Buffalo built a fortress on offense and let its entire defense walk out the door this offseason
Updated
The video that made the rounds this offseason was not a highlight. It was a graphic, a simple list of names, and every one of them was a Buffalo defender who is no longer employed by the Bills. Tre'Davious White. Taron Johnson. Jordan Poyer. Joey Bosa. A.J. Epenesa. Matt Milano. Shaq Thompson. DaQuan Jones. Cam Lewis. Nine of the sixteen men who played the most defensive snaps in Orchard Park last season are gone, and that single fact is the story of this team's projection. It is the reason our model looks at a roster with a top four offense and still comes away calling Buffalo a team that finishes under water.
Let us be fair to the good half first, because the good half is very good. Josh Allen is Josh Allen. He threw for 4,224 yards and 29 touchdowns a season ago, and when we ran the simulations he sits at the controls of an offense our grades place fourth in the entire league. He does not do it alone anymore either. DJ Moore projects for 89 catches and 1,124 yards as a genuine number one on the outside. Dalton Kincaid remains a matchup nightmare at tight end and comes back for 42 receptions and five scores. Khalil Shakir is the reliable chain mover underneath. James Cook is a legitimate lead back who tore off nearly 1,800 scrimmage yards and a dozen touchdowns last year and runs behind a line that our model trusts. This is not a one man band. This is a deep, balanced, dangerous group, and nothing about the projection questions a snap of it.
The questions are all on the other side of the ball, and they are not small ones. Buffalo did not adjust its defense this offseason. It demolished it and started over. Consider what actually left. White was the team's most trusted coverage corner. Johnson was the nickel who lived in the slot on early downs. Poyer patrolled the deep middle. Bosa and Epenesa combined for a real chunk of the pass rush. Milano and Thompson were the linebackers who could actually run and cover. Jones plugged the middle. That is not depth walking out the door. That is the spine of a defense.
What replaces them is young and unproven. Rookie corners and reclamation projects now man the outside, a pair of safeties who grade poorly in coverage sit on the back end, and an aging Bradley Chubb is asked to carry an edge rotation that lost its best pieces. When we ran the simulations the result was exactly what you would expect. Our model ranks this defense 28th in the league, and the points allowed number swells well past what Buffalo surrendered a year ago. A secondary that cannot cover turns every capable quarterback into a problem, and the schedule is going to send a parade of capable quarterbacks to town.
That schedule deserves its own paragraph, because it compounds everything. The division games are the same as always, two apiece against Miami, New England and the Jets. It is the rest of the slate that got heavier. Gone are the soft touches. In their place Buffalo drew Denver, Detroit, the Rams, Green Bay and Minnesota, a murderer's row of playoff hopefuls. The opponents on this year's card project noticeably tougher than the group the Bills fattened up on last season. A weak defense is bad enough. A weak defense against a hard schedule is how you turn a contender into a coin flip every Sunday.
There is a quieter subplot buried in all of this, and it is the state of the division around them. Buffalo has owned the AFC East for years, and the throne felt permanent. It does not feel permanent anymore. New England has quietly assembled a defense our grades rank in the top ten and handed it to a young quarterback on the rise. Miami and the Jets both have the pieces to steal a game or two. When we ran the season, the division that used to be a formality turned into a fight, and a Buffalo team that once cleared it by three or four games now has to scrap for every inch of it. The margin for error that a dominant defense used to provide is simply gone.
So where does that leave the number. The market has seen this roster and shrugged, pricing Buffalo as a ten and a half win team, because the market is buying Allen and the brand and betting that greatness at quarterback papers over everything else. Our model, holding the roster and the grades in the same hand, cannot stack the wins that high. When we ran the season, the Bills spent far too many afternoons in track meets they could not win, scoring in the twenties and thirties and still losing because the defense could not get a stop when it mattered. The projection lands them well below the market, and the direction of that call is one we stand behind. Buffalo is not the AFC East lock the betting number implies, and anyone treating them like one is paying for a defense that no longer exists.
We will be honest about the one place our own math runs hot, because a top four offense should be worth more than the bottom of the standings even with a broken defense. There is a real path where Allen refuses to lose, where he drags a green secondary to merely mediocre through sheer force of will and a stack of fourth quarter comebacks, and Buffalo claws back toward eight or nine wins. He has authored that kind of season before, and betting against him personally has never paid. But the honest read of what our model was handed is stark. This is an elite offense bolted onto a bottom five defense, playing a brutal schedule, with a defensive depth chart full of names most fans could not pick out of a lineup. That is not a team you pencil into January. That is a team fighting all year to keep its head above the surface, and Josh Allen deserves a whole lot better than the group standing behind him.
