As of now, the Buffalo Bills have named who their punter will likely be when the 2024 NFL season begins.
The team has announced that rookie punter Jack Browning was released to make room for the addition of safety Terrell Burgess. In doing so, Sam Martin appears to be the choice again for punter next season.
Browning had been considered by most as a longshot to replace Martin despite some struggles the incumbent had last year.
However, Martin did start getting an opportunity to hold for placekicker Tyler Bass during recent training camp practices which caught attention.
Evidently, there just wasn’t much in that thought when the dust settled.
Bills Wire will continue to provide all roster updates throughout the 2024 season.
Jake Browning with some thoughts on how he can help Joe Burrow.
Cincinnati Bengals backup quarterback Jake Browning says that last year’s starting experience will only help him assist Joe Burrow better in 2024.
Appearing on SiriusXM NFL Radio this week, Browning said that his role as a starter for a chunk of last season means he’s even better at weekly prep for Burrow.
Browning’s main point: “And there’s those conversations that, I was always helpful before, but there’s a whole other level of, ‘Hey, I’ve been in this offense, and I’ve had to be the trigger guy.’ And so when he has some concern or something, I can relate and we can have that conversation.”
Browning won four games as a starter for the Bengals last year while keeping them relevant when they really had no business being so with Burrow out. That led to the Bengals giving him a two-year deal this offseason rather than a one-year league minimum as an exclusive rights free agent.
More importantly here, Browning now has a better feel for what it’s like to be under center in meaningful action within the offense. Considering how much the Bengals might shift the gameplan by the opponent next season, that’s a big deal.
Jake Browning gets the nod as the best in the NFL at what he does.
In a move that should surprise nobody who pays attention to the NFL, the Cincinnati Bengals have the best backup quarterback in the league, courtesy of Jake Browning.
So says new backup rankings from Sports Illustrated’s Gilberto Manzano, where Jake Browning tops the list after his stellar showing last year:
Many assumed Cincinnati would falter from the playoff race after Joe Burrow sustained a season-ending wrist injury with seven games left on the schedule. But the Bengals remained in playoff contention through Week 18 because of Browning’s sensational performances, including a three-game winning streak. He didn’t just keep the team afloat, he elevated the offense by averaging 276.5 passing yards and completing 70.37% of his passes in his seven starts. He outdueled Trevor Lawrence on Monday Night Football with 354 passing yards and one touchdown.
Browning tops the list over notables such as Gardner Minshew, Joe Flacco and even former Bengals passer Andy Dalton.
The Bengals rewarded Browning’s breakout performance last year in place of the injured Joe Burrow by giving him a two-year deal in April rather than a one-year league minimum due to his status as an exclusive rights free agent.
Jake Browning roster news for the Bengals before the draft.
The Cincinnati Bengals have hit on an expected housekeeping move ahead of the 2024 NFL draft, re-signing quarterback Jake Browning.
According by the team, it’s a two-year deal for the exclusive rights free agent who had the memorable run as a starter last year after Joe Burrow suffered a season-ending injury.
The extension is a sign of good faith from the team, as opposed to merely signing him to the one-year league minimum.
[affiliatewidget_smgtolocal]
The Bengals also announced that they have signed free agent passer Logan Woodside to a one-year deal. He was originally a seventh-round pick by the Bengals in 2018.
Here are the top 12 quarterbacks who are about to hit the open market
The Carolina Panthers certainly won’t be on the lookout for a quarterback this offseason—at least as far as their main roster is concerned. But let’s rank the ones who are about to hit the open market anyway.
Here are the top 12 free-agent quarterbacks of the 2024 offseason:
Bengals QB coach Dan Pitcher to interview for the Saints offensive coordinator job after helping Jake Browning fill in for Joe Burrow:
We’ve got movement: after dismissing Pete Carmichael onTuesday, the New Orleans Saints are seeking an interview with a potential replacement on Wednesday in Dan Pitcher, the Cincinnati Bengals quarterbacks coach, as reported by NewOrleans.Football’s Nick Underhill. CBS Sports’ Jonathan Jones confirmed that the Saints requested an interview with Pitcher.
