Opening the Bills: Examining Buffalo’s DL ahead of 2023 NFL Draft

04/17/2023
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The Bills’ production on the defensive front was a tale of two halves. They were dominant up through week 11 when they visited the Lions for the Thanksgiving Day game, but after that, it was a pretty precipitous downfall. What happened? Well, we can easily point to the ACL injury suffered by future hall-of-famer Von Miller as the main culprit to this dropoff. If healthy, how much help do the Bills need? In my opinion, Brandon Beane should address IDL on day 1 or 2 of the draft and give Buffalo a possible replacement for Ed Oliver or depth after an aging DaQuan Jones and Jordan Phillips. Just how bad was the plunge pre-Miller injury and post-Miller injury? Two stats stick out to me the most when examining that. First, I wrote about some of the crazy stats for Buffalo through the first nine weeks of the year, and the trio of Miller, Greg Rousseau, and Boogie Basham were all in the top 25 of Pro Football Focus’ (PFF) defensive grades. If you don’t like analytics, try this on for size. The Bills were averaging almost two turnovers per game through week 11, after that it dropped to just over…

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