When the Bills picked up Meridith instead of signing a veteran OT after Butler went down they were gambling on Bell staying healthy and Chambers being able to be a short-term fill-in for him if he got hurt. Perhaps Bell will recover quickly and Chambers will revert to his previous form of being a decent fill-in at LT next week, but Chambers didn’t get the job done against the Saints and that is disturbing.

While it is easy to savage Jonathan Scott for his play on Sunday, which left a lot to be desired, he wasn’t the only one responsible for the horrible protection provided by the right side of the Bills’ offensive line: Eric Wood had a lot to do with that as well. Charles Grant absolutely dominated Wood when he came inside on the twists that the Saints were running. Scott had a choice of helping Wood with Grant (he should have been able to just hand him off to Wood) or pick up the rusher coming from the inside out. Unable to simply hand the crashing DE off to Wood, Scott got caught up inside and was unable to get to the man he was supposed to pick up on the outside far too often. The Saints rightly exploited this and, by the end of the game, it appeared that Scott and Wood were so confused that neither one knew who to block and ended up missing their blocks entirely.

This can be written off to their inexperience and is something that they should learn to correct as the season progresses, but it is the price that the Bills are going to pay for totally rebuilding their offensive lines with inexperienced players. The coaching staff and media analysts have all stated that there would be times when the Bills would suffer as a result of the inexperience of their young offensive linemen and Sunday against the Saints was one of those times. And, with Miami and the Jets and another game against the Pats on the schedule, there are certain to be other times ahead.

Would signing a veteran offensive lineman to replace Scott help? Possibly. But, having seen Wood’s vulnerablity to twists and blitzes, teams are going to continue to test him and there are still going to be days when his inexperience is going to show. A more experienced RT might be able to help him through those days, regardless of how much experience the Bills’ RT has it isn’t going to help much until Wood learns how to pick up a crashing DE or a blitzing ILB without getting pushed into the backfield or being beaten.

The price of starting inexperienced young offensive linemen is that each one of them is going to have days when his inexperience gets exploited, shows and he gets beaten like a drum. That’s what happens and is the risk that a team takes when it starts an inexperienced young offensive linemen. The Bills are starting four of them and they are going to take their lumps for doing so. But, it is the only way that these young offensive linemen are going to become experienced. Did the Bills have to choose to start all four of them? No, but it’s the choice that these coaches have made and, while it should make the team better in the future, we will all have to live with their bad days until they gain the experience they lack. In the meantime, the Bills had better hope that Bell gets better quickly and that Chambers is better prepared to play to the best of his ability when called on–which he wasn’t on Sunday.

Perhaps more disturbing was the lack of faith that Jauron showed in his team when he chose to punt rather than try to convert the 4th and 1 with 7 minutes and change left in the fourth quarter with the team only 10 points behind. You could literally see the team sag at that point and the fact that the Saints added 10 points to the margin after that was hardly a surprise. Up until now, Jauron has managed to keep the faith of his young players and they have played hard for him. While I know injuries depleted the tired defense by that point, they didn’t seem to play as hard after that decision. It is unlikely that the Bills will win enough this season for Jauron to retain his job, but, if he loses this team with decisions like that, things could get really ugly by season’s end.

He was clearly behind Scott on the depth chart, as evidenced by his sitting in the press box while Scott took the field.

So between getting released, secret handshake with the organization or not, and being deactivated for the first two weeks despite his “real game” experience, shows me the Bills aren’t very high on his ability.

No offense

Go watch the Patriots vs. Jets game and look at the problems that Matt Light, OT Patriots, had against the Jets OLB’s. Green Bay OT Daryn Colledge was a 2nd round pick and still can’t play OT very well three years later.