Bills' Pettine has had no words with Byrd / BuffaloBills.com

Rick Stewart

By Joe Buscaglia

JoeB@wgr550.com

Orchard Park, NY (WGR 550)  -- Officially through half of the total workouts scheduled for the Buffalo Bills' Organized Team Activities, franchised free safety Jairus Byrd has been nowhere to be seen around team facilities. Yet to sign his franchise tender, Byrd has been absent throughout all the voluntary workouts to this point in time.

After having his rights retained by the Bills in March, Byrd is currently employed by a team that will have him working with a fourth defensive coordinator in just five years in the NFL. Unlike any of the previous three coordinators, however, Byrd has yet to meet with the new man in charge of the defense.

"It's a coaching cliche, but I can only really deal with the players that are here. I haven't met him," Bills defensive coordinator Mike Pettine told reporters on Tuesday. "He's not here and for some of the other guys that aren't here, we have plenty to do with the guys that are. So we really haven't, as a staff, given it much thought."

They haven't met just yet, but have they communicated at all?

"No," Pettine confirmed. "That's above my pay grade. I got enough dealings with the guys here. So that's a situation I'll let itself handle it."

The one thing the Bills haven't failed to do is to add pieces to the safety group throughout the off-season. The team elected to switch former 2011 second-round pick Aaron Williams from cornerback to safety and also spent two draft choices in April on the position when they selected Duke Williams (fourth round) and Johnathan Meeks (fifth round). Those three joined Da'Norris Searcy, Mana Silva and Dominique Ellis in the off-season safety competition.


Are the Bills already preparing for life without one of their top players? Pettine said it's far too premature to start figuring out the safety group, with or without Byrd's presence.

"It's too early to really start to talk about the players there and the depth there," he remarked. "We're rotating guys in different personnel groupings. We just want to find out who can play, so we're a long way from trying to hone it down and figure out who's going to be out there. To me, that's a little bit too far down the road to talk about."

In the two OTA sessions available to the media, Williams has been working at free safety with the first-team defense. If the situation with Byrd lingers in to the season, perhaps the once-corner has a chance at seeing the field earlier than expected.

"He's doing a nice job, and that's a difficult thing," Pettine said of Williams' switch to safety. "You can make the argument, 'Well he's a DB and he's staying at DB.' The safety world is very different from the corner world. He's very intelligent and he's soaking it all in. Every day is a challenge for him as far as new concepts in the playbook and I think he's done a real nice job buying in, and really getting quickly to the graduate level details of it."

In regards to Byrd, the Bills have until July 15 to negotiate a long-term contract with their franchised player. If they do not, they can only negotiate a one-year contract past that date or Byrd can just sign the franchise tender and be owed roughly $6.9 million in 2013. The workouts to this point have been voluntary. If the safety misses the mandatory minicamp in June, he will be facing fines from the organization.

Bills Gilmore learned a lot from first season / Wgr550.com

PHOTO BY BILL KOSTROUN

Howard Simon

howard@wgr550.com

Even though he has just one NFL season under his belt, Stephon Gilmore is clearly the player the Bills will rely on to be their shutdown cornerback.

The team's first round pick in the 2012 draft started every game last season and finished with a team high 16 passes defensed, tied for fourth best in the AFC and ninth in the NFL.  The next best total on the Bills was Bryan Scott with eight.

According to StatsPass, Gilmore was targeted 89 times last season and allowed three touchdown passes.  He was one of 30 defenders to have been targeted at least 85 times and his 3 TD's given up was tied for fourth fewest.

Gilmore had just one interception though and has been using the voluntary OTA's(Organized Team Activity) to improve his technique for season number two.

"Its mostly staying square at the line of scrimmage" Gilmore said during an interview on the WGR morning show on Tuesday.  "When I was guarding receivers last year, sometimes I opened up, just mainly trying to use my athletic ability instead of working on straight technique.  Its one thing I feel I’m getting better at."

Gilmore is excited about the new scheme being installed by Defensive Coordinator Mike Pettine since it puts a lot of responsibility on the cornerbacks and plays to Gilmore's strengths as a defender.

"“Its mostly a man to man scheme and a corner has to guard, most of the time, the best athletes on the other team most of the game", the University of South Carolina product said.  "This defense will allow us to show our ability to make plays”.

You can listen to the entire interview with Gilmore and hear him talk about Doug Marrone's sense of humor as well as his initial observations on drafted receivers Robert Woods and Marquise Goodwin.

