By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Charles Clay – Signed by the Bills in 2015

The Bills’ fans could recognized a good player when they saw one, and they saw one when Charles Clay came to town with the Miami Dolphins in the early 2010s.

Clay was a sixth-round pick in 2011 who needed two years to blossom. Then he became one of the league’s biggest threats at the tight end position. When Clay became a free agent after the 2014 season, the team’s front office joined in the fans’ wish to add the Tulsa product to the roster. A five-year deal work $38 million got it done, and it was quite an exciting moment as these things go.

Clay wasn’t bad by any means in his first three years, catching at least 49 passes for 500 yards in each of those season. But by Year Four, the honeymoon was over. Clay only caught 21 passes for 184 yards. It was hard for the Bills to justify that sort of salary for that sort of production, and Clay was released. He had 18 catches for Arizona in 2019.

Let’s hear what he sounds like on the field:

(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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