Buffalo Bills trade down twice to move out of first round in 2024 NFL Draft

ORCHARD PARK - One can only imagine how impatient Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane was getting as he sat in the war room at One Bills Drive watching the first round of the NFL Draft play out Thursday night.

This is what happens when you are a perennial playoff team; barring a trade up, which Beane almost certainly explored, you have to wait a long time to make your first pick and for Beane and the Bills, it was all the way down at No. 28.

But when the moment finally arrived nearly three hours after the show began, Beane decided he could wait a little longer.

The Bills traded spots in the first round with the Kansas City Chiefs who had the 32nd and final pick of the round at No. 32. Buffalo also sent pick 133 in the fourth round, and pick 248 in the seventh round and in return received No. 32, pick 95 in the third round, and pick 221 in the seventh round.

Buffalo Bills draft picks 2024:Round-by-round selections and analysis

And then, Beane decided the heck with it, let's just wait until Friday and he traded down again, this time with the Carolina Panthers. That deal gave the Panthers No. 32 and pick No. 200 in the sixth round, and the Bills received pick 33 which is the first one in the second round, and pick No. 141 in the fifth round.

Trading down was the opposite tack everyone assumed Beane would be on board with. There was speculation that he might take a big swing to get into the top 10 to pick one of the top three receivers - Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr. who went No. 4 to the Cardinals, Malik Nabers of LSU who went to Brian Daboll and the Giants at No. 6, and Washington’s Rome Odunze went No. 9 to the Bears.

“I would say Vegas lost today on me because if they pay attention to us, which I'm sure they do, they probably would gave pegged us to move up,” Beane said. “I know just hearing around here, people fill me in, people were saying we were trying aggressively to make a move into the top 10.

“No team ever called me saying, ‘Hey, we want to move back there’ or anything like that. I'm not calling up there a day ahead or whatever, that was all just smoke, to be clear. If there was certain players that fell, we would have gone up, but I did not want to give up our two, though. It would have had to have been something that just made way too much sense for me to give up that two.”

These trades certainly give the Bills some extra ammo for the rest of the weekend, and the biggest aspect of all this is that they get a third-round pick which they thought they were going to receive as a comp pick for Tremaine Edmunds but somehow were squeezed out of the equation as that became a fourth-rounder.

“Like every year, following the board and where we think the value is,” Beane said. “Obviously, we came into this draft without a three and we were able to get ourselves back into the third, and feel like there will be some value there. And at this point now we're back to getting three picks in the top 95 so we're excited about tomorrow and instead of just having the one pick now we got three.”

Of course, trading with the Chiefs is dangerous, especially since they used Buffalo’s pick to select wide receiver Xavier Worthy who ran the fastest 40-yard dash time (4.21) in the history of the scouting combine.

Similar to trading with the Chiefs in 2017 which allowed Andy Reid to select Patrick Mahomes, this is a deal that will be heavily scrutinized in the years to come if Worthy becomes a star, especially one who hurts Buffalo in a playoff game.

Carolina swooped in and selected another wide receiver, South Carolina's Xavier Legette, at No. 32.

While Beane wouldn’t reveal what the Bills’ board looked like, it seems like once the Jaguars picked wide receiver Brian Thomas at No. 23, that may have started the merry-go-round on the trade scenarios. In fact, when I asked him specifically about it, if body language is a tell, it seems like had Thomas made it to No. 28, he would have been the pick.

“We were following our board, without telling you specifically,” he said. “There were some players that we were following and when they came off, we decided to see if there was good value to move back. Again, we had opportunities to move into the 40s, into the 50s. That was obviously too far. We had some some good opportunities.”

It’s probable that Thomas was the Bills’ last first-round graded receiver and they did not want to reach at the end of the first round on a player valued as a second-rounder and that likely prompted the trade down strategy.

Yes, the Chiefs picked Worthy and the Panthers grabbed Legette at No. 32, but those are players the Bills may not have graded in the same way, so Beane felt secure in moving down.

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana. To subscribe to Sal's newsletter, Bills Blast, which comes out every other Friday during the offseason, please follow this link: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Bills trade down twice to move out of first round in 2024 NFL Draft