Doug Farrar: Do The Bills Need a No. 1 WR? | One Bills Live | Buffalo Bills

Doug Farrar: Do The Bills Need a No. 1 WR? | One Bills Live | Buffalo Bills

all right hour number two here on a Monday Chris Brown Chris trapasso with you here on one bills live and pleased to be joined Now by USA Today editor and NFL writer and you’ll also find him on the X’s and O’s podcast with our good friend Greg coell it’s Doug Ferrar joining us here in the throws of the off season but uh Doug is always crunching tape and coming up with formulas and trends that are developing in the league and we wanted to get him on for for this one in particular his latest write up atntion NFL teams don’t need a number one wide receiver and here is why uh Doug first thanks for the time second the bills and their current receiving core would seemingly fall into this category we have somewhat of a track record of success with this Chiefs being the most notable Packers with a nice run last year without a true number one so I mean you could even argue the Lions if you don’t think a slot receiver can be an Alpha number one guy like Aman rain Brown so do we see this as a growing thing or is it too early to tell well yeah it’s and it’s an interesting question if it’s true it’s good news for Bills fans right because we’re you kind of looking at the receiver CT going okay well and you could argue that Stefan Diggs as good as he was at his prime maybe he wasn’t that number one guy anymore more of a possession you know less a do less downfield stuff and maybe that was more Gabe Davis last year but you start with how you define a number one receiver the guy who can take your best cornerback and have answers for him the guy who can always be pressed the guy who can always beat brackets the guy who no matter what route he runs he’s just a problem and you sort of have to take too much of your defense aligned to that guy and now you have other guys open that’s the other aspect of it and I think there are some teams that and I’ve been doing some work on this for a couple months just on the concept of needing a number one receiver as all these guys were getting huge deals and then about three weeks ago I saw some quotes from Jordan love the quarterback of the Packers during mini camp saying you know what we don’t have a number one receiver per se like that Alpha guy and actually I prefer it because we can align our receivers in all these different ways and use all these motions and condensed formations and all these things and it’s harder for the defense to have a beat on what we’re doing we can run Romeo dubs in this you know cross motion out of trips on one play and it’s Jaden re on the next one and you know depending on the skill set dubs is running the in cut the other two guys are running the vertical routes and now it’s Reed and it’s just different ways to get your guys open without having to put uh so much not only resources financially resources on the field now Tom Brady was recently on Colin coward show talking about if when you have a number one receiver you really need to focus on getting the ball to him so he’s not running a bunch of routes over and over and not catching the ball and getting frustrated and I’m thinking to myself well that’s great if you have a Randy Moss in his prime or a grank but you know Brady won probably more Super Bowls without that number one receiver yeah um he had a bunch of guys that worked well in the scheme so moving forward his teams are looking at resource allocation you know do we want to be like the Dolphins and give Tyreek Hill the deal after the trade and then give Jaylen Wadd the big deal well that’s how they want to Def Define it that’s how they want to build it other teams might say you know what but we can’t really do that because we want to focus on our Edge guys and our corners and our safeties or we want to have the best offensive line and the thing about paying that 30 million a year uh aav to one receiver he’d better be a Justin Jefferson or a Jamar Chase because the minute he isn’t you are really stuck from a Personnel perspective because you put that much room you know that much resource into one guy and now well who’s your number two too how did you build the rest of your receiver room or did you over rely on this one guy so I think teams are just kind of looking at the whole picture I don’t know that it’s a trend I would say that a lot of times it’s well we can’t get that guy so let’s just do the best we can with what we have but I do think that the idea that you can’t have a a really great passing game without a number one that was kind of what I was looking at and I think that’s a bit of a canar I think you can have a a passing game that’s just fine without that Alpha guy my question reading read this article and kind of understanding how this is come about with the Chiefs obviously winning back-to-back Super Bowls the Packers like you mentioned even the 49ers if you don’t want to include Brandon auk as as a true Bonafide