How Bills will use loss to Chiefs to help shape offseason roster decisions

The Bills couldn’t have asked for much more on the road in the AFC Championship Game. They had the ball only down a field goal, with three timeouts and 3:33 remaining to come away with the game-winning touchdown. That touchdown could have catapulted them into the Super Bowl.

Instead, the drive was over after only six plays, and now the Bills’ season is over. The initial shock is starting to wear off, though the sting will remain as the Bills go into offseason planning mode. If past years are any indication, the final game of their season has a way of helping to shape how they go about building their roster for the upcoming year. And there is a lot of meat on the bone from their Sunday loss to the Chiefs.

After studying the Bills All-22 from their final game of the season, here’s what stood out.

Mostly hidden weaknesses were blown up, but they can inform offseason plans

If there was one thing that became abundantly obvious, it’s just how much, through coaching, the Chiefs exploited some of the deficiencies of the Bills’ roster and some flawed planning to deal with them. These wound up being many of the tiny edges the Chiefs used to help fuel yet another trip to the Super Bowl. And while it leaves the Bills at home one game shy of their goal, it can help direct them over the next few months of roster building. Four positions felt it more than the others.

Cornerback

One central inflection point came when the Bills lost top cornerback Christian Benford for the game due to his second concussion in as many weeks. It subbed out one of the best defenders on the roster the entire season in Benford for the lowest-graded player on the whole roster, Kaiir Elam. Until Benford’s injury, the Bills had played zone coverage on 71.4 percent of the seven Chiefs dropbacks — a standard rate for their usual operating procedure.

It was a downgrade in performance and forced the Bills to pivot, likely trying to accomplish two things to give their defense a fighting chance. First, given Elam’s struggles in their usual zone-based defense, they tried to accentuate his strengths. He’s put together a handful of solid reps in a smaller sample size as a man-cover corner over three years and seems far more comfortable in those roles. Second, the Chiefs burned through the Bills’ zone coverage when Benford was in the game. They averaged 13.6 yards per dropback on five plays, including two scrambles by Patrick Mahomes. That’s opposed to allowing 4.5 yards per dropback in man coverage. So, the Bills and defensive coordinator Bobby Babich made a big switch through the rest of the game, hoping for the same results as the Ravens game.

But here’s the rub: the Bills ran man coverage only twice with Benford in the game, and Benford was the only reason they forced the incompletion on receiver Hollywood Brown to bring that per-dropback average down. Despite that, after Benford left the game, the Bills used man coverage on 50 percent of the Chiefs’ remaining dropbacks — a massive uptick from their 22.4 percent rate from the regular season. And the Chiefs were ready for it after seeing it on film from the previous game, armed with better, speedier receivers than the Ravens, and the Bills were down two members of their starting secondary.

After Elam entered the game, the Chiefs took off against man coverage. They targeted Elam repeatedly, and his confidence waned. When the Chiefs ran some pick plays targeting Elam, he got lost in traffic. There was a second-and-9 play where Xavier Worthy was lined up in front of Elam in man coverage, and Elam gave Worthy nearly 10 yards of cushion pre-snap. Mahomes quickly spotted it, Worthy ran a comeback to the sticks and had an easy completion. There was even a play later in the game when Elam was in press-man against JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Elam got himself crossed up, stumbled for the next two seconds and fell in coverage, allowing Smith-Schuster to be wide open over the middle of the field. That was on the Worthy catch that brought the Chiefs within the Bills’ five-yard line, and Elam went unnoticed because of the controversy around that catch and the defensive holding call on safety Damar Hamlin. On top of that, the team’s other starting cornerback, Rasul Douglas, a better zone defender than when he plays man coverage, struggled against the Chiefs receivers.

How bad was it? After Benford left the game, the Chiefs completed 11 of their 12 pass attempts against man coverage for 160 yards and Mahomes’ lone touchdown pass. Five of those 11 completed passes went for 15 or more yards. Three of them went for 20 or more yards. They averaged 13.3 yards per dropback. The Chiefs preyed on them in man coverage, using their speed and separation at wide receiver to their advantage and ran pick plays to enhance it further. Ironically, the other half of the time, the Bills were in zone coverage — what they had done all season, and the Bills allowed only 3.6 yards per dropback after Benford left the game. All five of Mahomes’ scrambles came against zone coverage, so that might have been part of their decision-making to keep on going with man coverage despite the results. But right from the moment Elam entered the game, man coverage was an overwhelming liability.

All of this is important because Douglas is a free agent and turns 31 in August. He’s no guarantee to be back next year. Elam has one year remaining on his rookie contract, but nothing about his showings throughout the 2024 season should make the Bills feel comfortable that he can step into a full-time starting role in 2025. Finding a cornerback to pair with Benford for the long term should be a focal point because everything over the last three years has shown Elam isn’t that player.

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Safety

Without top starter Taylor Rapp available for the game due to an injury, the top starting duo was Hamlin and rookie Cole Bishop. Bishop had some reps he’d want back and wasn’t a plus-player Sunday, but by far, he was the safety who trusted what he saw and was consistently in a better position to make plays and chip in with run support. He nearly came away with an interception because of how he read the play, too. One of the most significant pressure points of the defense that the Chiefs pressed was with Hamlin.

