Buffalo Rumblings
Last week, we went over the Buffalo Bills offensive roster with this same exercise. This piece will follow the same methodology, which will be repeated below:
Every fanbase thinks their team is better now than it was last year at this time.
Their favorite team (likely) added draft picks. They (likely) added free agents. Those people they lost to free agency? They were losers anyway. They certainly weren’t worth the contracts they signed elsewhere. If a player got traded away, it’s addition by subtraction. Even if the team isn’t better on paper, surely a coaching change will mean that the carryover players will perform better this year than they have recently. Almost regardless of how we felt in Feburary, March, and April, by the time June 1st rolls around, almost everyone capable of hopium-based mood swings is in full optimism mode.
But strictly on a player-in, player-out basis, are the Bills legitimately better right now than they were on June 1st of 2025? Owner Terry Pegula pretty clearly laid out in his media availability this winter that he believed the team had a great roster and needed better coaching, outlining his methodology for firing previous head coach Sean McDermott. How good is that roster he’s banking on versus the way it was at this time last year? Let’s go position room by position room and see how the 6/1/2026 Bills match up to the 6/1/2025 Bills. Important for this exercise: it does not assume development from any player. Just because you have young players on your team does not mean that linear growth is guaranteed and that they’ll be better in year two or three than they were in years one or two. Having cornerback Maxwell Hairston in 2025 and Maxwell Hairston in 2026 is a net neutral in this conversation (we all remember former first-round cornerback Kaiir Elam not taking a step forward in development in year two); trying to guess which players will develop positively and which will plateau or take a step backwards is not the purpose of this piece.
Each position room will be categorized with one of the following labels, using only a “player talent added minus player talent subtracted” opinion calculation. We’ll keep a point total running in our heads and we’ll add up the net additions and subtractions at the end of the exercise.
Significantly improved (+3 points)
Moderately improved (+2 points)
Slightly improved (+1 point)
Push (no points added or subtracted)
Slightly impaired (-1 point)
Moderately impaired (-2 points)
Significantly impaired (-3 points)
There are numerous ways to slice this information. You could look at the roster as a whole. You could isolate just the starting lineup. You could slice either of those views into offense/defense.
You could also go by “role” and apply weighting (the most weight to a starting quarterback, the least weight to a 53rd man who’s inactive on game days), but that injects two additional layers of subjectivity into an already-subjective piece (one for the definition of a...
