1 - How Bills fans can win Fox Sports' NFL Fan Base competition
Voting resumes today for the Fox Sports: NFL best NFL fan base tournament. In a March Madness-like NFL fan participation contest on Twitter, Buffalo faces off against Tennessee for a spot in the championship game as they've reached the semifinals.
Buffalo is a seven seed and has defeated Seattle, Green Bay and New Orleans on its current path to the championship. Seeds were determined by team account twitter followers.
Buffalo defeated Seattle with 55 percent of the vote in the round of 32 and then defeated the Packers in the Sweet 16 with 54 percent. The Bills and Saints were neck and neck with the vote going down to the final minutes but Buffalo pulled away beating New Orleans by less than one percent of the vote casted by 151,025 users.
Voting will take place in a Twitter poll run by @NFLonFOX.
If the Bills win, they will face either Chicago or Cleveland in the championship round.
2 - Draft mistake Bills have to avoid according to B/R
For Buffalo to continue its path towards sustained success the key for the franchise will be to draft effectively. The Bills landed impact players throughout the draft last season along with key depth pieces that allowed them to be flexible in this year's free agent period. Bleacher Report identified the mistake the Bills can’t make in this year’s draft.
Buffalo is in the midst of a fast-track rebuild because of quality acquisitions the past few seasons. The Bills have been focused on solving its offense and have added a couple veterans to help Josh Allen's supporting cast.
Still, the Bills cannot focus too much on offense, says Bleacher Report.
After plugging the offense with veteran stopgaps, Beane can't make the mistake of dumping his draft assets into the unit. The Bills still have needs along the defensive line and at cornerback. Thanks to Buffalo's free-agent activity, it can take the best player available in the early rounds.
Buffalo has been recently mocked to select defensive players like Houston's Ed Oliver and Michigan's Rashan Gary at the ninth pick. The Bills have the ability to take the best player available in the first round but the key to success will be finding quality pieces in the later rounds.
The Bills enter the 2019 draft with 10 total selections.
3 - How Buffalo hired a Hall of Fame coach
The Bills landed Marv Levy as a head coach in 1986, by losing. Former Bills offensive tackle Will Wolford went on the Moran-Alytics podcast and shared how the Bills purposefully lost against Tampa Bay to try and get their current coach, Hank Bullough, fired.
Buffalo entered the game with a 2-6 record. The Buccaneers, who recorded only two wins all season, was up on Buffalo 20-0 at halftime before winning 34-28. It was the last time Tampa Bay won all season and the last time Bullough was the coach.
"There were a lot of older players who didn't care for Coach Bullough at all," Wolford told Moran. "And literally, you know, we were playing Tampa my first year and they knew that if we lost to Tampa he was getting fired. Again, I'm just a young kid who's naive and taking this all in second, third hand. But we literally had players before the game and at half time saying, 'If you make a tackle, if you catch the ball, if you play any good I'll kill you.' And we went out and lost the game. We lost the game on purpose and sure enough Coach Bullough was fired and Marv Levy was hired. And really that was all she wrote. You put the combo of Bill Polian and Marv Levy together and magic happened."