number one the tight end position because I think those teams also have pretty good tight ends the Chiefs use 12 and 13 Personnel a ton you mentioned that Tom Brady like you’re mentioning that that had those quotes had Aaron Hernandez had Rob gronowski they usually had good tight ends the bills with Dalton concade and Dawson Knox certainly should be PR minent figures how important actually is the tight end position in teams being able to go away from that true number one wide receiver philosophy right when we talk about the Chiefs and saying they won the Super Bowl without the number one receiver I mean honestly guys I don’t think they would have made the Super Bowl without spags defense I don’t know if they would have made the playoffs without spags his defense that passing game was pretty bad but they did have a thing they have led the league in 13 Personnel three tight ends both of the last two seasons which you think the chief high flying whatever you wouldn’t think so and one of their primary Concepts was to put all three of their tight ends in a tight Bunch formation and have the other tight ends rolling vertically so Travis Kelce would have that designed opening underneath so they’re different and as you guys know before they gave Dawson Knox the big deal and before they uh you know they they really the bills focused on their tight end position before that they in 2021 they had the fewest uh snaps of 12 Personnel two tight ends in the league uh the year after that it was 31st last year it went up to about middle of the pack but they clearly see um Knox and concade as you know first multipliers in their passing game and you know when I did concade tape he was my te1 in that class he has Kelsey attributes he can work to seam he’s great on crossers he has a dynamite understanding of how to get open in zones how to fill those voids that are left open by Zone coverage so they got that and they’ve got you know Keon Coleman first round pick big fast ball winner struggles against press more than you might expect uh but he wasn’t pressed a lot in college because they know if you do that too much the guy’s just going to Godzilla your cornerback and then you have a problem so when you look at the bills and how they’re aligning with you know without Gabe Davis without Stefan Diggs and now it’s Coleman and it’s Samuel and it’s mvs and it’s Clay Chase clay poool and they’ve got a bunch of parts that Joe Brady now has to figure out the best plans for and Josh Allen I got to interview Josh about a month ago and he was talking about all the different things that he wants to do in Joe Brady’s offense and how it’s less rudimentary which I thought was an interesting way to put it and so maybe Josh is more of that point guard it’s getting the ball to the open guy and maybe through condensed formations which the Niners and the Packers and the Chiefs love to do and the bills don’t do a lot they prefer to spread it out but however you do it getting those guys open through scheme as opposed to oh well gosh we don’t have a number one guy so what are we going to do now can your number one guys be come your tight ends sure or they’re part of the distribution and you don’t have a number one guy and as Jordan love posited it’s actually an advantage because there’s nowhere to really focus at the snap it could be any one of five guys and that becomes tough for a defense yeah and that kind of leads me into my next question because I think you’ve seen enough of Josh Allen on tape to know that even in year six of his career last year there are still times when he leaves the pocket too early or it doesn’t or unnecessarily does so yeah um do you believe that this approach that Joe Brady is undertaking with this receiving core can also in turn help Josh play Within structure more sure and you know part of that was and we don’t really know what Joe Brady’s offense is going to be you know when you place a coordinator halfway through the season you’re you’re just whipsawing it together you don’t really know and Josh intimated to me when I talked to him a month ago that there are going to be a lot of different aspects of this offense you would expect that to be so so how that works we’ll see a lot of those you know when quarterbacks leave the pocket to there are a number of reasons for that PR is one but we talk about coverage sacks and coverage pressures if you’re too relying on that number one guy or even the number two guy and you’re like oh gosh my first read is gone now my second read is gone if the reads are based on receiver Talent OR receiver ability to get open as opposed to if I can run through quick reads and this is something that Brock Pere by the way was really good at and it’s one reason that and I would agree that Brandon nauk is more of a 1A than a true alpha dog but it’s one reason the Niners passing game worked so well is pery could just clock through his reads very quickly and he knew because he had Kyle Shanahan that those reads were going to be