Buffalo Rumblings
There’s so much no one knows about the Buffalo Bills in 2026, especially so when it comes to the defense. Yet even within that, the way in which people have viewed new Bills defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard’s desire to employ a pressure-packed, attack-style unit may not flesh out as expected. That’s perhaps twofold.
It’s true that it could take some time for things to gel in year one under Leonhard and the coaching staff. There’s the need to educate holdovers from Sean McDermott’s tenure. Then there are the newcomers via free agency and those players selected in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Despite all that still left to answer, all anyone wants to know right now is what Buffalo’s defense will look like this coming season. It’s a fair question as the first major change to that side of the ball in almost a decade. It’s also fair to wonder what Leonhard brings to the table as a first-time NFL defensive coordinator.
Prior to joining the Bills as a coach, Leonhard variously held the roles of assistant head coach/defensive back coach/and passing game coordinator during the 2024 and 2025 NFL seasons with the Denver Broncos. But he was never tasked with calling Denver’s defense.
The last time Leonhard called a defensive system was in 2022 as defensive coordinator for Wisconsin’s football team. It’s there where NFL writer and analyst Doug Farrar chose to dig in to find out more about what Leonhard may bring to the Bills’ table. What he found, and shared with Chris Brown and Steve Tasker during a recent segment of “One Bills Live” provided some interesting insight.
It’s true that Leonhard has never called an NFL defense, has never been a defensive coordinator at the professional level. It’s also the case that Leonhard hasn’t done either of those things at any level since the 2022 college football season with Wisconsin. Yet interestingly, Leonhard may have been way ahead of the curve.
Farrar noted that “the last two teams that won (the Super Bowl) created massive confusion for the opposing quarterback without blitzing.” He sees this as the big trend for NFL defenses moving forward, and see much of the same ideas in Leonhard’s scheme from 2022. For many, what follows below from Farrar’s assessment of Leonhard’s work as a college DC may provide the first real glimpse of what’s coming to the Bills’ defense.
“Players and defensive coaches right now, the overarching things with modern defense is that everything has to be connected to everything else: front, ‘backers, coverage. However you wanna line it up play to play — that’s the only way this post-snap movement, whether it’s stunts at the line, disguised coverage.”
“It was really fascinating to me to see how many current NFL concepts (Leonhard) was using five years ago in college. This was a lot of four-man fronts, but a lot of stunts. I mean, he ran hundreds of different,...