Pitcher, 37, has worked with the Bengals since 2016 after starting his career as a scout with the Indianapolis Colts back in 2012. He initially coached wide receivers for Cincinnati before being reassigned to the quarterbacks when Zac Taylor was hired as head coach in 2019.
He’s played a key role in developing Joe Burrow and other quarterbacks the Bengals have picked up over the years; it was his responsibility to work with backup quarterback Jake Browning when Burrow went down with a season-ending injury this season. The Bengals went 4-3 with Browning under center and finished the year with a winning record.
We’ll see if anything manifests beyond this interview. Pitcher has drawn a lot of attention (he twice met with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last year when they were looking for a new OC) and he’s someone Taylor has pointed to as a coach with a good eye for game management, which is something the Saints have lacked on offense. Stay tuned.
Interesting comments from Bengals coach Zac Taylor.
Cincinnati Bengals‘ head coach Zac Taylor has had a winning record in three straight seasons, but in a conversation with Bengals.com reporter Geoff Hobson, he said he thinks going through this season made him a better coach and playcaller.
“You learn through these experiences you’re in,” Taylor said, via Hobson. “Every year is a little unique and we certainly faced some adversity like all teams do, and I certainly feel that I’ll be an improved head coach going forward and I’m excited to help the team improve as well.”
The Bengals faced adversity when starting quarterback Joe Burrow was dealing with an injury early in the season and started 1-3, but even more so when he was knocked out for the rest of the year and needed surgery.
Jake Browning took over, and he and Taylor led Cincinnati to a winning record in the best division in the NFL, playing a first-place schedule.
Taylor said it was tough for him to say whether this season was the best he has done as a coach, but he did say that the experiences and the things he learned will help him as a coach in the future.
“I certainly feel like we played a lot of really good teams this year that posed those challenges and you had to make sure you communicated really well as a staff to put our team in a good position and have a chance to win the game,” he said. “I know that we worked really hard at it, and we always put our best plan forward. And I think there are a lot of things that we can take to really help our offense next year.”
An amazing moment at the end of the season for the Bengals.
The future of Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tyler Boyd with the team is very much in question coming out of the team’s season-ending win.
Boyd, potentially playing his final game before leaving in free agency with the Bengals, got some unexpected very public support from a teammate after the game, though.
Quarterback Jake Browning actually interrupted Boyd’s postgame interview to show some support, as captured in footage by CLNS Media’s Mike Petraglia.
“(He’s) been my locker mate the whole year, been a big part of helping me bounce back when I throw three picks in a game and I think an underrated part of the whole locker room,” Boyd said. “In the receiver room, obviously we have a ton of talent in there, but he’s a big, unsung hero of the locker room. And I hope he’s back. But wherever he goes, someone is gonna be lucky to have him in the locker room.”
Conventional wisdom says — given the possible major contracts for Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins and through the team drafting multiple receivers this year — that Boyd is the odd man out.
And yet, it’s not so easy to discount the idea that both parties make it work, especially when Boyd continues to have support in the locker room like this after being one of the only remaining veterans to drag the team through the lowest points of the rebuild.
Jake Browning shows love and respect for Tyler Boyd in a class moment postgame pic.twitter.com/hiew9oE4iM
Here’s how the top 32 QBs stack up in this stat going into Week 18.
All season long we have been ranking quarterbacks around the NFL based on different stats each week. Heading into the last week of the season, we decided to use a combination of EPA/play and CPOE.
Here’s how the top 32 QBs stack up in this stat going into Week 18.
The 2023 Chiefs will go exactly as far as their defense will take them. The good news is that Steve Spagnuolo is dialing up some evil stuff.
We all know that the Kansas City Chiefs’ offense, for whatever reason, is an unmitigated disaster at this point. Yes, Patrick Mahomes is still capable of making amazing plays from time to time, but the structure of the passing game has fallen apart, Mahomes is leaving too many throws on the field, and the chemistry is certainly a problem.
Sure, the pass was behind him… While Mahomes was getting clobbered.
And it was still wildly catchable. Like, high school catchable.
