Rex Ryan's team may have started the season hot with wins against the Colts and Dolphins and a game in which it finished within one possession of the Patriots, but the Bills are now sitting at 3-3. Buffalo has beaten three teams (the Colts, Dolphins and Titans) that don't exactly look like world beaters and lost to its opponents of actual quality (Patriots, Giants, Bengals). Buffalo is 13th in the NFL in point differential, and it looks like the Bills are pretty much an average team.
They were pretty much an average team last year, too, but they were an average team with an elite defense -- Buffalo finished 2014 ranked fourth in both yards and points allowed, and second in Football Outsiders' defensive DVOA. That defense figured to get even better with Ryan coming to town, but that's not exactly been the case.
Buffalo was 10th in defensive DVOA heading into Week 6, when they allowed 34 points to the Bengals. They're 18th in yards-per-game allowed and 16th in points-per-game allowed. After leading the league with 54 sacks in 2014, they're tied for 24th with only nine sacks this year. That's a drop of 1.9 sacks per game, the largest in the league.
The men primarily responsible for the pass rush -- the defensive linemen -- are frustrated, and they're letting multiple media outlets know about it. Specifically, Jerry Hughes, Marcell Dareus and Mario Williams are not happy that they (and Kyle Williams) are dropping back in coverage on occasion rather than rushing the passer on every snap.
"I think I probably set a record on dropping [back] today, but that's part of the scheme for us to go out and be put in a position to win," Williams said Sunday, per ESPN. "Whatever's called, you have to go out and do it."
Hughes echoed those sentiments.
"Yeah, I'll let the coach coach, and we'll play," Hughes, the big-money defensive end, said when asked about Ryan's play-calling. "So whatever he runs, we'll run it."
Dareus may have been the most unhappy of them all.
"Hey, like [Williams] said, they pay us a lot of money. And we want to use our talents the best way we know how. If we're going to be dropping we don't want to get questions about not getting sacks. That's just how it is," Dareus said Tuesday, per Yahoo! Sports.
"We want to make some plays," Dareus added. "We don't want fans looking at us crazy. We like making plays. We like getting sacks, just being out there exerting a lot of energy and having fun. But when we're dropping, when I'm not out there on third down or just I'm dropping or Kyle [Williams] is dropping or Mario is dropping or Jerry [Hughes] is dropping. ... It's not been a lot of times where there have been all four of us, full tilt, ears pinned back and we're going after it. We haven't had a lot of that this year. Hopefully Rex is going to implement it. There's nothing we can do."
Even former Bills quarterback Jim Kelly got in on the action, criticizing Ryan's decision to drop his linemen into coverage too often as well.
"Dropping Mario Williams into coverage a lot? Didn't we pay him a lot of money to hit the quarterback? And if I'm the opposing quarterback and I see him dropping into coverage, oh, that's a big plus. I'd definitely have a smile on my face," Kelly said, per Yahoo! Sports.
Mario Williams and Hughes, in particular, have seen a drop in the percentage of time they're rushing the passer. Respectively, they rushed the passer on 97.2 and 97.5 percent of passing down snaps last season, per Pro Football Focus. Those numbers are at 95.0 percent and 87.4 percent this year. Dareus has seen his pass-rush percentage drop from 100 percent to 98.1 percent, while Kyle Williams has dipped from 97.8 percent to 94.1 percent. That all amounts to only a few snaps per game, but every snap those guys aren't getting after the passer feels like a wasted one to them.
As for Rex, he is willing to take the blame -- to a point.
"A couple of them are my fault," he said, per ESPN. "I went with some three-man-rush stuff and never let my guys go as much as I should have. But I don't think our guys had enough shots on him, so we'll see. We got to take a long, hard look at what we're asking our guys to do."