open within the structure of the play for the most part he didn’t get nervous feet he didn’t start to flip out thinking well I about half or half my first read is going to be open that’s when any quarterback gets into trouble I don’t care if you’re Tom Brady it’s going to be a problem over time so it’s it behooves Joe Brady to scheme these things open and and have designs that give Josh that quicker not easy read necessarily but quicker and I know you guys wanted to talk about defense tackles too and that quick pressure right up that you know there’s so much more quick game the bills are a heavy RPO team there are a lot of quck there’s a lot of quick game going on so a lot of times it’s not the pressure because the pressure doesn’t have time to get there it’s and this is true for any great quarterback as I said it’s not just the the new guys if all of a sudden the picture is Muddy you know it happens to momes it just things start to break down so as as you as you said if Josh can have reads that are more just I know where it is bang I go and it’s more that point guard mentality the explosive plays will come from that over the time but if you’re depending too much on the intermediate and deep stuff that’s where it becomes a problem yeah let’s talk about defensive tackles now kind of moving on uh with the bills getting the breakout season from Matt Oliver last year after signing the big deal they D they draft Dwayne Carter in the third round out of Duke uh explain to the viewers and the listeners why I mean we always hear about Edge rushers they get the big bucks defensive tackle that position financially has really increased a lot why is that position more important now um than maybe it was even five or 10 years ago you go back to quick game I mean that’s really it’s a pretty easy answer because you know for what like let’s say a one to three-step drop it’s 1.5 to maybe 1.8 seconds before the ball comes out I don’t care who your Edge rusher is he’s not going to have time to get there maybe a pressure Maybe if the quarterback floats in the pocket or goes backward in the pocket which you never want maybe he can get a pressure there but a lot of times there’s just no way even if he even if the edge rusher is unblocked in a razor call or something like that to the quarterback he can’t get there in 1.8 seconds shortest distance between two points is a straight line and it’s why a guy like Dexter Lawrence is so important Ed Oliver has become really important in that regard so I did a study uh and Greg and I Greg cell and I talked about it too about the best uh interior pass rushers with with quick pressure against one to three step drops and Ed Oliver was on that list he had uh per Pro Football Focus who counts half sacks as whole sacks 11 sacks and 72 total pressures overall uh three of those sacks and 18 of those pressures came in one to three step drops wow so Ed’s getting pressure against quick game and when you can do that that is a force multiplier in your defense in the larger sense I would say that defensive tackles interior defensive lineman are more important simply because they don’t have to skirt The Edge they don’t have to do an inside counter if they can beat the guard and get and we saw this with Brady in the two Super Bowls that the Patriots lost to the Giants when Justin Tuck got right up the pocket right in Brady’s face Brady wants to move up so if you prevent your quarterback from moving up you’re taking away parts of the Playbook so that’s why so many interior defensive linemen are being paid at a level they just weren’t before 10 years ago it was Aaron Donald and you know a bunch of guys making 5 million a year now teams are investing in that position more and more because they understand the importance of quick pressure right up the middle to disrupt those the rpos you know the just the quick stuff outside the flat routes the quick Slants all those things that go into more the modern passing game where it is more quick game than it has been before and we’ve seen you know the bills jump into a turbo package and I realize they’re not the only team to do that in obvious passing situations but they’ll move rouso down inside where they’ve got a veritable tree next to Oliver um I I wonder I mean the reach there is the obvious asset and just getting his hands up to bat a pass down can be a win uh on a given snap but do you do you believe that with the difficulty with quick game that more team might move their longer lankier ends down inside in those obvious passing situations yeah it’s a really good point I mean as great as JJ Watt was and everything else he was a master at timing those batted passes he would get I think you know 10 or 12 a year and that’s you’re not losing yardage but as far as the as far as the end result it’s almost as good as a sack because the ball goes nowhere maybe it’s intercepted you don’t know um and you know obviously defensive coordinators are BEC more varied and multiple in their defensive line looks