AP

Bills coach Doug Marrone may not be seeing eye to eye with the team’s front office about some of the players they’ve acquired, but there’s one guy on the team who’s close with Marrone: Mike Williams.

Williams, a receiver who played for Marrone at Syracuse and was acquired by the Bills in a trade with Tampa Bay this year, says he gets along great with Marrone. That may come as a surprise to some considering that Williams left the team at Syracuse because of a violation of team rules, but Williams says that incident was an aberration in their long relationship.

“Beside the one big instance at Syracuse that separated us, we’ve almost been best friends,” Williams told the Buffalo News. “He’s come to me in the games, asked me what adjustments to make and things like that.”

Marrone says that even when he was kicking Williams off the team in college, the two liked each other personally.

“Mike has always been a great man, really, even when I was with him at Syracuse. It’s just a matter of when you get older you grow up, you learn some things. We both learned some things,” Marrone said.

One thing Marrone has learned is that he wants to surround himself with people he believes in. There may be tensions between Marrone and some other folks in Buffalo, but Marrone and Williams have each other’s backs.