To many, Dalton Kincaid is receiver-tight end hybrid, and Joe Brady is making a statement about his true position early on in the 2026 season.
Max Toscano, who specializes in tight end evaluations, recently posted an amazing thread on Twitter/X regarding Buffalo’s specific utilization of Kincaid (and other receiving specialists at tight end) to begin the 2026 season.
It’s highly recommended reading.
Before the season, I wrote an exploration of the chances Buffalo’s offense becomes tight-end centric
this season. Through two games, it undoubtedly has been.
Sprinkled throughout the original article were hints about Kincaid’s positional label actually being closer to receiver than tight end. I concluded that piece with this paragraph:
“And, heck, if internally the Bills don’t view him as a tight end, maybe simply a sizable jump in workload for Kincaid this season will actually make Buffalo believe its one of the more “receiver-heavy” offenses in the NFL.”
In his first three seasons, Kincaid never hit 27% of his snaps in-line (attached to the line of scrimmage, a classic tight end pre-snap alignment), and in 2025, he was positioned out wide at nearly the same percentage as he was in-line (22.1% vs. 23.5%). So, yeah, he kinda-sorta felt like a receiver.
Through two games in the Joe Brady era, the Bills have made it clear — Kincaid is a tight end.
His in-line snap percentage has sky-rocketed to 50.9% while his out wide percentage has plummeted to 12.3%. He’s been in the slot on only 35.1% of his snaps thus far, easily the lowest of his professional career. In each of Kincaid’s first three seasons in Buffalo, his slot percentage was over 52.0%.
How about this too — Kincaid was never asked to pass block on more than 2.2% of his snaps in any of his first three years as a member of the Bills. In the first two games, he’s stayed in to pass block 8.8% of the time.
Kincaid is producing like a receiver.
But he’s being deployed a lot more like a classic tight end, which has made it nearly impossible to opposing defenses to decipher whether a run or pass is coming from the Bills through two games this season.
