There’s so much no one knows about the Buffalo Bills in 2026, especially so when it comes to the defense. Yet even within that, the way in which people have viewed new Bills defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard’s desire to employ a pressure-packed, attack-style unit may not flesh out as expected. That’s perhaps twofold.
It’s true that it could take some time for things to gel in year one under Leonhard and the coaching staff. There’s the need to educate holdovers from Sean McDermott’s tenure. Then there are the newcomers via free agency and those players selected in the 2026 NFL Draft.
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Despite all that still left to answer, all anyone wants to know right now is what Buffalo’s defense will look like this coming season. It’s a fair question as the first major change to that side of the ball in almost a decade. It’s also fair to wonder what Leonhard brings to the table as a first-time NFL defensive coordinator.
Prior to joining the Bills as a coach, Leonhard variously held the roles of assistant head coach/defensive back coach/and passing game coordinator during the 2024 and 2025 NFL seasons with the Denver Broncos. But he was never tasked with calling Denver’s defense.
The last time Leonhard called a defensive system was in 2022 as defensive coordinator for Wisconsin’s football team. It’s there where NFL writer and analyst Doug Farrar chose to dig in to find out more about what Leonhard may bring to the Bills’ table. What he found, and shared with Chris Brown and Steve Tasker during a recent segment of “One Bills Live” provided some interesting insight.
Jim Leonhard “uniquely attuned to modern NFL defense”
It’s true that Leonhard has never called an NFL defense, has never been a defensive coordinator at the professional level. It’s also the case that Leonhard hasn’t done either of those things at any level since the 2022 college football season with Wisconsin. Yet interestingly, Leonhard may have been way ahead of the curve.
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Farrar noted that “the last two teams that won (the Super Bowl) created massive confusion for the opposing quarterback without blitzing.” He sees this as the big trend for NFL defenses moving forward, and see much of the same ideas in Leonhard’s scheme from 2022. For many, what follows below from Farrar’s assessment of Leonhard’s work as a college DC may provide the first real glimpse of what’s coming to the Bills’ defense.
“Players and defensive coaches right now, the overarching things with modern defense is that everything has to be connected to everything else: front, ‘backers, coverage. However you wanna line it up play to play — that’s the only way this post-snap movement, whether it’s stunts at the line, disguised coverage.”
“It was really fascinating to me to see how many current NFL concepts (Leonhard) was using five years ago in college. This was a lot of four-man fronts, but a lot of stunts. I mean, he ran hundreds of different, you know, almost 300 stunt plays. So your linemen are always creating games.”
“And I was talking to Mike McDonald about this for the Athlon NFL preview and he said: ‘We’re not necessarily trying to create pressure. What we’re doing is we’re moving the front. We’re moving the protections. We’re forcing the offensive line to do things they don’t want to do, and we’re creating confusion in the mind of the quarterback.’ And that seems to be where defense is going both with the stunts and with the disguised coverages.”
“You know, you want, can you pressure the quarterback? Sure. But if you can force the quarterback to hesitate just for a beat — like, ‘I’m not sure what I’m seeing’ — then the whole thing can fall apart. So, I was really intrigued to see Leonhard doing this in college, and it’s the subtle coverage disguises like, Brian Flores of the Vikings, you never know — that guy’s a petri dish. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
“But it’s the Vic Fangio, the Jesse Minter, Mike McDonald (schemes). Most of it is two-high shell pre-snap. And Leonhard was doing this, again, five years ago in college. You know, it’s subtle little twists of the knife over and over and over, and it just starts to peck away at the offense and all of a sudden the quarterback is in this weird nether world that he didn’t expect to be in. So, I think Leonhard, you know, he had that experience with the Broncos — we can talk about certain things there as far as the five-man fronts and whatnot because there’s some things to note.”
“But I think he is uniquely attuned to modern NFL defense because he was doing that already. And then when you look at the defensive players they drafted and the free agents, I mean, all of these guys, and we can go down the list, they’re all functionally versatile. They don’t just necessarily do one thing. So, Leonhard’s telling you with his personnel ‘I want guys who can be anywhere, and it’s not necessarily obvious — we’re just gonna move one guy or two guys — and the quarterback’s not going to know what to expect.”
What Farrar explains above is a pie-in-the-sky scenario and, as such, will require patience from Bills Mafia. But for now, it’s a fantastic look into what Buffalo’s defense could be building towards. Defensive pressure may look different under Jim Leonhard than what you’re prepared to witness.
You can check out all Farrar had to say on the Bills’ defense and plenty more in the embedded video below.
Read the full article here
