Pittsford, N.Y. (WGR 550) – The Buffalo Bills took the field on Wednesday for Day 1 of training camp at St. John Fisher University. It was pouring rain as new head coach Joe Brady spoke before practice and he couldn’t be happier about this kind of start,
“There’s a mentality that I want us to play with and I think it’s just perfect, it’s the first day, 8:30 practice, it’s raining, it’s just what I want, it’s got to be a tough camp and you get a pulse of the team and where you want it to be and this isn’t supposed to be just fun, we want to push it and the guys to feel some type of way and I’m excited for us to figure that out and learn and go through it all.”
Brady said only Tyrell Shavers won’t be out there as he’s on the Physically Unable to Perform list. He suffered a knee injury in last year’s playoffs. He said there still are some guys on a limited rep count
Brady said there’s only one way he knows how to be and that doesn’t change just because he’s the head coach of the Buffalo Bills,
“I’m just being myself, that’s all I know and I told the team, we’ve never been here before, and I can’t be anybody I’m not, I’m going to act a certain way, there’s standards and a personality that I want us to be about and If I see things that’s not the standard or not living up to it or getting in the way of it, then I’ll address it.”
Practices are earlier this season as they’ll begin at 8:30 am. Brady said there are good reasons as to why,
“Being able to maximize the full day, we’ve got a certain amount of time restraints. I don’t want to have dinner any later, but I want to make sure we have enough meeting time.
“I think there’s a mindset and personality of, let’s wake up and let’s go.”
This year the Bills are spending quite a bit less time at St. John Fisher and Brady said they have a new home in Orchard Park that they have to get acclimated to,
“There’s something to me wanting to get into a mindset of ‘What are these game weeks going to look like?’
“We come back, we have the red-blue, we’re into the routine, it’s not going to be necessarily like a game week, but we have that preseason game and getting the guys back into the routine, so I love getting away, but I want to make sure that there’s a lot of different nuances in regard to us getting back to the stadium and getting into that flow.”
It’s shorter, but Brady sees a positive in being here,
“I like coming away to camp because there’s that focus where there’s a lot of things going on outside of football, but we’re in this all together and we focus on the football and the connection piece it’s a lot of things that folks don’t put lot of attention on, but the connection piece is so critical and when the guys have time together are they just being with themselves? They have to make sure they’re in the playbook, but are they hanging with each other, because when you get back to Buffalo, sometimes, your work day if is over and you’re going home because you have a wife and kids and you want to establish a mentality that we’re working towards and when the guys take the ownership and really believe in who you’re going to be, that’s when it comes to life.”
It was raining hard for much of Wednesday’s practice, but that doesn’t bother Brady even one little, tiny bit,
“Who says it’s a crappy day? It’s football, right? There’s never a bad day to play football. Is it crappy when it snows? We play in Buffalo and we don’t care, just put the ball down and lets go play, so I think this is awesome, if it’s raining, cool, let’s see how we respond, who can go through the good and the bad, so I think it’s perfect.”
Brady was asked if there were a lot of jobs open and he pretty much bristled. He said he has one message to the players,
“When I had my end of the off-season meetings with every player I was like, a lot of guys want to talk about something, go take it, go take the job. I don’t care how much money you make, I don’t care how many years you have left on the contract, so we’re going to give everybody all these opportunities, but we’re in an opportunity at training camp, go take the job! If you want to earn it, nothing is going to be handed to the guys.”
Brady knows about the outside expectations out there, he says there are no expectations in his locker-room and there’s a reason why.
“All I focus on is today, we can talk about what we want to do and the expectations, but we haven’t done a damn thing. What a don’t want is, ‘We know we have a good offense’ we don’t know anything, we have earned a damn thing.”
Bills general manager Brandon Beane will be speaking after practice. You can hear it alive at around 11:00 on WGR Sports Radio 550.