Photo credit: Adrian Kraus/ AP

The Buffalo Bills are 5-4 and right in the middle of the playoff race. Starting quarterback Tyrod Taylor has completed 64 percent of his passes and 10 touchdowns to go along with three interceptions. He’s also run for 237 yards and two scores. That record and those numbers shouldn’t blow you away, but given how many bad teams and bad quarterbacks there are in the NFL, the Bills look better off than most. It was weird, then, to see this announcement today:




I can assure you that Nathan Peterman is a real NFL player. He’s a rookie from Pittsburgh who was drafted in the fifth round of the 2017 draft. Maybe he’s good enough to be a starter, but the middle of a playoff race seems like a strange time for Sean McDermott to go about trying to figure that out. It appears that the Bills players were just as surprised by this move as everyone else is, maybe because McDermott just gave Taylor a vote of confidence on Monday:


Taylor threw for 285 yards and two touchdowns in the Bills’ Week 9 loss to the Jets, and he managed just 56 yards and an interception before getting pulled part way through Sunday’s blowout loss to the Saints. He wasn’t spectacular in either game, but he also wasn’t responsible for the 81 combined points the Bills surrendered.

The big conclusion to draw here is that the Bills just don’t really like Taylor that much, and never have. They spent last offseason seemingly desperate to get rid of him, only to eventually give in and sign him to a five-year deal. Now, not even a full season later, Taylor is on the bench and the Bills will likely once again go about trying to find a way to not pay him:

Taylor probably isn’t good enough to ever make the Bills look inarguably stupid for always being so dissatisfied with him, but he doesn’t need to be that good for their continued desire to ditch him to be puzzling. Tyrod Taylor is a perfectly functional quarterback, and the NFL isn’t a league in which teams can really afford to jettison players like him in favor of Generic Backup Quarterback No. 234.