The first day of the Buffalo Bills’ 2022 training camp is officially underway at St. John Fisher University. While the Bills re-adjust to coming back to their old training camp home, the offense, in particular, will have to adjust to a familiar face in a new role.

Ken Dorsey takes over as the team’s offensive coordinator and play-caller after serving as Buffalo’s quarterbacks coach from 2019-2021. Dorsey has a lot on his plate in 2022 to maintain the level of success and production that Brian Daboll had with this offense in the past few years. Regardless of those expectations, there has been one persistent question for the Bills’ offense during this offseason, that question being “How do you generate more YAC (yards after catch) in this offense?”

This question was posed to quarterback Josh Allen after today’s practice.

“Again, I think that’s a quarterback stat,” Allen said during his press conference. “So I’ve got to do better with that in terms of ball placement, and there are certain concepts that we run, it’s no secret. Throwing outside the numbers, throwing deep or intermediate balls, where guys are catching and getting out of bounds, so finding ways to get a few more slants, unders, in-cuts where guys have the opportunity to catch and run, and again it comes with ball placement and understanding different concepts.”

Leading up to the 2022 NFL Draft, many fans and analysts had pegged the Bills to take a wide receiver such as Treylon Burks, who generated a lot of YAC during his final season at Arkansas. Burks was ultimately selected before the Bills even had a chance to consider him. They did add a YAC-friendly player in the second round of the draft in Georgia running back James Cook, but regardless of their additions, it seems that the mentality within the Buffalo offense is that the lack of yards-after-catch production is not a lack of players who can pick up those yards, but in needing a fundamental shift in what routes and concepts are called in order to put players in position to get those yards.

Given Allen’s belief in this, it would not be surprising if that is one of the ways the Dorsey offense will differ from the Daboll offense. While there may be some growing pains with Dorsey as the play caller as Allen alluded to as well in his post-practice presser, this potential shift into generating more YAC can certainly help the process of maintaining the overall production of the previous offense through a different avenue under Dorsey.

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