Not all that’s gone wrong with the Buffalo Bills defense through the first month of the season is a sign of what’s to come. Why? Because of the team’s pass rush. It’s been one of the most effective units in the NFL to begin the season. Buffalo’s defense just hasn’t felt the normal payoff of a ferocious pass rush yet.
I’m a big believer in process over results.
Trusting that adage means that sometimes if the process is correct you have to be patient for the desired results.
Of course, there’s a chance
the Bills just have a very bad secondary and will continue to struggle to stop the pass, which has certainly been the case in the first month of the 2026 season.
But over time, pressured dropbacks lead to sizable dips in opposing quarterback production.
The latter just hasn’t happened to date for the Bills.
Buffalo is fourth in the NFL in pressure rate and tied for eighth in sacks yet have allowed the seventh-highest quarterback rating of 103.4 entering Week 5’s game against the Rams.
To test whether or not the Bills are actually due defensively based on their pressure-creating capabilities, I began by tapping into the nflverse play-by-play data over the past five years to establish a baseline standard for how quarterbacks perform while pressured.
Here are the results from over 35,000 pressured dropbacks from the 2021 – 2025 seasons (and the first four weeks of 2026):
Clearly, the early-returns on the 2026 Bills defense haven’t been as good as the league-wide standard across the enormous five-year sample or even compared to the entire NFL in the first four weeks of the 2026 campaign.
I then took this study a step further to see if there was more evidence the Bills defense is due to actually start generating worse play from the quarterbacks it faces.
I wanted to see — and show you — how a quarterback’s performance normally dips when pressured (vs. when kept clean) and compare it to those same splits through four games against the Bills.
Seismic sample-size difference, but we’re attempting to analyze the 2026 season right now, and four games is all we have. The first results column is based on 2021 – 2025 data.
Again, more of the same. Collectively, C.J. Stroud, Jared Goff, Justin Herbert, and Drake Maye compiled a 110.7 passer rating when kept clean against the Bills. That collective rating only dipped to 91.0 while under pressure vs. Buffalo.
In the 2021 – 2025 sample, passer rating dipped from 99.5 while clean to 67.7 while under pressure, a far cry from rating while pressured against the Bills defense early in this 2026 season.
Now, sure, a shoddy Buffalo secondary may be the culprit here. But even if it’s indeed shoddy throughout the course of the entire season, the 2021 – 2025 seasons certainly featured shoddy secondaries too. The size of that data set can’t be ignored.
The Bills are generating pressure at a relatively high rate.
Thus far in the 2026 season they haven’t gotten the typical decline in opposing quarterback play that pressure historically creates.
