Short Take Sports:

Bills go prime time 5x again

Another season of Josh makes the Bills must-see TV. At least they missed Christmas and Thanksgiving. https://www.audacy.com/wgr550/sports/bills/bills-release-2024-regular-s…

Bills host Olympian Gable Steveson after his release from pro wrestling. https://www.syracuse.com/buffalo-bills/2024/05/bills-host-former-wwe-su…

Rockpile Report on receivers

They have become interchangeable, like runningbacks

(Editor’s Note: Rockpile Report is nearing legendary status on the Two Bills Drive Message Board. Here’s a take on the trivialization of receivers)

Bills fans have spent the first five months of 2024 talking about receivers: Whom the Bills have and whom they should get. The longer I’ve listened to that discussion, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that fans haven’t really internalized what’s happening in pro football.

In short, I think that receivers are following in the footsteps of their cousins, the running backs. Fans, and the New York Giants, were late to realize that in terms of team performance, there isn’t much difference between having a great running back and having a really good one. And you almost always can find a really good one. There’s always a Singletary, a Cook, a Pacheco, or someone else. In earlier eras, if you had a Jim Brown or an Earl Campbell or a Barry Sanders, you were a contender. Not now. Now, you can have a Derrick Henry and, well, you have some great highlights, but highlights don’t get it done any more.

Why did that happen to running backs? Two reasons: First, young players keep closing the gap between what the great players can do and what the next level of really good players can do. They learn the moves of the great players, and they condition themselves to be nearly as strong and as powerful. Second, the defenses have matured – the players are bigger, stronger, faster, so that a guy with Jim-Brown talent now finds a defense full of big, strong, fast defenders, and the coaches have schemed their defenses in ways that allow their big, strong, fast defenders to close gaps and gang tackle in ways that just weren’t done in earlier generations. Maybe some 250-pound guy who runs like LaDainian Tomlinson will come along, but that’s unlikely.

(As an aside, the same thing is happening in the NBA. In less than ten years, the league has filled up with guys who shoot threes like Steph Curry, guys who are bigger, stronger, and quicker than Steph. And the defenses have gotten smarter. The Warriors of five years ago would be good today, but not dominant in the way they were.

(And, by the way, there’s a whole generation of pro golfers who have caught up to the greatness of the early Tiger Woods. They don’t stand out like Tiger because, well, there are a lot of them.)

And now we see it happening to receivers. Again, the difference between truly great and very good has gotten smaller, the number of very good receivers has increased. It’s happened for the same reasons that it happened to running backs. Receivers have gotten about as big and fast as they are going to get. The difference in speed between a 4.3 guy and a 4.4 or even 4.5 guy just isn’t very important – 4.5 is plenty fast enough. Kids in high school practice catching balls one-handed, practice tucking the ball away after the catch, etc. By the time receivers have gotten out of college, a lot of them have speed, route-running technique, and catching skills that rival what some of the best NFL players had ten years ago. In other words, it’s become almost impossible to get better physically in a way that makes any one receiver a dominant player.

In addition to the younger receivers closing the talent gap, the defenders and the defenses they run have improved, too, for the express purpose of stopping the physically dominant receivers. If you want to win in the NFL, you simply cannot let one player get 150+ yards against you, rushing or receiving, so you create defenses to stop them. You shadow running backs, you double cover receivers, and then you develop nuanced variations off your defenses to slow down the opponent’s star player. Quickly, other teams adopt your ideas. The result is that even the very best running backs and receivers are not stringing 150-yard games, back to back to back, all season long. Yes, every once in a while a Tyreek Hill comes along, a physical freak, and he does string great games for a while, but it’s just a matter of time before teams adjust.

What about all the great young receivers out there? Well, I think there’s an important distinction to be made between great receivers and great production. A guy like Julian Edelman was not a great receiver, in the classic Hall of Fame sense. He had great production because of the circumstances he was in, and because he was the right guy to take advantage of those circumstanes. Cooper Kupp is another. Amon-Ra St. Brown is another. These guys are all over the league, guys with excellent speed, very good ball skills, and brains. They have great production, but it isn’t so much that they create the production – they just fit the scheme and get production because they have the skill to take advantage of the opportunities that their offenses create.

I’m not saying those guys aren’t good football players. What I’m saying is that they are the Pachecos and Cooks and Singletarys of the receiving world. What I’m saying is that teams are discovering that the physical difference between OBJ and St. Brown does not translate into an important difference in production on the field, just like the difference between Saquon Barkley and Pacheco.

What about the true studs, the OBJs and the DHops of the world? The guys who actually create their production? Well, both of those guys came to greatness on their original teams, were true sensations and great weapons, and then were somewhat surprisingly dealt to other teams, where they never recovered their initial luster. Now they’ve been reduced to hired guns that teams hope can somehow reclaim their greatness or at least be reliable 4th receivers.

The bottom line is, I think, that the game has moved on from the days when the ideal was to have a true stud skill player on offense (other than your QB). If you had a true stud, you gave him the ball every time you could. In fact, teams have discovered that having a guy who is so good that he demands the ball is a negative, not a positive. When you have a Derrick Henry or an OBJ, they’re only useful if you give them the ball a lot, and that limits your offense. Having a guy like Stefon Diggs, who is prone to sulking if he doesn’t get a catch in your first series, is a liability.

The Bills certainly seem to have adopted this thinking.

GO BILLS!!!

The Rockpile Review is written to share the passion we have for the Buffalo Bills. That passion was born in the Rockpile; its parents were everyday people of western New York who translated their dedication to a full day’s hard work and simple pleasures into love for a pro football team.