Reminder; Mahomes tried to take the blame publicly for MVS dropping a potential game winner vs the Eagles. https://t.co/g1hdVlll5u
In the Chiefs’ 25-17 win over the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, Mahomes completed 21 of 29 passes for 245 yards, one touchdown, and a passer rating of 119.8. Not bad for the way this season has gone, but Mahomes also had just two passes of 20 or more air yards in this game for 108 of those total passing yards.
It’s abundantly clear that the 2023 Chiefs will go exactly as far as their defense can take them, and at least there’s some good news there. Under defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, Kansas City ranks 10th in Defensive DVOA, and against the Bengals, it was Spags’ guys who put the nail in the coffin.
Harrison Butker kicked his sixth field goal of the day with 3:03 left in the game, and the Bengals started their corresponding drive with 2:59 remaining on their own 25-yard line. After two short passes that took the ball to the Cincinnati 45, Bengals quarterback Jake Browning saw his world unravel as the Chiefs sacked him four times in five plays — in 50 clock minutes from 2:14 to 1:24.
Spagnuolo alternated between Cover-2 and 2-Man on those four sacks, which was smart. Coming into this game, per Sports Info Solutions, Browning had completed 27 of 41 passes against those two coverages for 363 yards, 171 air yards, one touchdown, three interceptions, four sacks, and a passer rating of 71.5. And since the Chiefs had played the NFL’s sixth-highest rate of Cover-2 (17.3%, tied with the Buffalo Bills), and the highest rate of 2-Man (7.3%), everybody knew what to do on the back end.
The first two sacks were by safety Justin Reid, who blitzed from two different gaps. With 2:14 left in the game, Reid jumped from the box to the B-gap late in the pre-snap process, and went right into the pocket. Running back Joe Mixon tried to pick Reid up, to no avail.
Reid’s second sack came on the next play, with 2:00 remaining. This time, No. 20 rushed off the left defensive edge, and there was no concern about running back Trayveon Williams picking Reid up in pass protection, because Reid threw Williams out of the way on the way to Browning.
“It was a big moment,” Reid said after the game of those two sacks. “All of it just came down to execution. We were executing really all game and in the biggest moments, your biggest players in every situation… your players have to make plays. Coach Spags dialed it up for me to get home, we practiced it all during the week, everyone played their role to give me enough time to get home and we were able to make things happen.”
Browning then hit receiver Tyler Boyd on a 23-yard play that took the ball from the Cincinnati 32 to the Kansas City 45, at which point the Chiefs started beating up on Browning again. With 1:30 left in the game, edge-rusher George Karlaftis got through on a straight four-man rush where he beat left tackle Orlando Brown Jr. around the back of the pocket. That has been Brown’s Kryptonite throughout his career, and as Brown used to play for the Chiefs, we’re pretty sure everybody involved understood that.
That took the ball back to the Cincinnati 49, and now, it was time for uber-disruptor Chris Jones to do his thing. Jones is the Chiefs’ best defensive player, and given the way the offense has played this season, he might be the best player on the team. With 1:24 left in the game, the Chiefs brought a six-man pressure pressure look on second-and-16 with Reid and linebacker Nick Bolton then dropping into short/spy coverage, and Jones made it third-and-27 in a big hurry. Left guard Cordell Volson had no shot against Jones’ cross-body rip move.
Browning threw two more desperation passes incomplete, and game over.
“I think in that situation we’re hanging on, we’re behind the sticks and you’re hanging on for some longer developing routes because you have to,” Browning said of those four sacks. “I don’t know what exactly happened. My eyes were downfield trying to throw the ball to somebody to convert. That’s that.”
Chiefs cornerback Trent McDuffie summed up the importance of that effort quite nicely.
“D-line, linebackers, safeties – I feel like last year with the same kind of guys we were really building and building and building. This year, I don’t know what to tell you, everyone is doing their job correctly, everyone is playing fast, and I think the trust is just there. That brings so much more confidence to everybody.”
Especially when your offense inspires little confidence from anybody.
In this week’s “Xs and Os with Greg Cosell and Doug Farrar,” the guys get more into Spagnuolo’s defense, and how it’s saving the Chiefs’ season at this point.
You can watch this week’s “Xs and Os” right here:
You can also listen and subscribe to the “Xs and Os” podcast on Spotify…
