Offseason Stealing Signals, AFC East
Unique offenses create mounds of uncertainty
I sometimes hear from you guys that you don’t like to share my work with your buddies, because your buddies are your leaguemates, and you want to win. But I think that undersells your contributions here. Even if your leaguemates all knew about this, I don’t think you’d find that more than a couple other people would really be able — from an attention span standpoint — to read as much as I write. Or really be willing — from a brain power/mental investment standpoint — to get as into the weeds with me as you guys do, parsing the nuances of every profile and every little thing that could play into the season. I’ve said this before but I have a really hard time consuming content (crucially, content I like) in the ways I ask you guys to consume my writing.
So I put a lot on you guys with the amount of stuff I send out. Your superpower is a willingness to really dig into it, engage with it, and not even necessarily always agree, but take in the information and the angles and come up with ways to play it all. And I’m just taking a moment to commend you for that, because it’s a lot.
The first two divisions are done, the AFC South and NFC South, and we move onto the third division today. As always, I talked through each division with Michael Leone over at his podcast, Establish the Edge.
Important shoutouts to this Reddit series on offensive line play that a Stealing Signals reader sent me and I got useful information on the state of the line for each team, as well as the Coachspeak Index Discord where I got good information about what the coaches and GMs have been saying about each team throughout the offseason. Pat Thorman’s seasonal pace preview is always a must-read resource for understanding team play speed, no-huddle trends, and play volume; nobody parses that data as well as him. OurLads is always my go-to depth chart resource. I use OverTheCap for contract stuff, but Spotrac is another option. I get athletic stuff from RAS.
Data I pull for my projections typically comes from PFF, RotoViz, or Leone. Let’s get to the AFC East.
Buffalo Bills
Key Stat: Bills — 60.3 plays per game (league average: 62.2), -3.0% PROE (first negative season since 2019)
Bills Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The Bills have this phrase that has come up this offseason that is, “everyone eats,” and it refers to this idea that all their skill position guys will contribute in various ways. It’s a cool idea from a team-building standpoint, and makes you difficult to gameplan for and highly variable in what you can do, such that you have answers you can go to if one player gets hurt or any of those things. It’s also a nightmare for fantasy football, where we want concentration of production, not 15 guys all getting touches around a dual-threat, superhero QB who is the centerpiece of the offense but also takes skill position production away from the overall pie through his scrambling, particularly in how it has manifested in double-digit rushing TDs each of the past two seasons. And then after being pretty neutral in PROE overall in 2023 — but shifting down in the latter part of the year after an OC switch that season — new full-time OC Joe Brady brought the PROE squarely into the negative in 2024, and that combined with a slower pace to bring play volume crashing down to below league average levels after years of this being a solidly above-average team for play volume. Good teams tend to have the ball more and run more plays, but we’re talking about losing 90 total offensive plays from one year to the next, as Buffalo fell to 28th in the NFL in plays in 2024 after being no lower than 11th in plays per game across the prior three years.
The overall offensive shift also impacted the distribution of touchdowns. In 2020, this offense threw 40 passing TDs vs. just 16 total rush TDs. In 2021, it was 36-to-20, and in 2022 it was 35-to-15. In 2023, that started to shift some, primarily in the latter part of the year after the OC switch, and finished at 29 passing vs. 22 rushing. Last year, it was 30 passing vs. 32 rushing, with that latter number leading the NFL in rushing TDs by three over Philly and Detroit and at least seven over everyone else. There was a ton of touchdown production to go around — 62 total touchdowns is fantastic, and one thing we know is that efficiency does sometimes cost volume, and this offense being extremely efficient almost certainly cost it play volume (put differently, if they can’t match the elite efficiency, and most people do tend to regress this kind of thing, then you have to probably assume more play volume as their drives run into more third downs and just take more plays overall). In going through the projection, it did feel to me like the rushing TDs were probably going to stick more than it might have made sense on an individual level. What I mean by that is Josh Allen had 12 rushing TDs last year after 15 the year prior, but had been between 6 and 9 in each of his first five seasons, and also his overall rush attempts have declined a bit (his 102 in 17 games last year were equal to his career low in any year where he played at least 16), so you would be forgiven for wondering about regression in that stat. Instead, I finished the projection kind of expecting double digits again (and still high on Allen even if that dips, because probably in those scenarios Allen’s pass TDs have some real upside, because he’s the centerpiece of the offense that everything revolves around). Ultimately, I projected the Bills for 55.4 offensive TDs, most in the NFL (because their lookahead line expected point total for the season is highest in the NFL), and pretty squarely between their 62 last year and 51 in 2023 (to the point about efficiency dips increasing play volume, I did elevate their play volume closer to league average, by more than a play and a half per game, and also elevated their pass rate to a still below-average rate that was nonetheless nearly two percentage points higher than last year, to account for an expectation of more passing downs generally, because regressing these team-level things all has to work together in a projection).