After coming up short in the AFC run for the Super Bowl, winning the AFC East but falling to the Kansas City Chiefs in the divisional round, the Buffalo Bills are at it again in 2024, hoping that this collection of talent will be the correct pairing around Josh Allen in this his seventh professional season.
One area where fans have to keep a particularly close eye is at wide receiver, as the team purposefully took a step back in order to pursue a more effective long-term plan heading into the future.
With a slew of new faces now calling 1 Bills Way home for the 2024 preseason, Buffalo will be watching very closely to see who develops a connection with Allen and who doesn't and how they can settle on a 53-man roster that optimizes the passing game, with these two players in particular seemingly vying for the same spot heading into Week 1.
Two players on the preseason bubble for the Bills
1. Marquez Valdes-Scantling
After saying goodbye to Stefon Diggs in a trade with the Houston Texans, the Bills have taken a bit of a scattershot approach to finding a new WR1, forgoing a trade – either for a veteran or up in the draft – to secure a can't-miss prospect in favor of instead taking multiple bites at the apple.
One signing who doesn't appear to have come as advertised, at least not yet, is Marquez Valdes-Scantling, the two-time Super Bowl Champion who has split his professional career between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs before landing in Buffalo on a sub-$2 million contract.
Discussing the Bills' wide receiver rotation through the early segment of camp, Joe Buscaglia of the Athletic noted that MVS has been the odd man out of Buffalo's top-5, with the group actually operating more like a top-4 as a result.
“To begin training camp, the Bills appeared to have a pretty well-defined top five of the wide receiver group. That included Keon Coleman, Khalil Shakir, Curtis Samuel, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, and Mack Hollins,” Buscaglia wrote. “But as camp has gone on, there are clear signs that the top five may only be four, with Valdes-Scantling needing to battle his way back into it. Valdes-Scantling has faded into the background in the last few practices. He has yet to make a strong impression in the passing game during team drills, and his opportunities with quarterback Josh Allen and the top unit have dwindled.”
Now, as Buscaglia later noted in his own reporting, it is early in camp, and the decision to “demote” Valdes-Scantling to a lesser role could have more to do with evaluating other players than losing confidence in the former fifth-round pick out of South Florida. Still, if the team was confident in the 29-year-old playmaker, wouldn't they be giving him more looks on the outside instead of less, what with Allen needing to get comfortable throwing to the 6-foot-4, 206-pound deep threat? All in all, this is a story to monitor heading into the preseason.
2. Mack Hollins
If MVS is able to put it all together and become a starter next to Coleman and Shakir – probably – there might just need to be another shoe to drop in order to balance out the roster.
Could the player ultimately handed his papers be Mack Hollins, either via a straight-up release or via trade to a wide receiver-needy team?
Originally drafted as a Day 3 deep threat by the Philadelphia Eagles, Hollins has bounced around the NFL over his professional career before really coming into his own in 2022 as a member of the Las Vegas Raiders, more than doubling his previous offensive snaps ceiling with 1,030 while catching a career-high 57 passes for 690 yards and four touchdowns. While Hollins wasn't able to match that production in 2023 for the Falcons, finishing off the year with just 18 catches for 251 and no touchdowns, he clearly showed enough to get the Bills' front office excited, and they signed him to a one-year, $2.6 million contract right at the start of free agency.
Like MVS, Hollins is a tall, long, deep threat who can put in work as a WR3 on the outside, and while he is a good special teams player – not to mention a very fun personality universally loved by his teammates – he isn't elite at any one aspect of the game and probably won't develop an elite trait before he turns 31 next month. If the Bills decide they can only keep one of the two players, and like Valdes-Scantling more for one reason or another, it shouldn't be hard to find another team interested in Hollins, as he does enough things on a value contract to justify a late Day 3 flyer.
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