The most astonishing comment from the post-2026 NFL Draft press conference of Buffalo Bills president of football operations/general manager Brandon Beane was his take on the cornerback position.
“As we started this draft, I thought that the biggest hole on our roster was corner,” said Beane in front of the assembled media at One Bills Drive following the initially surprising second-round selection of cornerback Davison Igbinosun.
In my post-draft question-answering article, I laid out the outside
cornerback depth chart before the 2026 draft. It was a group headlined by entrenched starters Christian Benford and Maxwell Hairston yet featured Te’Corey Couch and MJ Devonshire as their immediate backups. Yikes.
In that piece, I wrote, “the cornerback spot was not discussed often entering the draft cycle as a position in dire need of depth, and it should’ve been.” And, I, myself, was absolutely at fault from January – April for not noticing the seismic depth issue the Bills had at boundary cornerback entering this draft.
Now with Igbinosun in tow, and on the heels of Beane’s direct comment on the cornerback position, Matt Warren suggested I look into the recent history of how frequently the Bills’ depth corners have actually played.
These are the seminal findings from my research:
From 2016 – 2025, the Bills’ fourth cornerback averaged playing on 35.6% of the team’s defensive snaps during the regular season.
The lowest snap percentage for this fourth cornerback came in 2024, when Kaiir Elam appeared on 27.6% of Buffalo’s defensive snaps. The highest snap percentage was 44.9% in 2021 with Jackson.
After the 2017 and 2019-2025 campaigns, that fourth corner has appeared on 26.8% of the defensive snaps in the playoffs. I admittedly thought this figure would’ve been higher, yet in conducting the research quickly realized my incorrect guess was simply due to the enormity of the lone snap by Dane Jackson in the divisional-round loss to the Broncos. That play — which resulted in a Denver touchdown — was the lone “fourth” cornerback snap from a Bills defender in the 2025 playoffs. In the wild-card win over the Jaguars, Tre’Davious White and Benford each played 56 snaps, Taron Johnson appeared on 44 snaps, and no other cornerback logged snaps.
On the Johnson note, in this quick study, I looked for the cornerback with the fourth-most snaps because, as we all know, the third/slot cornerback is a full-time position and has been for a long time. Johnson has primarily held that gig since his rookie season in 2018.
In 2017, Leonard Johnson — how’s that for an early May name drop for ya — was the primary slot corner and Shareece Wright was Buffalo’s “fourth” corner who played a rather sizable 41% of the team’s snaps in that regular season.
Of course, the better, potentially more informative version of this study would be an examination of the snap percentage of the fourth cornerback for every team in the NFL the past decade, a super-thorough investigation that’d take far more time than this one.
You can decide if you agreed with Beane’s assessment of the cornerback need entering the draft.
But now we know — using the past decade of the team’s history as a guide, the Bills can reasonably expect their fourth corner to play around 36% of the time during the regular season and just under 27% of the time in the playoffs. Cornerback depth will be tested, and therefore needed.
For context, that 36% is smack dab between the percentage of snaps Hairston and Cam Lewis played during the regular season in 2025. The 27% is between Larry Ogunjobi and T.J. Sanders’ snap percentage a season ago.
Now we won’t be surprised to see Igbinosun — or whoever “loses” one of the outside cornerback gigs out of training camp/preseason — on the field a decent amount of the time for the Bills in 2026.
