Buffalo Bills

The Buffalo Bills would like everyone to believe that they're a team on the rise. Sure, they started the 2010 regular season with eight straight losses, but that 0-8 record became 4-4 over the second half of the season. The young Bills gave playoff teams like Baltimore, Kansas City, Chicago and Pittsburgh big-time scares, and the team was generally much more competitive once their ducks were in a row.

The Buffalo Bills are banking on first-round pick Marcell Dareus, a defensive lineman out of Alabama, to help improve the team's league-worst run defense that surrendered 170 rushing yards per game (which, remarkably, was only 14 more yards per game than in 2009). Dareus will likely start at defensive end, joining Kyle Williams and Dwan Edwards up front in the team's evolving 3-4 defense.

Of course, in selecting Dareus to help shore up the run defense, the Buffalo Bills passed on a few intriguing quarterback prospects, meaning that the Bills are Ryan Fitzpatrick's team for the foreseeable future. The hope is that Chan Gailey can better harness the offensive talent around Fitzpatrick so that he can replicate his success in his first four games in 2010 (11-4 TD-INT ratio), and improve on his play in his final nine games (12-11 TD-INT ratio). Fitzpatrick won't have competition for the job, so the 28-year-old Harvard product will enter a season as his team's unquestioned starter for the first time since his senior season in college.

After the 2011 NFL Draft, Executive Vice President and General Manager Buddy Nix finally executed a long-anticipated overhaul of his scouting department, promoting former Steelers executive Doug Whaley to Assistant GM and Director of Player Personnel, and importing Tom Gibbons (Director of Pro Personnel) and Chuck Cook (Director of College Scouting) from outside organizations. It's the first time the team has had a coherent vision in its football department since Tom Donahoe ran the operation.