BILLS AGREE TO FOUR-YEAR, $68 MILLION EXTENSION WITH DT ED OLIVER
The Buffalo Bills have agreed to a new extension with Defensive tackle Ed Oliver, as first reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
The new deal, as per ESPN’s Adam Schefter, is a four-year, $68 million extension that includes $45 million in guaranteed money. A 2019 first-round pick, Ed Oliver, had only a year left on his rookie deal but after this deal is now tied down for the next five years. The Bills picked up Oliver’s $10.753 million fifth-year option last spring and consider him a key piece of their defense going forward.
The new contract, expected to be signed in the next few days, keeps Oliver in Buffalo through 2027 and places him within the top-15 highest paid interior defensive linemen in the NFL at a $17 million per-year salary. The deal continues an offseason trend of big money extensions for young defensive tackles in the league. In a three-month period fans have seen massive deals for Titans’ DT Jeffery Simmons, Commanders’ DT Daron Payne, and Giants’ DT Dexter Lawrence.
The Buffalo Bills didn’t have a defensive tackle under contract past 2024 and now fix that long-term issue with a huge deal for one of the league’s most promising young defenders. Bills general manager Brandon Beane said a few weeks prior that the team was potentially looking to get an extension done with one of its defensive tackles around training camp. Instead, the club now has a new deal completed before mandatory minicamp begins in a couple of weeks.
“If it’s somebody that’s here,” Beane said last month. “It would have to make sense to do an extension with any of these guys. So, we’ll see. We’ve found a way to sometimes do an extension or two in training camp, so maybe we’ll look at it at that point, see where the guys are at, who’s all in, who’s looking good, and if there’s a chance to get one extended, we might look to do that.”
Picked ninth-overall from the University of Houston in 2019, Oliver has been a staple of the Bills defense since his second year in the league. Standing at 6-foot-1 and just under 290 pounds, the Bills nose tackle is an incessant penetrator at the line of scrimmage and a disruptive force in the passing game.
The fifth-year man also finished second on the team last year with a 41.5% run stop rate and is only expected to improve on his ascending skill set. Oliver’s elite speed and quick get off is a problem for many of the league’s interior offensive linemen. The 2017 AAC Defensive Player of the Year had an irrefutable reputation of being one of the best interior defensive linemen coming out of college.
The Marksville-native has been a full-time starter for the Buffalo Bills in the past three years and was a crucial piece to the team constantly clinching Divisional Round berths in the postseason in recent years. Oliver was also part of the starting defensive line that helped the Bills get to the AFC Championship Game in 2020.
Bills defensive line Coach Eric Washington said last week that the former Cougar had a lot of talent but challenged him to get better at anticipating plays. “When you have the kind of talent that Ed has,” said Washington. “You’ve got to be able to process very, very quickly, win your one-on-one so he can play ahead of a play as opposed to playing with the sequence of that particular play.
“With where Ed is, from an experience standpoint, we need him to anticipate and play ahead as opposed to playing with the tempo of the play.”
Oliver has only amassed 14.5 sacks with 42 quarterback hits in his four-year career, accompanied by 4 forced fumbles and 151 tackles. The Louisiana-born man put up 5 sacks and 43 tackles in his rookie year in a 24th-ranked Buffalo Bills defense, but has failed to get past those numbers since. The 25-year-old ended up missing three games with injury last year and finished 2022 with a career-low 2.5 sacks.
With his future now secured and additional new money to his name, a fully healthy Ed Oliver will look to bounce back in 2023 and repay the confidence that the Bills organization clearly has in his potential to be among the best nose tackles in the NFL.
-Maher Abucheri
Twitter: @pabloikonyero
Photo: All-Pro Reels. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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