Buffalo Bills have 3rd most roster turnover this offseason

Sean McDermott is remaking the Buffalo Bills in his image. A new article shows how it compares to the rest of the league.

It’s no secret that the Buffalo Bills roster will look very different compared to last year. Sean McDermott may preach strong defense and a run-based offense like Rex Ryan, but the players the current head coach wants don’t have a lot in common with the former head coach.

After NFL free agency and the draft, we have an idea of what the Bills 90 man roster looks like. While training camp will eventually weed out enough players till there’s only 53, we still can see how this year’s roster compares to last years.

The website Over the Cap compiled a list of teams that had the most roster turnover in 2017, and the Bills ranked third on that list. Only behind the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals.

In a post ranking the first set of teams, OTC’s Jason Fitzgerald explained the process that went into calculating the turnover.

"To get a better idea I wanted to score each team in 4 categories. The first category is the percentage of total snaps lost which every simply looks at how many snaps that were on the end of the 2016 rosters are no longer on the team in 2017.The second category looks at the quality of snaps lost. What this entails is the amount of players who were lost that are actually on other rosters in 2017. While we often are disappointed when teams fail to re-sign free agents or cut the players for whatever reasons, many times the rest of the league doesn’t view those players of even contributing to a team. We pull those out to better identify the important players who were dropped. Likewise special teams do play a role so we are also looking at the percent of snaps lost on specials.Finally to get the best idea of how good or bad the players were who were lost we turn towards a market value.  The average APY lost is the dollars per player being spent by the rest of the NFL on the quality players still good enough to land in the NFL.Averaging those scores out we come to a final ranking in which a higher score indicated the least change and low score indicates important changes."

As stated in the quote, Fitzgerald’s rankings indicate that those with a lower score had the most turnover; the Buffalo Bills scored a 7.5. The team that ranked number 32, the Los Angeles Chargers, scored a 29.3.

In fact, when you add up the rankings for all 32 teams, that number averages out to 16.49. Considering the Bills clocked in at nearly a ten full points lower than that, you can say their roster had a lot of turnover compared to everyone else.

In the post describing Buffalo, Fitzgerald writes this:

"Speaking of roster and cap mismanagement, you have the Bills whose decisions the last few years led to them patching a team together with a ton of one year low cost veterans, many of whom are not in the NFL right now. It’s one thing to be aggressive when you are the Packers or Seahawks spending on talented players, but another thing to be the Bills and being aggressive on guys like Charles Clay to create bad financial situations."

Fitzgerald makes a good point here. During the Doug Whaley era, the Bills spent like a “win-now” team, but the result was not the same. Because of this, the team has a lot of good players not living up to great contracts (Clay, Cordy Glenn, Marcell Dareus), which creates resentment.

Also, fan pressure to let go of under-performing players. But many of them are locked into contracts that are too big to either trade or let go of.

For the Buffalo Bills, their percentage of total snaps lost is 36.5 percent. 21 percent of that is comprised of players that are on other teams, defined in the article as “quality snaps.” 24.6 percent of players lost took special teams snaps, one of the higher team percentages. Finally, they lost an average of 2.9 million in APY, a lower figure that indicates the players they lost weren’t of the highest quality, but some could still find deals.

By contrast, the Packers and Seahawks (two teams Fitzgerald mentioned in that quote) sacrificed 4.4 million and just over 930k.

It’s an interesting look into how much this Bills team has changed. Sean McDermott has an image of a winning team and is continuing to work toward it. It might not produce immediate results, but he’s already swapped out a lot of players in a short amount of time.

The preseason starting next month will show how the new-look Bills compare to other NFL teams.

Next: 5 players that should make the 2017 Pro Bowl

What do you think of the Bills roster turnover this off-season? Leave your comments below!