Analysis: Brandon Beane is betting big the Bills have a championship roster
"Fans wanted something more impactful Tuesday than scouring the waiver wire. It seems Beane wanted that, too, but he wasn’t able to deliver," Jay Skurski writes.
Brandon Beane said what you expected him to say Wednesday.
“I do believe we can win a championship with this roster,” the Buffalo Bills’ general manager said during a news conference that stretched nearly 30 minutes.
Beane spoke the day after failing to swing a deal before the NFL’s trade deadline kicked in at 4 p.m. Tuesday.
That inactivity was met with an avalanche of criticism online. Beane’s words and tone Wednesday expressed similar disappointment, or even shock that he was unable to make a move. The general manager said he would have lost money wagering on whether the Bills would have made at least one trade, something he’s done at or near the trade deadline in each of the past three seasons.
Bills general manager Brandon Beane did not make a deal at the NFL trade deadline for the first time since the 2021 season.
Joshua Bessex, Buffalo News
That criticism is going to be ramped up by a significant degree if the Bills don’t do what the general manager believes they can, which is win the Super Bowl. That’s a lofty bar to clear, but that’s how the franchise is measured these days.
Fall short, and it will be easy to look back on Nov. 4 as a day in which Beane failed to act in improving the roster.
The reason was twofold, according to Beane. No. 1 is that it takes two to tango, and the Bills lacked a dance partner.
“I cannot force someone to trade me a player,” Beane said.
On that, we will concede he has a point. It was rumored Tuesday that the New York Jets, the most active team on deadline day, didn’t want to do business with teams in their division. That’s not to say the Bills were in on cornerback Sauce Gardner or defensive tackle Quinnen Williams, but rather to point out that if the Jets simply refused to answer an area code 716 phone call, that is out of Beane’s control.
The second part of the equation, according to Beane, was the salary cap. The Bills have $3.3 million in space as of Wednesday. That certainly does impact the size of the contract that they would be able to take back.
Beane said he had deals in place to restructure a couple of contracts of players on the current roster to open up cap space. Any player acquired from another team who came in on a reworked contract, like, for example, his original team retaining money, would have had to have been processed by Monday, because the new contract inherited by the Bills would have to fit under the salary cap.
Of course, Beane doesn’t get a pass for that. He’s responsible for the team’s cap number, because he oversees contract negotiations. The Bills are in this situation because of how they have managed the cap. If they were unable to add a player because they didn’t have the space, that doesn’t excuse the GM. In fact, it’s a strike against him.
“Believe me, I went home as mad as any other fan,” Beane said. “I wanted to do things. I’m always wanting to do things to make this team better.”
At least Tuesday, though, he didn’t.
Beane said that the team was active in gauging the trade market. He found that a lot of names rumored to be available were just that – rumors. It’s true that not every player thought to be available ended up switching teams. Buffalo’s upcoming opponent, Miami, was thought to ready for a fire sale. Instead, the Dolphins made just one trade, electing to keep wide receiver Jaylen Waddle and defensive end Bradley Chubb.
Still, 15 trades were made around the league in the last week, including eight on Tuesday. It’s not as if general managers around the league had their phones on do not disturb.
Beane was asked if he thought upping the price he was willing to pay as the deadline approached might have pushed a deal across the finish line. He gave an answer the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase would have been proud of, saying in part “99% of the players are available for a price.
The Jets trading both Gardner and Williams – two franchise cornerstones – proves that point.
“My job is to not be reckless with this role,” Beane said. “It’s not fantasy football. … There are so many ramifications of cost and draft picks.”
Here is where there is a fundamental difference between how Beane views his job and how fans outside the organization view it.
The AFC is wide open this year, perhaps more so than it’s been since Beane and Sean McDermott came to Buffalo nine years ago. The Bills have the league MVP at quarterback. There is a growing sense, with each passing year, that Josh Allen’s prime is being frittered away every time the season ends and he’s not raising the Lombardi Trophy. The championship-starved nature of the fanbase only adds to that pressure.
The team has been ravaged by injuries. In consecutive weeks, impact defensive linemen Ed Oliver and Michael Hoecht have been lost long term. Ideally, at some point that injury luck turns around, but there is no telling when, or if, that will happen.
Beane said he wants to have the best team possible when he sets the initial 53-man roster at the end of training camp, and that he hopes to not have to rely on the trade deadline to bolster it. That’s a noble plan, but injuries have challenged the calculus this year.
“We’re usually very active. I’m always active,” Beane said. “You put a lot of work in. Sometimes you look back, when you go home last night, like ‘Damn, that was a waste of time.’ ”
That being true is the worry.
Beane is right when he uses the example of how trading for a $25 million player can impact the team’s salary cap outlook for years to come.
“It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t do it, but you also have to say ‘If you do that, you can have him probably for ’26, if we kick the can down (the road) ... but it’s coming due where you’re going to have to walk in here and I’m going to have to tell you, ‘Yeah, we had to trade this player we really liked, yeah we had to release this player that we like,’ ” he said. “You can’t make decisions in a vacuum or a silo. They all have long-term affects.”
That’s true, but what’s also true is most fans don’t give a hoot about the 2028 salary cap. They want a Super Bowl in February. They look at the Rams’ approach from a few years ago – which we’ll amend to “(forget) them picks” as one that’s worth duplicating.
The Bills have won both of their games coming out of the bye week, putting together their most complete performance of the season Sunday against the Chiefs in the process. Instead of leading Beane to conclude the team might not need reinforcements, he said the opposite was true.
“The way they were playing made me look even harder,” he said. “We’re trying to win this thing every year.”
With all due respect to Jordan Phillips, whom Beane mentioned as an example of a player who was added to the roster after the trade deadline last year and who ended up playing in the AFC championship game, that’s not moving the needle.
Fans wanted something more impactful Tuesday than scouring the waiver wire. It seems Beane wanted that, too, but he wasn’t able to deliver.
