The Bills are getting heavy — and crushing people

Joe Brady has built the league's most idiosyncratic offense by consistently putting an extra lineman on the field

When Josh Allen first got really rolling in 2020, the football collective (rightly) tossed flowers at Brian Daboll’s feet.

Allen’s growth from a scattershot, inconsistent passer in college to a scattershot, inconsistent passer in the pros and then on to a ruthless destroyer of worlds remains one of the most remarkable development stories in recent league history – a trajectory that has forever altered how teams evaluate college quarterbacks.

Daboll tapped into Allen’s skill set by running a super-spread offense, deloading the box and getting as many eligibles out, as often as possible, early in the route. Buffalo ramped up its average formation width to the highest in the league, ensuring there were enough options spread across the field to take advantage of Allen’s arm talent and add a natural distance between everyone (defenders and receivers) to increase Allen’s margin for error. Such a spread setup offset some early Allen concerns, reducing the blitz and pressure menu defenses could bring to the party, and forcing them into generic, base, zone looks that allowed Allen to eat.

It was essentially Daboll’s offense from his year with Alabama, when he took the great and good that Lane Kiffin had installed in Tuscaloosa in 2014 – with traditional concepts from Daboll’s Patriots days slathered on top.

It was electric. Allen caught fire. Pairing those spread looks with Allen’s downhill running and off-script magic helped turn a hit-or-miss prospect into football’s version of the atom bomb.

After last season’s playoff failure, though, everything was on the table for Buffalo’s offense. Joe Brady was named the full-time coordinator in the offseason. He had already started to overhaul the group in the middle of last season after Ken Dorsey was fired midseason. Dorsey’s offense was — by the metrics — fine. But Brady ruthlessly ripped apart large chunks of the structure anyway once he was handed the keys. Initially, that meant an uptick in the team’s RPO rate, motion and shift rates, how often the Bills ran the ball, and how the team ran the ball (upping the volume of gap-scheme runs), focusing more on the run and then drizzling creative play-action shots on top of those new run designs.

Still: it was fair to wonder which way the Bills would pivot with Brady installed full-time. Brady was the architect of the greatest offense in college football history back at LSU, relying on a stupidly talented roster (Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson hahahaha) and a small volume of plays and pre-snap looks. Once in the NFL, Brady adapted, broadening his scheme. But it was still unclear what direction he would move in Buffalo once he was paired with Allen full-time, with a full offseason to install just his stuff. Would they return to those super-spread ways, finding a way to balance a receiving corps with overlapping skill sets? How would Brady blend the skills of Khalil Shakir, Keon Coleman, Dawson Knox and Dalton Kincaid, a group of receiving options at their best aligned in the slot, slightly detached from the formation? Was Allen precise enough to play in a more condensed offense, with fewer options available early in the route? If they moved to that style, would it play into Allen’s penchant for hero ball, washing out early options with Allen holding onto the ball seeking strikes down the field, returning the Bills to the fractured boom-or-bust approach that has sunk earlier playoff bids? And even if they did become a congested group, how would they be able to maximize their top-receiving threats without a middle-of-the-field, in-breaking savant like Stefon Diggs?

Brady’s response: bleep all of that.

Brady and the Bills have hit on the league’s most idiosyncratic offense this season — running neck-a-neck with the Commanders in the funkiness-meets-success sweepstakes. Through 13 weeks, they’re second in the league in EPA/play and tied for sixth in rush success rate. Allen is at the top of whichever MVP power poll you check. The Bills are frontrunners in the AFC. Undeniably, whatever they’re doing has been a success.

Stylistically, there has been a bit of everything. They are a big, powerful team, relying on the run game to trigger shot plays. But there are still doses of the super-spread paired with the RPO sweetness that Brady has relied on throughout his coaching career. On any given week, they can toggle to what is required. Some weeks, they rely on Allen to shift the box count as a downhill runner in the quarterback-option game; other weeks, the investment is not worth the downside, and so Allen takes off only when peeling away from the pocket like a Giraffe let loose from the Buffalo Zoo.

But what stands out above all is how heavy the Bills have been this season.

And we’re not talking here about 12 personnel usage or sticking a fullback on the field — things that have trickled up and down throughout Allen’s time in Buffalo. With Dawson Knox and Dalton Kincaid, the Bills 12 personnel package is not a true two-tight end set — and defenses do not treat it as such. They’re receivers first, with Knox proving to be a talented split-flow blocker but not exactly an in-line mauler. That was always a concern with pairing the two together; was it worth sticking both on the field to gain the perceived advantage of 12 personnel (the defense gets into its base look with an extra linebacker on the field you can target in coverage) if the defense doesn’t buy either of them as in-line blockers who can help drive the defensive front off the ball? Probably not — at least not in the typical way.

