Buffalo Bills No. 1 draft choice Aaron Maybin is expected to be a contractual holdout when

the team opens training camp Saturday.

If negotiating trends of recent years hold, Maybin could miss a week or more, and several

other picks might be absent for the camp's start.

The reason is the Bills open camp a week early this year, and that is making it harder for

the team's top draft picks to negotiate deals in time for the first practices.

The Bills will be the first team in the NFL to open training camp to both rookies and

veterans this summer. The Bills get to open early because they are one of two teams in the

league that will play an extra preseason game. The Bills meet the Tennessee Titans in the Pro

Football Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio, on Aug. 8. The Bills camp starts four days sooner

than every other team and a week sooner than some clubs.

The problem from a negotiations standpoint is most contract talks with first-round draft

picks go down to the wire of the opening of camp. There is a slotting process in rookie

contract negotiations, with every player generally getting a little bit more than the player

taken behind him and a little bit less than the player taken directly in front of him.

The Bills and the agents for their top picks have few comparisons to draw upon this week,

since only two first-round picks and four second-round picks were signed as of Wednesday

evening. The Bills' chief negotiator, Senior Vice President of Football Administration Jim

Overdorf, is under more deadline pressure than normal. Contractual comparisons are important

because teams want to strike the best deal possible, and agents use the contract terms they

negotiate in recruiting future draft clients.

Fifth-round pick Nic Harris on Wednesday became the third of the Bills' eight draftees to

sign a deal. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Harris started 37 of 51 games at Oklahoma and ranks sixth in Sooners history among

defensive backs with 233 tackles (143 solo) and 12th with 21 pass break-ups. The 6-foot-2,

232-pounder earned First-Team All-Big Twelve Conference honors from the league's coaches in

2007 and 2008.

Previously signed were seventh-rounder Ellis Lankster and sixth-rounder Cary

Harris.

The Bills typically have not set the market in recent years by signing players earlier than

the other players taken around them. In 2006, Donte Whitner missed the first eight days of

camp. In 2007, Marshawn Lynch signed the night before camp opened. Last year, Leodis McKelvin

signed on the second day of camp, although he was one of the last first-rounders to finalize

his deal. All of those camp openings, of course, came a week later on the NFL calendar than

this year's camp.

Beside Maybin, the other unsigned Bills rookies are first-rounder Eric Wood,

second-rounders Jairus Byrd and Andy Levitre and fourth-rounder Shawn Nelson.

The agent for Maybin is Joel Segal. Last year he had two No. 1 picks — Kansas City's

Glenn Dorsey and Tennessee's Chris Johnson — and both of their deals got done at the

"league-wide wire" — by the first day of their team's camps.

The challenge for the Bills this year is the league-wide wire is six or seven days into

their training camp.