As the Buffalo Bills head toward training camp and the 2024 season, the team’s roster is coming into focus. That said, before Josh Allen and company hit the dorms at St. John Fisher University in Rocester, NY on July 23, there is still one more move to make to fill out the roster.
The Bills should add Hunter Renfrow to roster before training camp
It’s no secret that the Bills need help at wide receiver this season. Gone are Stefon Diggs (to the Houston Texans) and Gabe Davis (to the Jacksonville Jaguars), the team's two most prominent wideouts in the Josh Allen era, and in their place are rookie second-round pick Keon Johnson, incumbent youngsters Khalil Shakir and Justin Shorter, and free agents like Curtis Samuel, Chase Claypool, Marques Valdez-Scantling, KJ Hamler, and Mack Hollins.
Pick any combination of three of those players to start and you don’t exactly get Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, and Brandon Stokley vibes.
Heading into the Bills 2024 season, you get the feeling that this is a situation of throwing a bunch of players into the hopper, shaking them up in training camp, and seeing who comes out on top.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With the team paying an understandably huge salary to stars like Allen and predictably bad big money to players like Von Miller, the team had to skimp somewhere, and WR is as good a place as any.
General manager Brandon Beane and head coach Sean McDermott are simply copying the Kansas City Chiefs formula that led to a Super Bowl last season.
With second-round rookie Rashee Rice and a rag-tag bunch of vets (including the Bills’ now-own Valdez-Scantling), Patrick Mahomes got just enough out of his WR corps to win it all.
Since the Bills are hoping that quantity turns into quality, taking chances on as many available veterans as possible is key. Signing a player like Claypool, who is still relatively young (he’ll turn 26 on July 7) and has had some success earlier in his career is perfect. The Bills are not paying him a lot and there is a chance he could turn into an above-average starting receiver this season.
Obviously, the Bills’ in-house youngsters — Coleman, Shakir, and Shorter — all have a lot of upside as well, and if one or two of them hit and become top-end pass-catchers, it would be huge for Buffalo.
Samuel, Valdez-Scantling, Hamler, and Hollins are a little different in that we pretty much know what they are at this point. They are all fine, but there isn’t a ton of upside there.
With Bills training camp quickly approaching and the NFL free-agent market pretty thin, there aren’t a ton of options left to add to this group. However, there is one player who the franchise should take a flyer on.
Hunter Renfrow was a fifth-round pick in the 2019 NFL Draft out of Clemson of the then-Oakland Raiders.
As a late-round pick, he was a pleasant surprise in his first two seasons, putting up back-to-back 600-plus-yard campaigns. Then, in his third season, Renfrow was a breakout star, putting up 103 catches for 1,038 yards and nine touchdowns. These numbers earned him a Pro Bowl bid.
The next season Renfrow dealt with injuries, only playing 10 games, and in 2023 he was completely eliminated from the Raiders offense for some reason.
In fairness to Renfrow, the Raiders have been a mess the last several seasons between the Jon Gruden scandal and Josh McDaniels debacle.
Renfrow is still just 28, though, and should still have plenty of tread on the tires. He is small at 5-foot-10, 185 pounds, but that is part of what made him an excellent slot receiver early in his career.
If things break perfectly for the Bills in training camp and the upcoming season, Coleman will become a star WR1, Claypool will rediscover his Pittsburgh Steelers form and win the WR2 job, and Shakir will develop into a 2021 Renfrow-level slot guy.
Even if it works out just like this, though, bringing in a player like Renfrow is a smart idea now, and could payoff big for Buffalo if they end up going as deep into the postseason as they hope this year.
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