ORCHARD PARK - Winning the game was obviously the primary goal, and the Buffalo Bills achieved that last Sunday in Houston, but Jim Leonhard pulled no punches regarding how his first game as an NFL defensive coordinator went.
“I think it was awesome to get a win, find a way to close it out,” he said. “I love the way we started, obviously, creating a turnover and then finishing it out with a big turnover. There was a lot of ugly in between there.”
That’s putting it mildly.
The Texans rolled up 26 first downs, partly because the Bills - as was a problem last season under Sean McDermott - were not good on the possession downs as Houston converted 9 of 18 third- and fourth-down situations, a 50% success rate that is untenable moving forward. And the defense
committed five penalties that gifted Houston first downs, two of those coming on third-down plays, and Houston had 10 plays of 12 yards or more.
“Excited for the play style,” Leonhard said. “The energy was there, the effort was there, the detail has got to get better. Not up to the standards. But in a lot ways it did feel like Week 1 where when things started to unravel a little bit at times, or just feel a little bit off, I thought guys looked around like they weren't sure what the answer should be.”
This was to be expected as the Bills make the transition to Leonhard’s odd-man front defense. Everyone is playing in slightly different positions, learning new assignments and responsibilities and because so many of the front line players were either injured or barely played together in the preseason, mistakes - both mental and physical - were bound to happen.
“We’re going to be figuring our team out,” head coach Joe Brady said. “We like to think we have a pulse, but you’re still getting a feel of how to use guys offensively, defensively, special teams. We don’t get a lot of time to be able to talk about the game, so how do the guys learn from it and make sure the same mistakes don’t show up this week and we continue to grow as a football team?”
Leonhard admitted that he expected worse when he watched the tape. His initial read during the game was that things were going poorly, but upon review, there was also plenty to like.
“I left watching the tape going, ‘all right, we're closer, we're closer than it looked’ and I'm excited for where we're going,” he said. “There's going to be some bumps in the road. We have to improve. The standards are higher for what we want this defense to be and it's our job to get there. There's a lot of things I want back myself, as I'm sure some players want some snaps back. That's the fun part of this game, man, we get a chance to go do it again on Thursday.”
Here are a few other highlights from his press conference
The best players played a lot
Some of Leonhard’s personnel usage was certainly a departure from the previous Buffalo defense. He leaned heavily on Ed Oliver who played a whopping 82% of the snaps, Rousseau played 80%, and Bradley Chubb 80%, crazy high numbers for players who spent almost all their time at the line of scrimmage.
In McDermott’s defense, rotation was a big thing on the D-line and it was a lot if a player played 60% of snaps.
“Big picture, that's too many snaps,” Leonhard said. “They felt good, we had good communication with them where they wanted to roll. But big picture throughout the course of the season, we need more from that next wave of guys and we know that. That's something that will be addressed with them.”
Pass rush needed to be more consistent
The three sacks - two by Rousseau, one by Deone Walker - were nice, but Houston’s CJ Stroud had far too many dropbacks with too much time to scan the field. And what was certainly worrisome is that according to NextGenStats, Leonhard blitzed on 26.2% of Stroud’s dropbacks, yet the Bills had the lowest pressure success at 21.4% of any team in Week 1.
“They were able to play kind of on schedule,” Leonhard said of the Texans offense. “Run, boot, play actions, play ahead of the sticks. And when offenses are able to do that, they can create a pretty good rhythm. And even off schedule, he did a great job of getting the ball out of his hands on time.”
Leonhard said he scaled back the blitzing in the second half and tried to play more coverage because, “When we were pressuring in the pass game it didn't necessarily help us. I thought it was inconsistent because we didn't necessarily play as clean when we pressured. And they did a good job of playing on rhythm and on timing.”
According to Pro Football Focus, the Bills had 20 individual pressures, seven by Rousseau and four by Chubb, but the team's average time to pressure was clocked at 2.77 seconds which is average at best.
Rough day for Christian Benford
Buffalo’s secondary is already a bit suspect, so it really can’t afford Benford to have too many days like this one. He struggled terribly trying to cover Nico Collins and for the game, he was targeted a whopping 12 times and gave up eight completions for 85 yards and two TDs and also missed two tackles.
“He had some huge wins down the stretch, that was cool to see,” Leonhard said, referring to the end of the game when Benford looked more like the player everyone knows he is. “To pressure and to be more aggressive on first and second down, you're gonna have to win a one-on-one. And he won a couple on Nico late in the game. That was huge. If those don't happen, that game doesn't end the way it does. So for him to just kind of keep kicking and keep pushing, it was good to see how he finished as well.”
The Lions will present some problems
Leonhard is already into the Lions’ tape of their 31-30 overtime victory over the Saints, and the two players who stand out immediately are running back Jahmyr Gibbs and wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown. He knows his defense has to be better going against those two than they were against the Texans’ Collins and David Montgomery.
“With Gibbs, it all runs through him, the run game, the play action, the boots, like everything plays off of what he can do,” Leonhard said. “I think he touched the ball 34 times (Sunday). I mean, that's impressive for a guy his stature, to be able to do that.
“And obviously what they do with St. Brown and (tight end Sam) LaPorta, you put them in that same mix, now they added that weapon back of just consistently being able to move the sticks and play that intermediate game. And Jameson Williams being able to take the top off at any time. So they got some challenges. You have to know where they're at. It's difficult because there's four of them. They have that talent and they're spread all over the place. You have to understand where they are because such a unique skill set out of each one.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Bills' defense escaped Houston. Detroit may not be so forgiving
