With Labor Day approaching, there are 3,352 individual snaps from players on last season’s Buffalo Bills defense who are currently unsigned.
Those snaps came from eight players; Tre White, Joey Bosa, Matt Milano, Jordan Poyer, DaQuan Jones, Taylor Rapp, Jordan Phillips, and Larry Ogunjobi,
I don’t know how often this happens in the NFL, but I assume this type of occurrence is more normal than it originally seems. Having written that, I would bet eight players who played more than 200 snaps (out of 20) on a team that eventually advanced to the divisional round of the playoffs not being on an NFL roster by September 1 the following year is darn rare.
This has been something Bills fans — and media — have been tracking for a while this offseason, and justifiably so.
Everyone has their own take on what it means, and I don’t necessarily think there’s a correct answer either.
Does it clearly show the Bills defensive roster wasn’t good enough last season? Does it demonstrate Sean McDermott got a lot out of the personnel he had? Or, the least discussed, least controversial, and simplest conclusion — does it mean the Bills 2025 defense featured a rather large collection of rosterable players who just so happened to be in the final year of the league deeming they were rosterable?
I tend to lean with the latter, and while I can get slightly on board with the idea that McDermott and Co. got the best out of those veterans, we can’t forget the defense was 13th in EPA allowed per play, which included being 7th in EPA per drop back and 31st in EPA per rush (non-garbage time). Plus, it did allow 33 points in the divisional-round loss.
But I’m not here to harp on that playoff game now.
I want to ask you — what do you think those 2025 Bills defenders not being on an NFL roster today indicates?
