The Buffalo Bills need to be as careful with Keon Coleman as I will be writing this article.
Coleman is starting to understand his on-field shortcomings and how to work around them to become an asset to the Buffalo Bills passing game.
His 116-yard performance in Week 4’s loss to the Patriots was the second-highest yardage total to date in his NFL career — behind a 134-yard performance I frankly don’t have much recollection of in a 34-10 throttling of the Titans at home in 2024.
After Week 4, Coleman’s
yards-per-route-run figure of 2.38 is nearly double what it was a season ago, and he’s hauled in two of his three contested-catch opportunities in the first month of the season. Contested-catch win rate isn’t particularly sticky from season to season or week to week. But winning more of those opportunities than he loses — even this early — is a step in the right direction for someone who’s hovered between 30-40% dating back to the 2023 campaign at Florida State.
But Coleman is still not separating at a regular clip.
Has he shown slightly better releases against press off the line of scrimmage?
Yes.
Is he ever going to be a consistent man-coverage winner in the NFL? Most likely not.
Now, success at receiver in today’s NFL isn’t strictly dictated by separation ability against man coverage.
There’s more that goes into playing the position well, but either the natural athletic talent to spring yourself free from coverage or the refined skilled to allow you to do so remains king.
What I’ve noticed with Coleman early in Year 3 is that he’s finally understanding how to get open and “stay open” against zone. He’s not running through voids in coverage. He’s processing said coverage faster, and it’s clicking faster in his mind that he might actually already be open in some stages of the route. Also, he’s seemingly getting that some creativity in the route is often needed to either get open or stay open for Josh Allen.
The NFL moves at a ridiculously fast pace. Two weeks ago, Joe Brady was the toast of the town in Buffalo for his offensive ingenuity. Now many Bills fans think his offense is stagnant and predictable. I even wrote a critique-based column on the Bills needing to get back to their tight-end heavy ways of Weeks 1 and 2. For the record, I don’t think Brady is suddenly calling a dull and easy-to-defend offense.
But one indisputably smart wrinkle from Brady pertains to Coleman entering Week 5.
Brady is deploying Coleman more in the slot and in-line (essentially attached to the line of scrimmage) than ever before.
Through four games, Coleman has run 16.5% of his routes from the slot and 6.8% of his routes in-line. Combined that’s 23.3%
As a rookie, Coleman appeared in the slot + in-line on 10.8% of his routes. Last year, that figure was 18.7% in the regular season and sunk to 2.4% in the playoffs.
And even when Coleman has been the “outside” receiver in this offense, Brady has increased the tight-split look before the snap, essentially giving Coleman slot-esque positioning. As a rookie and in 2025, Coleman ran routes on the outside from those reduced splits — closer to the offensive tackle — around 35% of the time in both seasons.
Through four games, those instances are up to 50.9%, per Fantasy Points Data.
In short, Brady is providing Coleman more room to operate based on pre-snap alignment alone. That’s precisely what he needs to be maximized as a large-body, athletic-but-not-twitchy weapon at the intermediate level and down the field.
And here’s where the Bills have to be careful.
They have to stick with the curated deployment of Coleman. Just because he’s fresh off a 100-yard performance does not mean he’s now ready to move into a classic X or Z role, staying mostly stagnant near the sideline. He’s not suddenly ready to win against more man coverage and safeties more regularly over the top.
He can’t become a target-magnet either. And as long as DJ Moore is healthy, I really don’t believe he will be.
The Bills tried this type of experiment with former stud WR4 Gabe Davis. They moved him to an elevated pass-game role, and it didn’t work. He couldn’t get open nearly as much as he needed to.
Coleman is still young — only 23 — but the Bills should have a reasonably good sense of who he is as a receiver and who he isn’t.
He’s undoubtedly growing as a player, his skills are sharpening, and Brady appears to understand an optimal way to use him on the field.
To continue Coleman’s growth, regardless of who’s healthy, who’s not, or who the Bills are playing, they need to continue to stay on this new track for his specific utilization.