Bills Roundup: Tuesday News, Stevie Returns / BuffaloBills.com

Photo: Getty Images Sport

Stevie Johnson returned to the field on a limited basis as the team hit the half way mark of OTA's, plus hear from offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and defensive coordinator Mike Pettine. CLICK HERE: Bills Roundup: Tuesday News, Stevie Returns

OC Nathaniel Hackett on Stevie's Return / BuffaloBills.com

AP

The Bills offensive coordinator talks about Stevie Johnson's return to the practice field, focusing on the run game, and about the young receivers from this year's draft class. CLICK HERE: OC Nathaniel Hackett on Stevie's Return

DC Mike Pettine on Young Defense Coming Together / Buffalobills.com

AP Photo/David Duprey

The Bills defensive coordinator talks about several of the young players, the state of the safety position, and how he thinks the defense will come together. CLICK HERE: DC Mike Pettine on Young Defense Coming Together

Kevin Kolb Praises Young WR Group / Buffalobills.com

AP Photo/David Duprey

Bills quarterback Kevin Kolb talks to the media after the fourth OTA workout, and had some high praise for the young wide receivers as well as for the offense in general.  CLICK HERE: Kevin Kolb Praises Young WR Group

The once-happy couple Mario saga raises hard questions / wgr550.com

Mike Schopp Reporting @schopptalk

schopp@wgr550.com

OK, here's the deal. Sign on the line, or don't.

** Instead of going to a job that pays far less money and requires real work, play a game. We need you to practice for a couple hours a day. Just like real jobs we need you to show up on time but unlike those jobs you'll get several months off. (Well unlike most of those jobs, right, teachers?)

** You'll be able to afford bigger houses than you can possibly use. Cars, alternate residences, you name it. Travel is on us -- and it's first-class all-around, from the charter flights to the best hotels on the continent. We'll pay for all of it. Also, in case that's not enough, we'll throw you meal money that you can pocket or gamble with because we'll feed you all day every day. We even have our own chef!

** You shouldn't have to worry about spending too much of that money on important stuff. Once they get to know you in your new town, a lot of people will do things for you at no cost. Home improvements, restaurant/bar tabs, financial planning ... a lot of this stuff will be free for you. Nice, huh?

** And you'll be famous! Those guys on ESPN you grew up watching? They'll be talking about you! You still play video games? Guess what, you can be yourself in the game without having to create the character! This is great too because a lot of guys spend countless hours on video games so that they don't have to interact too much with the rabble that are always annoyingly saying hello and, you know, "I'm a big fan".

Sure, sometimes this means people will criticize you, and sometimes also it might mean that people will know certain personal details about you that you might prefer they not know. But for all those perks, you can handle that.

Right?

Here's irony for you: An athlete spends $785,000 on an engagement ring -- an ungodly sum -- yet ends up in a salacious court fight over it that gets splayed out publicly. This wouldn't be so except for the amount of the ring. Had the ring cost, say, 1 percent as much, there'd be no public discussion of it, and very possibly there'd be no fight over it in the first place.

Want some more? It seems possible these days that a well-intentioned Mario Williams might envy guys like us. He might be wishing he had a regular job, one that paid exponentially less, just because no one would be talking about him. At times like this, he might wish he could take it all back.

I say might.

Just where these details on Williams' personal life should be considered and where they should be ignored is entirely up to the beholder. There is no clear line on this. Athletes go through breakups just like we do, and some of these things are ugly, and we almost never hear about them. I, for one, don't need that to change.

But...

If our interest is the teams these guys play for, as it is, and their play happens to suffer because of, to some degree, what's going on in their lives away from sports, isn't it useful if not intrusive for fans to know what's up? And further, if there's a record of a player taking drugs to cope that don't seem to fit with the usual sports prescription, don't we have some right to that information too?

They either can have us care -- and subsidize their dream lives -- or not. But it's bad with the good.

I'm not saying we need to look for excuses to give these guys. We all have stress at home, and the challenge of focusing on work and doing our jobs well is one that almost of us can relate to. A football player is no different than a laborer when it comes to that.

Here's the thing though: Athletes don't ask for special treatment when it comes to this stuff. The vast majority of the time they keep it private. There have to be hundreds of cases where some distraction we never knew of explains why a player didn't come with his best in a particular game, or moment. In many of those cases the athlete's legacy takes a hit in the name of privacy. I can respect that.

And 'round and 'round we go.

Add it all up and it's still murky to calculate what right the fans have to know details of the players' personal lives. In the end I think the fans can claim some. Athletes' astronomical salaries, a major propellor in steady ticket hikes not to mention publicly funded stadiums, are some defense for this position. No, we don't need to know which players on the team fought with their spouses the morning of the game. And we're not asking for that.

So what do you say? Is it a deal?