How does Bills’ young offense stack up against NFL’s best entering 2024 season?

The Ringer recently ranked each NFL offense entering the 2024 season, slotting the Buffalo Bills in fairly.

Kyle Silagyi | Aug 22, 2024

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Josh Allen is good at football.

This isn’t necessarily a revelation that one would stop the presses for, but it’s sometimes important to remember just how dynamic the Buffalo Bills signal-caller is as he’s occasionally left out of league-wide quarterback-centric discourse. He’s a 6-foot-5 human wrecking ball with a cannon attached to his right shoulder, a linebacker-playing-quarterback who has accounted for a league-high 174 touchdowns over the past four seasons. He totaled over 40 touchdowns in each of those campaigns (the only player in league history to accomplish such a task) and earned NFL MVP votes in three of them, cementing himself as one of the league’s premier players in the process.

The presence of Allen is why it’s difficult not to be optimistic about Buffalo’s offense this fall despite the turnover the unit experienced in the offseason. The team moved on premier aerial contributors Stefon Diggs and Gabriel Davis while also parting ways with stalwart center Mitch Morse, leaving the offense in a more inexperienced and generally cloudier state than in years past. That said, the unit’s ceiling is still among the league’s highest thanks to the person under center.

This sentiment has been reflected in The Ringer’s recent article in which writer Sheil Kapadia ranks each NFL offense entering the 2024 campaign based on how the analyst thinks they will perform in 2024; the Bills slot in at No. 9, their placement within the top 10 largely attributed to No. 17.

“As long as Josh Allen is healthy and in his prime, this Bills offense will be good,” Kapadia wrote. “After trading Diggs and letting Gabe Davis walk in free agency, this feels like a transition year. But that doesn’t mean the Bills will take a giant step back. Consider this: In their divisional-round loss to the Chiefs, the Bills went up and down the field and produced the seventh-highest success rate in a single game for any offense all season. Diggs had just three catches for 21 yards in that game. My point? Diggs had a great run with the Bills, and they won’t be better without him, but I think there’s still a formula that can work here.”

Kapadia goes on to note pass-catchers who figure to be oft-utilized by Allen this season, writing that wideout Khalil Shakir, tight end Dalton Kincaid, and running back James Cook are promising and that the quarterback may be able to “get something” out of rookie receiver Keon Coleman.

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“I’m not telling you it’s the best skill-position group in the NFL or even that it’s massively underrated,” Kapadia wrote. “I’m just telling you that the situation is workable when Allen is the quarterback and you have a good offensive line (which they do).”

Kapadia won’t tell you that Buffalo’s weapons corps is underrated, but we will. Both Kincaid and Shakir emerged as capable contributors after Joe Brady took over as offensive coordinator midway through the 2023 campaign, with Shakir, in particular, catching 30 total passes for 438 yards from Week 11 onwards (including playoffs). Cook, rookie running back Ray Davis, and veteran tight end are also capable of contributing to the passing attack, and Coleman is a ball-of-clay whom Allen is already developing a strong rapport with. Kapadia doesn’t even mention Curtis Samuel, an offseason signee who reunites with Brady after constructing his best season as a professional under the play-caller with the Carolina Panthers in 2020.

There are justifiable reasons for a person to have questions about the Bills’ offense entering the 2024 season, but the presence of Allen effectively mitigates a hefty chunk of these concerns. A ranking just inside the top 10 is fair at this juncture given the lack of results, but it’s easy to imagine the team finishing the season slotted much higher..

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