The release of Marcus Stroud won’t come as a surprise to many.
After signing a two-year extension in 2009 that added $12m in guarantees to his deal, Stroud never did anything to justify the $4.5 million the Bills were due to pay him if they kept him around any longer.
Stroud and John Henderson formed one of the league’s premier defensive tackle duos when together in Jacksonville, but when the Bills traded for Stroud in March of 2008, they may have made a deal for a player that was just mounting the crest of his career.
Since that move, things haven’t gone the way they had planned.
Hot Start
2008 was Stroud’s first season as a Bill, and by far his most successful. His season featured two of the best graded games we have ever given to a defensive tackle. Opening the season at home to Seattle he recorded a pair of sacks and added another six pressures. Then in Week 11, when the Bills hosted the Browns he was able to knock down the passer twice and add five more pressures. These games were as dominant as anything we had seen from an interior lineman (until his former Bill teammate Kyle Williams redefined dominance against the Steelers in 2010).
He finished the season inside the top 10 of our DT rankings that year with a +17.1 PFF grade on the season, but Stroud scored a +19.2 grade from those two monster games alone. For the 14 other games Stroud actually graded out below average. The signs were there for the Bills that sinking money into Stroud might not have been the best plan. Especially since in the same year, much less heralded defensive tackle Kyle Williams finished with a +26.5 PFF grade and since gone on to become one of the leagues’ standouts at the position.
Never justifying the money
After the Bills extended Stroud’s contract, he has never looked likely to justify the salary. 2009 saw his play drive over a cliff. From being ranked in the top 10 the previous season, albeit on the back of a pair of huge games, Stroud found himself rooted near the bottom of our DT rankings in ’09. Stroud’s -17.7 PFF grade for the season was bad enough to rank him 83rd amongst DTs, just two spots better off than Ryan Sims, a name synonymous with defensive tackle bust.
When the Bills began to experiment with a 3-4 defensive alignment, Stroud began to see much of his playing time at defensive end in the 3-4, with Kyle Williams manning the nose in the Bills defensive front. The new system saw Stroud receive significantly reduced playing time. After averaging 76% of the Bills defensive snaps in ’08 and ’09, Stroud only participated in 64% of their defensive snaps in 2010. Buffalo’s problems ran far deeper than Stroud in 2010, and their season featured a complete switch from 3-4 to 4-3 defense during the year.
The switch may have benefitted Stroud had it not resulted in him being played at times as a defensive end in the 4-3, a position which he can’t have been expected to succeed in. Though people may look to formation incompatability as one of the main reasons the Bills chose to part ways with Stroud, in truth that wasn’t the main problem.
Though his season ended with a near identical grade overall to his ’09 season (–17.8), the bulk of the damage was done late in the season, with Stroud turning in a series of five heavily negative games down the stretch to end the year, registering just a three pressures in total over those games, never recording multiple pressures in any of those games. -14.0 of his total negative grade for the season came from those final five games, and watching him play you got the sense that you were looking at a man that had reached the downslope of his career, and simply was running on fumes.
Worth a look?
As with all big names that get released, the first question thousands of fans ask is “Is he worth bringing in”? In the case of Marcus Stroud, you can probably get your answer from looking at who released him.
Buffalo had the worst run defense in the NFL in 2010, and they decided that they were better off without him. Stroud is now 32 years old, and like so many NFL players, his career has taken a steep nosedive in flight-path after his 30th birthday. Once known as a premier defensive tackle and an excellent run-stuffer, Stroud no longer looks capable of anchoring the middle of a defensive line, and has failed to be a pass rushing force consistently for years.
Stroud has only knocked the quarterback down on multiple occasions in a single game one time since the 2008 season, and will need to have a very limited role for any new team. Names like Stroud’s always get teams kicking the tires, and he may well be able to convince teams that he is worth a spot in their rotation with a strong workout before the wheels fall off, but any team looking for much more than that will likely have to search elsewhere.
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