As the season progressed, Hamlin improved from where he began early in the year. But the Chiefs game yielded one of Hamlin’s worst showings of the season. The hesitance he played with early in the year returned, which helped expose some of his athletic flaws. And then, with the Bills playing as much man coverage as they did after Benford left the game, Hamlin was pressed into one-on-one coverage. That led to several opportunities with separation and even a defensive holding call against him. Lacking the versatility to vary up coverages in a successful manner is a difficult thing to overcome, which questions his place on the Bills roster moving forward.

Hamlin is a free agent as of March, while Rapp is signed for 2025, and Bishop is signed through 2027. Unless it was on a team-friendly deal with the understanding that Hamlin is the backup behind Rapp and Bishop, they might be better off allowing Hamlin to sign elsewhere and address the depth at safety in a different way.

Defensive end

The secondary deserves a hearty amount of the blame over what happened against Mahomes and the receivers, but the Bills didn’t get anywhere close to enough from the entire defensive end room. Greg Rousseau dominated in the Week 11 matchup with the Chiefs, but the opponents duped him on edge contain responsibilities, and he didn’t have the pass-rushing wins they needed. Rousseau had a pressure rate of 14.3 percent through the regular season and the first two rounds of the playoffs, but managed only one pressure on 29 opportunities (3.4 percent) against the Chiefs. Fellow starter A.J. Epenesa was barely better, securing a pressure rate of only five percent. While it was a one-off for Rousseau, it was a continuation for Epenesa, who had a pressure rate of only 5.8 percent before the AFC Championship Game. The Bills take him off the field on most obvious passing downs, which could be as good of an indicator as any.

Dawuane Smoot and Von Miller were on the field for fewer combined snaps than Epenesa. Smoot is an upcoming free agent, and the Bills can save nearly $8.4 million in cap space to move on from Miller this offseason. Meanwhile, both Rousseau and Epenesa are signed for only one more year. The Bills prefer not to make blitzing their identity and prefer to use it only as a tool to catch the opposition off guard at an opportune moment. They were near the bottom in the league in blitz rate for a reason. Given how they want to play defense, the lack of consistent pressure from the defensive ends could pave the way for some changes this offseason. It would not be surprising, in the slightest, if that became one of their top priorities.

Wide receiver

Even after an unstable start, the offense kept the Bills afloat and in a position for a spot in the Super Bowl right up until the end of the game. Most of that had to do with quarterback Josh Allen and running back James Cook. And while some of the Bills’ pass-catchers had their moments, it was quite clear how their lack of consistent separation impaired the Bills offense from being a consistent threat. Particularly outside of the numbers, receivers Amari Cooper, Keon Coleman and Mack Hollins didn’t get the separation they needed. Allen’s touchdown throw near the end of the first half to Hollins required an incredible pass to complete, as cornerback Trent McDuffie was in Hollins’ hip pocket the entire way.

That lack of separation outside the numbers helped influence some of the predictability from offensive coordinator Joe Brady. They found some success with a 17-yard screen to the outside with James Cook, and they proceeded to call a variation of an outside-the-numbers screen at the line of scrimmage six more times. Those next six attempts gained an average of 2.7 yards. That certainly doesn’t explain Brady’s refusal to go away from the tush push when the Chiefs knew Allen was looking to go left every time and kept winning the matchup to stop him. However, it does at least give some logic to calling as many screens as they did.

Although there are several needs on defense the Bills will need to address, what the Chiefs game showed is that the Bills are an asset shy of having a truly elite offensive environment. The quarterback, backfield and offensive line are all good. Tight end Dalton Kincaid should be improved with a full offseason to heal his knee injuries. But with Cooper and Hollins both upcoming free agents, finding a boundary receiver who can separate should be a priority target.

Players with 15 or fewer snaps:

WR Curtis Samuel (14), CB Christian Benford (12), FB Reggie Gilliam (11), IOL Alec Anderson (10), RB Ray Davis (9), DB Cam Lewis (5), LB Dorian Williams (4), TE Quintin Morris (4), QB Mitchell Trubisky (0), IOL Will Clapp (0), OT Tylan Grable (0), DE Javon Solomon (0), LB Joe Andreessen (0), LB Edefuan Ulofoshio (0), CB Ja’Marcus Ingram (0), S Kareem Jackson (0)

**Minimum 200 snaps

How the standards work

When the All-22 film becomes available, we’ll go through and watch every player on every play as many times as necessary to assess letter grades. It is a subjective analysis, and it’s important to note we do not know the play calls and full responsibilities. The grades stem from technique, effort and presumed liability.

The study accounts only for players who take a snap on offense or defense. Players with fewer than 15 snaps — unless they significantly impact the game — will not factor into weekly rankings. The grades range from an ‘A’ (a perfect 4.00 GPA) to ‘F’ (0.00 GPA). There is no such thing as an ‘A+’ in this grading system. Season-long grades will be tallied and documented, with a single game’s grade weighted based on how much the player was on the field in a given week.

(Top photo of Mack Hollins: Mark J. Rebilas / Imagn Images)