Most impactful takeaway from Bills vs. Bears might not be quality of play

I wrote an article after the Buffalo Bills played the New York Giants in the first week of the preseason. In it, I said the following:

“The biggest takeaways from preseason games usually revolves around how a specific player plays. It’s a qualitative conversation. The focus is on the quality of the passes they threw, the quality of the routes they ran, the quality of the reads they made, or the quality of the reps they took. And that’s awesome. It’s great to have actual (kind of) football to analyze again.

But the most predictive observations from preseason games doesn’t lie in the quality of the play on the field. Instead, it lies in where, when, and with whom the individual players play. The ‘official’ depth charts released by the team are largely PR items and essentially serve no purpose in helping us get a better idea of where a player falls on a depth chart or what the coaching staff thinks of them.

If a player is playing in the fourth quarter of the final preseason game alongside players that nobody assumed from the beginning of camp would actually make the team, that tells us something. Whether an offensive lineman gets all his preseason reps at left tackle instead of right tackle tells us something. If a receiver gets 100% of his reps alongside the starting quarterback, that tells us something. Put simply, ‘where, when, and with whom’ > ‘how’ when it comes to predictiveness and determining what the coaching staff thinks of a specific player.“

Even though the Bills got shellacked thoroughly by the Chicago Bears in one of the worst shutout losses in NFL preseason history just a few nights ago, there are still lessons to be learned about the 53-man roster decisions the coaching staff has looming and where their heads may be at during this time. Let’s dive into some observations from Buffalo vs. Chicago and the impacts those may have…

Mike White played (poorly) with the first team

One of the main items on my watch list for Bills-Bears was the QB2 battle and, specifically, the chronology of appearance for Mike White and Mitchell Trubisky. After Trubisky got 100% of the snaps with the first group against the Giants, I opined that if that phenomenon repeated itself, it signified that Trubisky was pretty much in the driver’s sheet for the backup quarterback job.

The former second-overall pick by (ironically) the Bears still looks to be in the driver’s seat, but not for the reason we may have thought. Mike White came in and played with the first group against Chicago, raising the flag that the QB2 battle was alive and well. He completed only four passes in 11 attempts, totaling 54 passing yards and taking two sacks.

Since the beginning of the offseason, my mantra has been “tie goes to the cheaper guy” — referring to the $1.5 million the team can save by cutting Trubisky, but...