Sharp: Buffalo bills has finally set to kill two birds with one stone” befor they finally move to the training camp” base on recent report….
The Buffalo Bills’ roster is starting to take shape as the team prepares for training camp and the 2024 campaign. Nevertheless, one more transfer needs to be made in order to complete the roster before Josh Allen and company move into the residence halls at St. John Fisher University in Rocester, NY on July 23.
It’s no secret that this season, the Bills need wide receiver support. The team’s two most notable wideouts from the Josh Allen era, Stefon Diggs (to the Houston Texans) and Gabe Davis (to the Jacksonville Jaguars), are gone. In their stead are rookie second-round pick Keon Johnson, incumbent rookies Khalil Shakir and Justin Shorter, and free agents like Mack Hollins, Curtis Samuel, Chase Claypool, Marques Valdez-Scantling, and KJ Hamler.
You won’t exactly feel like Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, and Brandon Stokley if you start any three of those players.
Heading into the Bills 2024 season, you get the feeling that this is a situation of throwing a bunch of players into the hopper, shaking them up in training camp, and seeing who comes out on top.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With the team paying an understandably huge salary to stars like Allen and predictably bad big money to players like Von Miller, the team had to skimp somewhere, and WR is as good a place as any.
Head coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane are merely replicating the Kansas City Chiefs formula that won a Super Bowl the previous season. With a motley crew of veterans, including the Bills’ own Valdez-Scantling, and second-round rookie Rashee Rice, Patrick Mahomes was able to extract just enough performance from his wide receiver group to win it all.
It’s important for the Bills to take chances on as many available veterans as possible, since they hope that quantity becomes quality. It is ideal to sign a player with Claypool’s experience and youth—he turns 26 on July 7—as he has had some success in his early career. Given his low salary, he has a potential to emerge as an above-average starting wide receiver for the Bills this season.
Of course, Coleman, Shakir, and Shorter, the young players on the Bills roster, all have a great deal of potential as well. If just a couple of them succeed and develop into elite pass catchers, it would be extremely beneficial for Buffalo. The only difference between Samuel, Valdez-Scantling, Hamler, and Hollins is that, at this time, we know pretty much everything about them. There isn’t much of an upside there, but they are all fine.
There aren’t many choices left to bolster this bunch, with the NFL free-agent market being very thin and Bills training camp rapidly approaching. But there’s one player the team ought to give a chance on.
Hunter Renfrow, an Oakland Raiders player from Clemson, was selected in the fifth round of the 2019 NFL Draft. In his first two seasons as a late-round pick, he was a nice surprise, with back-to-back seasons of 600 yards or more. Renfrow then became a breakout star in his third season, hauling in 103 passes for 1,038 yards and nine scores. His stats earned him a trip to the Pro Bowl.
The next season Renfrow dealt with injuries, only playing 10 games, and in 2023 he was completely eliminated from the Raiders offense for some reason.
In fairness to Renfrow, the Raiders have been a mess the last several seasons between the Jon Gruden scandal and Josh McDaniels debacle.
Renfrow is still just 28, though, and should still have plenty of tread on the tires. He is small at 5-foot-10, 185 pounds, but that is part of what made him an excellent slot receiver early in his career.
Should everything go according to plan for the Bills during training camp and the 2019 campaign, Coleman will emerge as a top wide receiver, Claypool will regain his former Pittsburgh Steelers form and be selected as the WR2 and Shakir will mature into a 2021 Renfrow-caliber slot receiver. Even if everything goes exactly as planned, Buffalo would be wise to add a player like Renfrow now, as it may pay off handsomely if they make it as far into the postseason as they had hoped.
