Snap judgments are a powerful but dangerous thing.
They have a tendency to allow you to use your intuition and subconscious to take in information without you cognitively processing it, and without all the necessary information needed to be informed, and yet, snap judgments can be accurate at a very high rate (See Malcolm Gladwell-Blink for more).
However, bias can creep in and rear its ugly head, causing you to feel an irrational way towards something, based on irrelevant information to the judgment at hand.
Which is why I wouldn’t trust anything Chris Collinsworth has ever said about the Bills. Or Mel Kiper.
Now that the draft is over, and the season is starting with rookie minicamp about to begin, it is a fun exercise to see how national writers felt about this year’s draft class for the Buffalo Bills. Local media have a tendency to be overly positive about their team if they’re currently performing well, and overly negative if they’re not. A national writer can have perspective by not focusing on any one team, but getting a sense for the league a a whole and who is moving and shaking within it.
Of course, they can also be missing information that local writers have uncovered.
In reality, we won’t really be able to judge a draft class until 3-5 years later, when they have the chance at a second contract.
Will this draft class surprise the league and overachieve, or will they underperform on the promise everyone thought they said?
Let’s see what the nation thought.
Gennaro Felice – NFL.com
Gennaro ranked the Bills as having the 14th-best draft with an overall grade of B.
My favorite quote: “Is this the year Buffalo punches its bullies in the face?”
He identified Maxwell Hairston as his favorite pick, Dorian Strong as his sleeper pick, and D-1 Walker as his lottery pick.
The rest of his thoughts can be found here.
Chad Reuters- NFL.com
Chad graded the Bills with an overall grade of B+, but has an interesting grading system of grading each day separately, where he gave their day 1 an A-, and days 2 and 3 both B’s.
He was a bit critical of the decision to trade up twice, and to have both trades be for a DT, but complimented the value they got in drafting Kaden Prather as a vertical option.
Overall, his opinions were a bit blah… maybe he was tired
The rest of his thoughts can be found here.
PFF.com
PFF is best known for their unique grading system that tracks performance by rep and categorizes it into different performances. They gave the Bills a grade of A-. Some of their interesting highlights:
- Mad Max’s coverage grade in 2023: 81.8
- T.J. Sanders had a pass rush grade of 81.9 and had 33 QB pressures
- Landon Jackson‘s 2024 pass rush grade: 83
- D-1 Walker: noted his drop off from a 80.6 overall grade to a 71.2, but didn’t include the context of the undiagnosed back injury or the toughness it must have taken to power through an injury because other starters were injured and he didn’t want his team to suffer from another injured starter missing time.
- Jordan Hancock’s coverage grade: 82.2
- Jackson Hawes’ 2024 run blocking grade: 74.7
- Dorian Strong had a coverage grade of 73.3 while in zone, and only allowed 46.6 percent of passes into his zone to be caught.
- Chase Lundt had a run blocking grade of 88.2 on zone runs and only allowed one quarterback hit and 0 sacks
- Kaden Prather only dropped one ball in his final college season.
The rest of their comments can be found here
Nate Tice – Yahoo Sports
Tice gave a grade of B- with the following reasoning:
It’s a solid class that makes sense for what the Bills need, even if a few of the players went a little higher than I would have preferred.
He leaned heavily on how the Bills picked according to his own draft board and concluded that the Bills didn’t do anything special other than add to their roster in a way that made sense for them, but didn’t make any splashes.
He also identified D-1 Walker as their most interesting pick.
The rest of his comments can be found here.
Rob Rang – Fox Sports
Rob Rang gave the Bills a straight A, noting that Beane’s style of drafting is to pick good, physical players, but that he deviated from that with his pick of Mad Max, who he sees as having “game-breaking ability. “
My favorite quote:
Hairston is a gamble that could be the finishing touch needed for a Super Bowl run.
I also loved his metaphor that draft grades are like sending your compliments to the chef before your meal has arrived.
The rest of his grades can be found here.
Big Takeaways
The reviews were generally favorable, if not stellar.
Most everyone liked the Bills picking Maxwell Hairston as a speed and playmaking compliment to the otherwise solid system players.
Everybody has questions about Deone Walker and whether he’ll pan out or always be the big guy with the back injuries, though most thought a fourth round flyer was about right and could up being massive value.
Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see once we’ve eaten, won’t we? Maybe we’ll be having gold for the main course?
How would you have graded Beane’s draft?