AP

Ryan Fitzpatrick might feel like he’s the Bills quarterback of the future, but the fact his boss keeps talking about finding one suggests he isn’t.

For the second time in a week, Bills general manager Buddy Nix went to great lengths to explain the need for a long-term answer at quarterback, saying he needed to find the answer this offseason.

During a regular segment on WGR, Nix said he wanted to draft a quarterback in April.

“Let me be as honest as I can,” Nix said, via Tim Graham of the Buffalo News. “I think we really need to address it this year. The thing we can’t do is you can’t create one. You can’t go out, thinking ‘I’ve got to make this guy a player.’ If you do, then you’re going to be in a bigger mess. We don’t want to do that. We try to guard against that.

“But we do need another one, and we need to do it this time.”

When Nix talked about it previously, he didn’t offer such a hard-and-fast timetable.

But he said drafting a quarterback didn’t necessarily mean using his first pick on one. He said he didn’t see a can’t-miss prospect such as an Andrew Luck in this class.

“You’ve got guys spread out all over the league that have been successful that didn’t go with in the first round or the first five or 10 picks,” Nix said. “That is the hard part, now.

“If you got a [Andrew] Luck, an RG3 [Robert Griffin III], a Cam [Newton], those were the buzz guys every year, and it proved to be accurate on those guys. But I don’t see one of those yet in this draft. That may develop later on, but there is a lot of good players in the draft, a lot of good quarterbacks.”

For all the guys he named, there are also guys such as Christian Ponder, Jake Locker and Blaine Gabbert, all of whom were drafted in the top 12, and all of whom were obviously overdrafted, some by several rounds.

The Bills can’t make that kind of mistake, or they’ll be even further behind than they already are.