It would be a stretch to say Brandon Beane slept well this weekend.
That’s because the Buffalo Bills’ general manager barely slept at all.
Beane, however, felt pretty good Saturday night. That’s because he exited the 2022 NFL Draft feeling like he accomplished his main objectives.
“I’m excited about the guys we got,” Beane said. “I know you sit here every year and you should be excited, or I did something stupid. Hopefully in the fall, it looks like it is exciting as we see some of these guys play and fill out their roles, whether it ends up being starters or key backups or special teams players, whatever it is.”
Beane has every reason to feel good about what he’s accomplished. He’s got the Bills on rock-solid footing, with a roster devoid of holes. Coming into the draft, the only one was potentially at cornerback, where the team lost Levi Wallace in free agency and is dealing with the uncertainty of when All-Pro Tre’Davious White will be ready to play after tearing his ACL on Thanksgiving night last year.
People are also reading…
Beane took care of that in the first round by moving up to select Kaiir Elam out of Florida.
Elam was the fourth cornerback off the board in the first round. By the time the Bills were scheduled to pick at No. 57 overall in the second round, four more cornerbacks had been chosen. Had the Bills not chosen Elam when they did, there is a good bet he would have been picked before No. 57, as well, meaning Beane might have been looking at drafting the ninth cornerback.
“You look and you work hard to get your value right, but that's one of those positions -- we talked about it as a staff -- that if you start looking back historically, we were looking at some of the names that were going in the first round, in the second round and early in the third, and we were like, 'man, some of these guys that got taken, we weren't necessarily as high on,’ ” Beane said. “I was like, ‘the guys we really want, we better put them up here, because they're going to go.’ ”
With the card for Elam turned in, Beane was able to approach the rest of the draft with a certain freedom.
“I did feel a lot better after Thursday night and felt like, at this point, we don't have to force anything,” he said.
With the biggest positional need taken care of, Beane went to work filling out depth in other areas. On Friday, he added a pass-catching running back – Georgia’s James Cook – to give the offense an element it has lacked. He also acquired a backup for weak-side linebacker Matt Milano in Baylor’s Terrel Bernard.
On the third day, he added another potential weapon for quarterback Josh Allen with the selection of Boise State receiver Khalil Shakir. Heck, Beane even had the luxury of using a draft pick on a punter – making Bills mock drafters everywhere happy – when he took San Diego State’s Matt Araiza with the first pick of the sixth round.
The work for Beane never ends. He was anxious to leave the podium Saturday to get back to the Bills’ draft room as the team started its pursuit of undrafted free agents.
“The job between now and when we show up at St. John Fisher is to try and make this team as competitive as possible – every single position,” he said. “So we're not done. We're not going to go to 90 (players on the roster) today or tomorrow. There will be more veterans on the street. We'll continue to kind of circulate through the waiver wire at this point.”
True to his nature, Beane maneuvered his way around the board frequently, trading up twice and back twice. He did so without having to worry himself about the most important position. Having a franchise quarterback in Allen signed long term likewise provides freedom, or as Beane termed it, “stability.”
“If you’ve got your quarterback and you’ve got your head coach, that’s the two most important things,” he said. “You’ve got to be really good there if you want to be championship level. We’ve got a good quarterback, and we’ve got a good head coach. I would just say it helps you in anything. You see what goes on, all the maneuvering in the offseason for these guys. Obviously, the contracts that they require – I’m glad that we have Josh and I look forward to having him for many years.”
As long as they do, the Bills will be on the short list of Super Bowl contenders. That’s something that shouldn’t be taken for granted. It wasn’t so long ago that draft weekend meant talking yourself into a quarterback who had no business going in the first round. Or it meant trading away a first-round pick to move up just five spots to draft a wide receiver to help that quarterback – and then benching him for good four games into that wide receiver’s rookie season. The E.J. Manuel-Sammy Watkins era didn’t work out, like so many other before it and a couple more after it.
It remains to be seen if this one will, in terms of reaching its ultimate goal. If we’re being honest, this weekend’s draft might even be considered a bit boring – in the most complimentary way possible.
We won’t know for at least a couple years whether these picks ultimately pan out, but it’s easy to see the logic behind each of them. The Bills didn’t do anything sexy this weekend, but they didn’t have to. They already look good.
