I like to avoid low-hanging fruits, and the large, ripe, and colorful low-hanging fruit for this gameday column would be to wax poetic about the Buffalo Bills dealing with adversity for the first time this season after their loss to the Patriots in Week 4.
I’m going in a different direction.
Injuries are a frustrating, ubiquitous element of football, particularly in the NFL.
Sometimes, they force a team’s hand in the necessary direction.
There’ll be no Josh Palmer tonight against the Rams. Injured his
shoulder late in practice this week. Bills starting veteran slot cornerback Dee Alford got hurt against New England. He missed practice on Thursday and Friday before getting in a limited session on Saturday. He’s questionable.
Rookie Skyler Bell would replace Palmer. Brady said so himself. Rookie Jalon Kilgore may very well fill in for Alford in the nickel spot.
It’s very likely neither has every intricacy of Brady’s offense or Leonhard’s defense ingrained into their minds yet.
But it’s not as if Palmer or the rest of the Bills secondary, those who’ve forced Bell and Kilgore into healthy scratch status the first month of the season, have followed their respective duties in the offensive and defensive schemes to regularly be at the right place at the right time in the first four games.
What Bell and Kilgore can bring — speed and explosiveness.
Bell ran 4.40 with a 41-inch vertical and 133-inch broad jump. That 40-yard dash time placed in the 85th percentile among all combine WRs since 1999. The jumps were in the 95th percentile. At the UConn Pro Day, Bell managed a blisteringly fast 6.65 second time in the three-cone drill that measures agility.
At nearly 6’2” and 210 pounds, Kilgore ran 4.40 in the 40-yard dash (94th percentile) with a 37-inch vertical and 130-inch broad jump (92nd percentile).
Sure, the Rams are not an American Athletic Conference foe that’d be familiar to Bell, and are drastically more collectively challenging than any SEC opponent Kilgore faced during his time within the South Carolina program.
But their raw talent should be viewed as a welcomed addition to a team that’s suddenly trying to find itself on offense and has yet to piece together a full game of sound defense this season.
Even T.J. Sanders, the club’s second-round pick a year ago who’s an excellently explosive athlete in his own right, should make his 2026 debut with Ed Oliver out. Now, Oliver is a proven disruptive force on the interior. But playing next to Deone Walker should provide Sanders ample one-on-one opportunities to showcase all of his natural gifts at defensive tackle.
And how did I get this far into this column without mentioning my ultimate draft crush, linebacker Kaleb Elarms-Orr. I loved what I saw from him on film last week. He’s another youthful, high-caliber athlete at his position. His 40-yard dash, vertical, and broad jump all placed in the 84th percentile or higher at linebacker.
In an ideal world, a coordinator has nothing but experienced veterans working in perfect unison within the system thanks to a their strong grasp of what each individual play is set out to accomplish.
The NFL is hardly an ideal world.
Scheme knowledge is vital. Communication is key.
Those skills usually come with experience.
But sometimes a team is forced to roll with inexperience.
The upside in the Bills collection of youngsters — they’re all tremendous athletes.
And for as much as scheme matters, oftentimes in this game the best athletes are those who make the biggest plays, even if they aren’t an extension of the coach on the field.
With Bell, Kilgore, Sanders, and Elarms-Orr (potentially) moving into more prominent roles, don’t be surprised if the Bills look faster and more explosive in tonight’s game.
