Bills enter season facing multiple question marks

The wave of hype and expectation that has regularly made its way through Buffalo in recent National Football League seasons is gone.

For now, the Bills are just one of those teams with great aspirations and a number of key question marks, following another year in which their Super Bowl hopes were dashed in January.

The Bills have reached the plateau achieved by a lot of teams in professional sports, a regular-season juggernaut but playoff disappointment, creating the feeling of being stuck at the same place over and over and over again.

But while the past few seasons have featured a Bills team with all the pieces apparently in place, this one comes with questions that could either derail the Bills’ hopes or extend their Super Bowl window into this season and beyond.

It starts with the offence, where the group of receivers around quarterback Josh Allen has undergone a complete remake from a season ago.

Gone are veterans Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis, the former being jettisoned via trade to Houston that cost the Bills a lot of dead cap money but appears to have cleared the air around One Bills Drive. Both had their limitations a year ago.

Davis, a player once seen as having a high ceiling for a fourth-round pick, levelled off during his third and fourth seasons in the NFL, going five games without a catch in 2024.

Diggs, meanwhile, suffered a precipitous drop off in production just as he was turning 30, including failing to hit 25 yards receiving in either of the Bills’ critical matchups with the rival Kansas City Chiefs – one in the regular season and one in the playoffs.

Add it all up and the Bills had clearly seen enough of two players who accounted for 44 per cent of Allen’s targets a year ago. Thus, the page was turned.

The Bills have five receivers on their roster to begin this season and only one of them – Khalil Shakir – has ever caught a pass from Josh Allen.

The good news is that he did so a better rate than any receiver in the entire NFL a year ago, hauling in 86  per cent of the 45 passes directed his way, and putting up more yards than Diggs during the final 10 games of the regular season despite being targeted 40 – 40! – fewer times.

Look for Shakir to get a big share of the 241 targets left behind by Diggs and Davis. The same goes for second-year tight end Dalton Kincaid, who quietly had one of the best rookie tight end seasons in NFL history by hauling in 73 passes for 673 yards. There’s a chance the Bills could become the latest team to make a tight end the primary focus on their passing attack.

There will also be an emphasis on involving rookie receiver Keon Coleman after the Bills traded out of the first round to take the Florida State product early in the second, and the big expectations that come with that.  

Defensively, the question marks are no less daunting than on offence, starting at the safety position.

For the past seven years, the Bills have enjoyed one of the NFL’s best safety tandems in Jordan Poyer and Micah Hyde. But the aging duo has moved on, with Poyer in Miami and Hyde contemplating retirement.

In their place, the Bills will begin with two backup safeties from last season in Taylor Rapp and Damar Hamlin, the latter of whom will make his first start this Sunday versus Arizona since suffering a cardiac arrest on the field at Cincinnati in January of 2023.

That event drew national attention and sent Hamlin on a journey of recovery, which included being active for five games a year ago as he leaned into the fear and anxiety he faced returning to the field.

With that behind him, he’ll try and hold off free agent Mike Edwards and second-round pick Cole Bishop, who both missed significant time during training camp with injuries.

Head coach Sean McDermott has a strong history of identifying and developing safeties, but the departure of Hyde and Poyer leaves a gigantic hole at the back of the defence.

So does the loss of linebacker Matt Milano, who is out until at least December after tearing his biceps during training camp. Arguably the Bills best overall defensive player, Buffalo will turn to second-year linebacker Dorian Williams to fill Milano’s place and hope that the payoff comes close to what happened a year ago when they turned a linebacker role over to then-second-year player Terrell Bernard.

Add it all up and you’ve got a Bills team with more questions than any in the Allen era.

Some of the answers will come quickly, with a Sunday home game to open the season followed by a trip to Miami to face the Dolphins four days later.

But as McDermott commented this week, he expects to learn things about this version of the Bills every single week, which is the nature of a team in transition.

The rest of the football world may have stopped projecting lofty goals on to this team, but the Bills have not.