In 2019, the Buffalo Bills went 10-6 and enjoyed its best season since 1999 while earning its second playoff appearance in three seasons after a 17-year drought. Unfortunately, the season ended in an overtime loss in the wild-card round of the playoffs to the Houston Texans. The Bills only managed to score 19 points in the loss despite Houston having a fluttering bottom-tier defense and allowing 28 points per game over its last seven regular season games.
Nineteen points are exactly what Buffalo averaged per game in the regular season, good for 23rd in the NFL, and the lowest of any team that qualified for the playoffs. The next closest playoff team was the Green Bay Packers, who finished 15th in scoring and managed to produce 24 points per game.
The key move that the Bills made over the offseason to help fix its scoring problem was trading for superstar wide receiver Stefon Diggs and providing quarterback Josh Allen with a bona fide No. 1 target in the passing game.
While the move was met with plenty of excitement for how Diggs can impact Buffalo’s offense, naturally the question of what the target distribution will look like has come up. After all, John Brown enjoyed the best season of his NFL career last season with the Bills, where he hauled in 72 receptions for 1,060 yards. In addition, Cole Beasley settled in wonderfully after seven seasons with the Dallas Cowboys and hauled in 67 receptions for 778 yards with six touchdowns. Beasley set new career highs for targets (106), touchdowns, and yards per reception while logging the second-most receptions and receiving yards for his career. Not to mention Buffalo has an up and coming tight end in Dawson Knox and a multifaceted running back in Devin Singletary, in addition to the rest of the receiving corps.
There is a clear path for Buffalo to make sure all the mouths are fed in the offense.
The first item to acknowledge is that Buffalo is an 11-personnel heavy offense, meaning three wide receivers on the field to go with a tight end and a running back. The Bills were in 11-personnel on 70% of its offensive plays last season, a number that was more than 80% from Week 11 on. That frequency was without Diggs in the mix. With Diggs in the fray, Buffalo will surely continue to lean heavily on three-wide receiver sets, and the trio of Diggs, Brown, and Beasley will be on the field a lot.
So where do the targets for Diggs come from?
The first piece of the puzzle is the Bills passing the football more, which is not an unreasonable thought. Buffalo is often falsely perceived as a run-heavy offense. Last season, the Bills ranked eighth in the NFL in passing rate on early downs. In addition, the Bills are committing 17.56% of its salary cap space to the wide receiver position, which is the third most in the NFL. Passing early and often is what the Bills offense is designed to do. The key is doing it more efficiently. With all the continuity surrounding Josh Allen who is entering his third season in Brian Daboll’s offense and with the addition of Diggs, that isn’t an unreasonable expectation.
In 2019, the Bills had 513 passing attempts, which ranked 24th in the NFL. The easiest way to find targets for Diggs and the rest of Buffalo’s talented weapons is to throw the football more. If the Bills increased their passing attempts from 513 to 574 (3.75 more attempts/game), the Bills would climb to 16th in the league in passing attempts and create 61 additional targets. Give those all to Diggs and change nothing for the rest of the weapons.
With 61 targets easily created, it’s not time to start taking away targets from the Bills’ existing weapons. All 18 of Zay Jones' targets, who was traded to the Raiders, go to Diggs. Take 10 away from John Brown’s 115 and give those to Diggs. Brown still has 105 targets and Diggs is suddenly up to 89.
Robert Foster and Isaiah McKenzie combined for 57 targets last season. Reduce that by 23, give those to Diggs and now he has 112 targets which would be the second most that he’s ever received for any season in his career.
In this common-sense plan, Brown (105), Beasley (106), and Diggs (112) are all over 100 targets and there are 251 targets remaining for Buffalo’s running backs, tight ends, and other receivers.
Finding targets for Diggs is a good problem to have and an easy problem to solve.
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