Buffalo Rumblings
For three straight Januarys, the Buffalo Bills have lost because their defense couldn’t produce enough game-changing plays on the biggest stage — no sack, no strip, no pick, no stop with the season on the line. The offense kept manufacturing chances and the defense, despite solid stretches in some of those games, never could fully do its job.
The lack of playmaking from the defensive backfield was surely one of the reasons.
Since Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer aged out of their primes, safety in Buffalo has been a revolving door of stopgaps — Taylor Rapp, Damar Hamlin, a parade of one-year veterans. PFF graded the 2024 tandem of Hamlin and Rapp 42nd and 45th out of 55 safeties who logged at least 700 snaps. The Bills’ former head coach, Sean McDermott, refused to allow his rookie second-round pick to get valuable playing time and learn from his mistakes on the field early in the season, preferring to keep patching the position instead of solving it.
The 2025 season showed the fix is already on the roster. He’s entering year three, and his name is Cole Bishop.
January 26, 2025. AFC Championship Game in Arrowhead. Taylor Rapp was ruled out with back and hip injuries, and a rookie second-round pick who’d played roughly a third of the defensive snaps all year gets thrown into his first career playoff start against Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
The Bills lost that game 32-29. You know that. What got buried under the heartbreak is that Bishop led the entire defense with 10 tackles and produced a fourth-down stop on a Mahomes throw to Rashee Rice that handed the ball back to Buffalo’s offense. On the biggest stage of his life, against the team that has authored most of this franchise’s nightmares, the rookie was arguably the best defender the Bills put on the grass, even after a tough season, stuck behind limited veterans.
That’s a 21-year-old refusing to blink in the exact moment that has swallowed more experienced Bills whole. I filed it away as a flash. A year later, it looks more like a preview. Big things ahead, and he certainly should have played more before.
One playoff start can be waved off as a fluke. Kaiir Elam had looked good in a playoff game against Miami before and it didn’t end well. However, a full season can’t. And 2025 was a nice step in the right direction.
Bishop went from a rotational rookie to a full-time starter, appearing in all 17 regular-season games and leading the Bills in both total tackles and interceptions — 85 tackles, three picks, seven passes defensed, and two sacks. His PFF overall grade jumped from a forgettable 52.0 as a rookie to a 70.7 in 2025, which ranked 24th among 98 qualified safeties. His coverage grade of 73.7 landed 16th at the position.
But the season-long numbers actually undersell how good he was...
