Greg Rousseau is becoming a huge win for age-related draft analysis.
Even after sitting out his second season at the University of Miami due to COVID, the Buffalo Bills selected Rousseau with one of the final picks in the first round of the 2021 NFL Draft just a few weeks after his 21st birthday.
He was one of the youngest players in that draft, and surprisingly was able to shoulder a full-time workload as a rookie at defensive end.
Since then, he’s been a steady yet mostly unspectacular edge rusher
in Buffalo. His regular-season pressure rate has hovered between 14.0% and 14.9%. Quite impressive, really.
That is until the first two games of 2026 within Jim Leonhard’s scheme. Rousseau’s pressure rate is a massive 23.1% entering Week 3, and he already has four sacks on the year, matching his rookie-year total and just one shy of the five he accumulated as a 23-year-old in 2023.
Just 26 years old, Rousseau has probably just entered the the prime of his career, and he’s already played 3,507 snaps — counting playoffs — in his NFL career. Along the way, he’s learned a variety of ways to collapse the pocket, work around tackles, and track the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage.
Like on his first sack of the season, a strip-sack of C.J. Stroud in the first quarter of opening weekend against the Texans, watch how he swiped away the chipping tight end, then worked back to the inside as he felt the quarterback stepping into the pocket.
Textbook. The clean, around-the-corner wins are flashy. The big-time sack producers understand how to follow the quarterback as he glides around in the pocket.
The game-sealing sack late in the fourth quarter was a tremendous display of his maturity rushing the quarterback. Against the impossibly large and lengthy Trent Brown, Rousseau used an inside-arm stab before climbing around Brown’s outside shoulder before getting his right arm on the football as Stroud unsuccessfully attempted to evade the rush again.
That play was a fine example of why length matters along the defensive line. Not only to establish first contact at the point of attack… but to have the reach to get your hands on the football once you enter the pocket.
Right when Rousseau has the offensive tackles thinking he’s a lanky-ish, finesse rusher… he can deploy a nasty straight-arm bull rush, like he did hear against the typically serviceable swing tackle Larry Borom.
His second sack against the Lions was the byproduct of bad offensive schematics from the Lions — as Rousseau was left with a tight end on him in pass pro.
Obviously, Rousseau quickly worked through the tight end and forced another fumble on a sack.
Referencing yesterday’s article on Buffalo’s pass rush converting pressures to sacks at a much higher clip than at any stage of the Sean McDermott era, Rousseau is a key aspect of that.
Rousseau entered this season with a career 14.6% pressure-to-sack rate himself, and only in 2023 was that single-season rate higher than 15% — it was 21.4%.
Thus far in the 2026 campaign, Rousseau has four sacks on 16 pressures, good for a 25% pressure-to-sack rate in Leonhard’s new scheme.
By year No. 6 in the NFL, we almost always know precisely who a player is.
But at his age, Rousseau has ample experience and really is entering the peak physical timeframe of his professional career. And, this season, he looks well on his way to realizing all the upside that was a key element of his draft profile all the way back in 2021.