so yes absolutely and you know you want those guys who can get their hands up Ed’s not a big guy he’s about 280 um in season weight so his job is to be more disruptive and yes maybe you want a linebacker mugging the quarterback and trying to get his hand up um so yes teams will do all kinds of things all kinds of you know TT stunts the Cowboys were great at than under Dan Quinn uh the the Titans were great at that with Jeffrey Simmons and den catry so yes you are trying to create all different kinds of pressure in the interior where you can get to the quarterback in half the steps which half the steps half the seconds it’s easier to do that math than it is waiting for your Edge rusher to get to a guy when he’s throwing the ball after taking one step back last one for me this can be quick uh we’ve seen the defensive tackle position like we mentioned financially just kind of blow up over the last couple years because of the Aaron uh Donalds the Chris Jones at Olivers the safety position really hasn’t how important do you think the safety spot is and I asked this because the bills obviously moved on from Jordan puyer they draft Cole Bishop they’re going to have some new faces at the safety spot in 2024 yeah and Taylor R who I thought had a pretty good year last year um it depends well the safety positions changed so much I noticed this doing draft prospects a couple three years ago all of a sudden it wasn’t strong and free was all these safeties are playing generalizing a quarter free a quarter in the Box maybe almost half in the slot and a few blitzes MH doing a lot all of a sudden the slot position became a lot more important for safeties and I think in today’s NFL unless you can play The Deep third at an Ed Reed or an Earl Thomas level you would better be able to play three or four positions really well the bills have always like interchangeable safeties I think Cole Bishop fits that really well but unless you’re a Kyle Hamilton where you’re just you’re standing out that way I think the financial Schism at the safety position is that the position itself is being redefined it’s not like we used to think of Cam Chancellor is in the box and ear Thomas is in the third it’s more he’s over here he’s over there the Packers I mean they got Xavier mckin from the Giants then they drafted to do it all safeties uh in 2024 three new safeties to do all these different things safeties are not being paid the way they were and the safety Market tends to fluctuate anyway I remember this same sort of thing happening about seven years ago um I think it’s fluctuating now because the position itself is being redefined it’s sort of hard to put a you know an absolute dot on what a safety is more often than not the answer to that question is what a safety is is he’s a lot of things and you’d better be good at all of them yeah because we were just talking earlier in the Show Doug about how you still have some pretty bigname safety end corners for that matter still out in the market I mean at the start of the Market opening in free agency there were 22 starters entering free agency at the safety position and there’s still probably about a half a dozen left sitting out there including Justin Simmons but to your point it’s it’s the change in definition of what those positions are de demanding of the players that play them and maybe some of these guys on the wrong side of 30 can’t do everything anymore well I would say it also depends it’s it’s not agnostic every Team every defensive coordinator and every you know St you know defensive backs coach has a different concept of what they want their safeties to do it’s not just one guy it’s how do you fit in well Justin Simmons has been a great player for a long time and all 32 defensive staffs and head coaches and GMS and money guys have to figure out okay well how would Justin Simmons like what does he do best at this age at this time in his NFL career and how does that fit into what we do or can we get a guy who can do 80% of that in the fourth round yeah and that’s you know Point that’s kind of where guys like Simmons run into trouble and that’s true for any position like I said with safeties it’s just weird right now because the position is changing it in and of itself yeah good discussion Doug thanks for the time we appreciate it as always enjoy what you got left of the offseason here it’s going to come up fast yes it is thanks gentlemen appreciate it [Music]

USA Today NFL editor and writer Doug Farrar joined One Bills Live. He shared his thoughts on why NFL team’s may not need a number one wide receiver and why the Bills could enter the 2024 season utilizing numerous options at the position. He then talked about the importance of the tight end position in today’s game and Joe Brady’s approach with the Bills offense. Finally, he discussed the changes with the defensive tackle position, the safety position, and the versatility each unit has in today’s game.

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