Orchard Park, N.Y. (WGR Sports Radio 550) - There’s no way to know who will be available to the Buffalo Bills when they select 30th overall in Thursday night's NFL Draft.
They could stay in their current draft slot and make a selection, trade up, or trade down. We’ve seen general manager Brandon Beane do all of those things over his seven previous drafts in charge of the club.
But what we do know is whoever they select, at whatever spot, it will be a team consensus, built from months of scouting, interviews with prospects, and opinions from everyone involved in the process.
"It's not my board. It's not the scouting board. It's the Buffalo Bills' board," Beane said during a pre-draft press conference with the local media on Tuesday.
"Not every player is ranked exactly how I saw them. There are times I'm like, 'You know what, I'm the minority in the room.' It's painful sometimes. You're like, 'Man, I like that guy more,' but it's like 85/15 (percent) the room, and I'm hearing him out, and I'm like, 'All right, better be right, though.'"
Beane laughed while saying the last part, but how a player ultimately turns out can impact careers in the business.
"It's hard because we're all competitive," he said. "We all want to be right, but we're not always right. And as I've said, this is a projection business. You're weighing risk, whatever round it is, especially when you're talking about a one and two and things like that. And so I just want to get it right for the team and for Terry Pegula and that crew. That's my job. It's not to pick the players how I rank them. It's how the consensus, how we feel, making sure I see alignment and making sure we all have the shared vision for this player and how we're going to use him here in Buffalo."
As opposed to so many years before Beane and head coach Sean McDermott arrived in 2017, the Bills have something very unique in the National Football League: Eight-consecutive years of continuity with the same general manager and head coach, and largely most of the same front office staff.
Beane says he not only collaborates with his staff, but McDermott as well.
"I always give Sean kind of a list of targets of players to view, especially on defense, being that's the strength of what he's been coaching all his life," Beane said of the process.
"And then we go back through, the scouts and I work the board. He was in there earlier today, just kind of going through, hearing some of the things the scouts would say, talking about how they were used."