Buffalo’s beef instead comes from planting an extra linemen on the field. Some 16% of the Bills’ offense this season has come with an extra lineman on the field – and that figure has ticked up to 18% (!) in the past three weeks, a figure partly inflated due to the Snow Bowl in week 13. But the path for that performance against the Niners was charted throughout the season.

The Bills are in a different stratosphere from the rest of the league when it comes to their usage and the effectiveness of planting an extra lineman on the field.

Turn on any Bills game, and you will see backup center Alec Anderson trotting onto the field to align as a pseudo right tackle/tight end. The Bills have run 116 snaps this season with an extra lineman, almost twice as much as the second-closest team in the league (the Broncos). No team subsumes as much as their offense to six linemen sets – few are as wedded to their third or fourth grouping as a percentage of their offense.

Check the calendar: Is it 2024? Is Josh Allen still the Buffalo’s quarterback?!?!

We are used to seeing six linemen on the field in short-yardage situations or close to the goal line. But the Bills are rolling back the clock some 50 years in using six linemen as a base element of their offense all over the field. It’s, like, their thing.

What’s interesting, though, is how they’re using those sets – and why. On 83% of their six-linemen groupings, the Bills are motion or shifting to alter the look pre-snap. But they only get to two general run concepts. It’s Duo or wide-zone (or outside) zone. That’s it. That’s the whole list. They have run only one counter design with extra meat on the field this season. There has been one trap play. But 55% of the runs have been of the ‘man’ blocking variety, big on big, with wide-zone serving as the go-to change-up.

Traditionally, when a team brings an extra hat to the backfield or line of scrimmage, it’s to add an extra gap to the front. By adding a gap, they can, hey presto, get to a wider variety of gap-scheme runs – pulling or moving a lineman with a running back attacking a designated gap. You get the lead stretch stuff, but you’re adding an extra hat so that you can get to those gap-oriented runs, particularly when you have a quarterback who can run downhill, which adds another gap to the equation. The Bills don’t. They put bigger bodies on the field and just mash people.

Brady and the Bills are not interested in the fancy nonsense. They want to dent the defensive front straight-ahead, moving a body or two around pre-snap to overload a point along the line of scrimmage. And from there, they’re getting to their play-action shots or offering Allen easy outs in the passing game based on the alignment of the defense.

It’s part of the ongoing move across the league (the Bengals aside) to get to traditional ‘two back’ stuff without planting an extra back on the field. That has more often come with a tight end, a receiver (see Cooper Kupp and Robert Woods with the Rams during the early McVay era), or a hybrid full back/tight end taking on the second back responsibilities. It funks with the box count, making it tricky for the defense to match their personnel and fronts. They’re all so terrified of the dropback game and the play-action world that they want to stay light, meaning an offense that can maul away with smaller bodies can manufacture pops down the field more easily, given that they don’t have to shift their personnel grouping and tip what’s coming based on who is in the huddle.

Trying to be as un-siloed (is that a word?) is the name of the game.

But given their roster, the Bills opted to replace the fullback element of two-back football with a lineman. It’s different. It’s distinctive. It’s fun!

And… it works. Huzzah!

With an extra lineman on the field, the Bills are averaging 5.5 yards per play, and have averaged 10.46 (!) yards per pass attempt. For context, the best offense in the league this season by yards per play (the Ravens) averages 6.3 yards per play.

It’s, obviously, a smaller sample size than a full offense (though not small compared to other formations, groupings, or specific alignments or concepts) but the Bills’ six-linemen set would be enough to put them 9th in the league compared to entire offenses (which just so happens to be where they sit anyway), and their passing game would be outpacing the league by more than four yards. They’ve been efficient and explosive — the Holy Grail. From those looks, they’ve popped 16 explosive runs and nine explosive pass plays.

Early in the season, the Bills were super-duper heavy: running out a sixth lineman with two tight ends on the field. Few other offenses can match that, because they don’t have the luxury of tight ends with the receiving chops of Kincaid and Knox. With three bigger bodies on the field, Buffalo would bait defenses with the run before engineering easy chunks to Kincaid or Knox down the seam or jutting across the field. It was — as people now like to say — easy offense. But easy offense thanks to a difficult initial plan: slamming the ball into the line of scrimmage on the ground (Hey, is the run game still valuable? Asking for friends.)