The Buffalo Bills got beat badly by the Chicago Bears in their 2024 NFL preseason opener, losing 33-6. Of course, no one in Western New York cares about the final score. What was important in the first Bills preseason game was to see how players further down the roster who are fighting for a starting position or a spot on the team fared.
Obviously, when a team loses by 27 points, there isn’t a lot that goes right even when it is a preseason game. Still, there were several positive takeaways from the Bills-Bears tilt, especially when it comes to three players who you may be seeing more of this season than initially expected.
RB Frank Gore Jr.
While NFL fans know the name Frank Gore well, Jr. is still an unknown commodity. The son of the longtime Pro Bowl running back, Gore Jr. signed with the Bills — the second-to-last team his father played for — as an undrafted rookie free agent out of Southern Mississippi.
The most likely spot for Gore Jr. is on the practice squad. The Bills have James Cook and 2024 fourth-round pick Ray Davis out of Kentucky as their one-two punch this year. After that, it seems like Ty Johnson and Darrynton Evans are in line for the third and possibly fourth spot. Plus, the Bills are a team that has carried a fullback in the past, so if Reggie Gilliam again makes the team, there might only be space for three halfbacks.
So, even making the team is going to be hard for Gore Jr. That said, he played well — at least the best among any RBs — when the Bills played the Bears.
Gore Jr. finished with seven carries for 21 yards and added three catches for 16 yards. Now, 3.0 yards per carry is nothing to write home about, but with the way the Bills' offensive line played (not great) and the way Joe Brady and company called plays (very vanilla), 3.0 YPC was better than Cook or Davis could manage.
It will still be an uphill battle for Gore Jr. to make the 53-man roster, but if he keeps flashing potential, he’s got a shot. The Bills know what Johnson and Evans are, and that’s two average backs. They are fine depth pieces but there is little to no upside there.
In Frank Gore Jr., the team has a player who at least has an outside chance of becoming a Pro Bowl runner someday, and we know this because we’ve seen it before from the man he calls dad.
C Sedrick Van Pran-Granger
As mentioned above, the Bills' offensive line didn’t look all that great against the Bears, especially blocking for the run. That said, there are two important things to take into account.
One is that the Bears, an up-and-coming team with a No. 1 overall pick QB, cared about this game way more than the Bills did. You could tell this when you saw the other thing to take with a grain of salt, and that is how the Bills play-callers ran the same running plays over and over again. This wasn’t a game played to win. It was a game played to evaluate some players and give as little away as possible.
That said, the offensive line still wasn’t great, and it started in the middle with center Connor McGovern. The fifth-year veteran is a guard by trade and started all 17 games at left guard for the Bills last season. With longtime starter Mitch Morse gone to the Jacksonville Jaguars, McGovern has slid over to center to help out the line. David Edwards is now on the left side in his place.
The problem is that one of the lone bright spots on the line came later in the game when fifth-round rookie Sedrick Van Pran-Granger came in and took over snapping duties.
Van Pran-Granger was a three-year starter for a back-to-back national championship-winning Georgia program who spent his practices going up against the likes of recent first-round picks like Jordan Davis, Devonte Wyatt, and Jalen Carter. He is smart, he is tough, and he is talented.
Against the Bears, Van Pran-Granger put up the second-best PFF rating on the team at 75.7, according to the PFF BUF Bills X account.
Van Pran-Granger is not in danger of not making the team, but after his performance in the Bills-Bears game, there is a good chance he will be snapping it to Josh Allen instead of Mitchell Trubisky come the final preseason game.
CB Kaiir Elam
By the end of the 2023 season, Kaiir Elam was close to getting the dreaded draft bust label. The No. 23 overall pick of the 2022 NFL Draft was ineffectual and, at times, a liability in the secondary. It was so bad that he had lost most of his playing time to several DBs, including Christian Benford, a player picked 162 picks later than him in the same draft.
During the regular season, the cornerback was inactive for seven games, got DNP’d seven games, and played in three with minimal impact and no interceptions.
The Bills 2024 season seemed like a last chance for Elam, but if he was as bad as he had been at times in his first two seasons, there was a small chance the team could cut him if he was completely unplayable.
However, Elam has reportedly been a revelation at Bills training camp, finally flashing the skill that made him a first-round pick two seasons ago. And the Bills CB took that positive camp performance and parlayed it into a solid game against the Bears. With a 72.0 PFF grade, Elam walked away with the fifth-highest mark on the team and second to only linebacker Baylon Spector on the defense.
In today’s NFL, you can never have enough good cornerbacks, and there are now at least signs that Elam could finally be one of those in 2024.
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