While it seems like a different lifetime ago, it’s not.
In the not so long far away past, the Bills were a team that players in the NFL didn’t hold in very high regard… especially guys on the free agent market.
Sign in Buffalo? Why?
As of Friday, Bills safety Micah Hyde signed with the Bills for a second time in his career. He inked a two-year extension. After doing so, he admitted there was a point where signing with the Bills once was something he wasn’t interested in.
“When I hit free agency, back in 2017, I wasn’t somebody that everybody was chasing after,” Hyde said via video conference on Friday. “I was getting love from Buffalo and I was like, ‘Cool,’ but I remember having a conversation with my agent before that and was saying, ‘Look, man. I grew up in cold Ohio. I went to Iowa, I was in Green Bay. C’mon, man. Let’s go to a warm city, and maybe like… not Buffalo.”
Things have certainly done a 180 since then.
“But now, I wouldn’t change it for the world,” Hyde said.
“I want to finish what was started in Buffalo,” he added. “Buffalo is 100 percent where I want to be.”
At his end of season press conference, Bills general manager Brandon Beane said he thought Hyde could “play for years” into the future. Beane put his money where his mouth is via the $19.25M extension he handed the 30-year-old late last week.
In regard to his change of heart, Hyde also had a very candid moment during his conference call. The defender explained that he’s now kind of having the last laugh with some other players he knows around the NFL. Hyde said he would try to convince others to join the Bills back in his first year or two in Orchard Park before the recent turnaround the club went through. He said they weren’t interested… and Hyde’s now having a bit of a “I told you so” type of look back.
“They’re going on visits and I’d be like, ‘Hey man, come to Buffalo.’ They’d be like, ‘I’m cool. I’m gonna go somewhere else,’” Hyde said. “Well you know what? At the end of the day I bet they’re pretty pissed off they didn’t take those visits to Buffalo. Now they’re probably sitting on their trash team or sitting on the couch somewhere else because they didn’t come to Buffalo.”
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