By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Mitch Morse – Signed by the Bills in 2019

When Mitch Morse agreed to join the Bills as a free agent before the 2019 season, it didn’t have the biggest impact among the signings on the fans that year. That was reserved for a pair of wide receivers. Centers are rather anonymous as football players go. Still, Morse had the biggest impact on the Bills’ finances.

Morse was a second-round pick of the Chiefs from Missouri in 2015. He was a starter on the offensive line from Day One, and stayed there for his four years on the team. Morse offered plenty of size at 6-foot-6, 305 pounds, and the Bills had been looking for a worthy replacement for Eric Wood for a while. It took $44.5 million over four years, but Morse became a Bill. At the time he was the highest-paid center in history.

It’s obviously very early to evaluate Morse’s career in Buffalo, but we can safely say he’s off to a good start. After suffering a preseason concussion, Morse played all 16 regular-season games in 2019. Meanwhile, the Bills’ offensive line did take a good-sized step forward. It’s tough to say if he’ll live up to that contract, but he certainly has a chance to move up this list.

(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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