Originally Posted by
eschatological
So Bills twitter is melting down tonight because Mahomes is in the Super Bowl. So I thought I'd present the argument here:
If the Bills hadn't traded the 10th pick in 2017 to KC, and picked Mahomes (or for that matter, Watson) at that pick, would they have been flops?
Cause the excuse around Buffalo is twofold:
1) "Oh, well, Mahomes needed the offensive genius mind of Andy Reid to become a generational talent."
2) "Well, McDermott had just been hired 3 months before and knew he was going to replace the GM and the whole scouting department, so he didn't want to pick the franchise QB without 'his guy' in place." And the Bills did indeed fire their GM and entire scouting department the next week so McDermott could have the GM he wanted, his friend from Carolina, Brandon Beane.
My counterarguments break down as follows:
1) DeShaun Watson is still great, despite Bill O'Brien. He'd be spoken of in the same breath as Mahomes if there was even a mildly competent offensive mind in the building. Mahomes, if he followed the same trajectory he did with the Chiefs, with the Bills, would have sat '17 with Tyrod Taylor playing, and get some random playing time that Nathan Peterman got instead. Dennison would have still been fired as our OC, we would have gotten our "offensive guru" in Daboll. Then, in '18 (when Josh Allen was drafted and started almost immediately), we could have instead upgraded our o-line, still pick up Tremaine Edmunds, find a CB instead of Tre White (who we took with the Mahomes pick and was a 1st team All-Pro this year), have a dynamic back in Shady McCoy, and found some receivers instead of Kelvin Benjamin. And then this year we'd have Beasley, John Brown, a good rookie RB and TE, and we'd be off and running under Daboll.
2) That's totally on McDermott. The scouting department had done all the work, they had their recommendations. The fired GM (Doug Whaley) has since said he wanted to take a QB there. McDermott just chose to ignore them because they weren't "his guys" and picked a CB up when we were one of the few teams who had a desperate need at QB. And if he "needed his guy," he should have had his guy in place from the beginning, instead of going through the draft process with people he knew he was going to fire literally the next week. It boggles my mind.
I think Mahomes would have been great in '18 (last year) with Daboll as his OC, Shady McCoy in the backfield, Charles Clay at TE, Robert Foster our speedster, Isaiah McKenzie, and some potential draft picks to fill out the line/WR corps.