Over this past weekend, the NFL and Bills made a lot of decisions. Plenty of tough ones, too. The objective was to get down to 53 players on team rosters ahead of the 2020 regular season. Just last week, most teams in the league had near 80 players, and each team had to fill out a practice squad as well.
In breaking things down and allowing the dust to settle, the Bills certainly did make a few surprising decisions. To catch you up, we’ll go through some of those now:
Jake Fromm sticks
Perhaps the biggest debate out of training camp was what the Bills will do with their quarterback situation and as it turns out, they did the smart, sensible thing: Kept four of them. This was the suggested scenario we made prior to roster cut-down day as well.
While reports out of training camp were few and far between, none of them had something good to say about rookie quarterback Jake Fromm. Some speculated that the fifth-round pick was outplayed by Davis Webb and the veteran backup was actually going to be the third quarterback behind Josh Allen and Matt Barkley.
But nope, instead, it’s Fromm over Webb, who eventually made his way to the practice squad. What Sean McDermott & Co. were thinking seems to be pretty clear now.
Cut Fromm? As a rookie and a very well-known college quarterback, he was going to get claimed by someone. Webb? He’s been on and off practice squads in his career and with the Bills specifically, no one has signed him of their practice squad in recent seasons. So putting Webb out on the wavier wire was much smarter and if anything, it could just be a formality.
If Webb did outplay Fromm in camp? It would be interesting to see what the Bills do if Allen or Barkley go down. Could Webb be ahead of Fromm on the depth chart even though he’s on the practice squad? That’s speculation, but certainly a scenario most would prefer not to find out.