Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane recently sat down with The Buffalo News, providing a window into the team’s 2018 NFL Draft process. In a trade from pick twelve to seven, the Bills gave up two second-round selections. Popular trade value charts estimated the move as a roughly 30% over-payment. Brandon Beane is aware of this, but isn’t losing any sleep over it.
While Beane wouldn’t give up their final quarterback rankings, he makes it apparent they valued Allen highly. Rather than provide his rankings, Beane kept it simple. Smiling widely, per The Buffalo News, Beane remarked “I really like him.” Beane later offered more insight into his opinion by defending criticism of the pick.
“I think what’s come with social media and all the draft coverage is that all the stats get plastered out there. I said it on the radio show the other day ... one of the guys said something about Josh Allen being raw. I went into a thing like, raw came from a national pundit. They labeled these guys as different things. Some of them I agreed with, some of them I did not,” said Beane.
The team’s opinion of Allen factors into Beane’s comfort paying the cost to move up and get him.
“Can I ask you a question? What did Philly pay for Carson Wentz?” Beane asked. “The point is, if you get your guy, then nobody will ever care. It’s about getting the guy. You can’t worry about that stuff.”
Beane also noted the difficulty in placing exact values on draft trades. Regarding popularly cited charts, Beane referred to them as “a starting point.”
“There’s so many variables,” he continued. “Every team has variations of their own chart. Nowadays, there’s so many websites out there, footballjunkie.com – and I’m just making that up – but there could be just some guy who really doesn’t know anything, who’s writing it. What did they put into that chart that says it’s legit value?”
Beane recognized the cost of both second rounds picks was high, but alluded that they could have paid even more.
“I’m obviously biased because I made the move, but for us to get a quarterback in round one, move up, and still save 22 – I didn’t see that scenario happening with all the teams that were hungry for a quarterback. I thought it was a good win for us. Would I have liked to keep my twos? Hell yeah, but you don’t want to outsmart yourself. If teams had bid up and jumped me, and you don’t get one, I probably wouldn’t have slept from that night until now.”
In the end, the comfort in moving up comes down to the comfort in the selection itself.
“We put in a lot of time, energy, effort, sleepless nights,” Beane said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched these guys. You see their highlights, and I go, ‘I know what’s happening here. It doesn’t matter, what team, what the score was, whatever, I’ve seen it over and over and over.’ There’s a lot of emotion invested in that. So we thought that was the right move for our team.”
Time will tell if he was right.