ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. -- The Buffalo Bills have Super Bowl expectations and an offense good enough to make their goals become reality. But there's legitimate reason to wonder whether the Bills' defense could hold the entire operation back.
The Bills (5-1) come out of their bye week ranked 30th in points allowed per game (28.5), 31st in yards allowed (386.8), 31st in passing yards allowed (285.8), 27th in third down conversion rates (45%) and last in first downs allowed per game (25.7).
So as they prepare for their Week 8 game against the Baltimore Ravens (1 p.m. ET, CBS), the question of whether the Bills can achieve their goals with the defense playing the way it has through the first six games looms large.
"Our best football has to be ahead of us, whatever that means," Bills coach Joe Brady said. "You never want to peak early in the season. If you're playing your best football in September, there's a problem. And so how do we continue to improve? How do we continue to learn?
"If we're playing our best football right now, it's not going to look good as the season goes. So I hope better is ahead, and that's what we're chasing."
For "better" to be ahead, that'll have to start with better in the secondary. Only the Detroit Lions are allowing more passing touchdowns per game than the Bills, and only the Washington Commanders and New Orleans Saints have allowed a higher success rate on pass attempts. The seven defensive backs who've played the most snaps for the Bills combine to allow a passer rating of 107.8, which sits five points better than Bills QB Josh Allen's rating -- and he's the front runner for MVP -- this season.
First-year Bills defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard concedes his defense's woes are mostly to do with the back end. The Bills are top 10 in quarterback pressure rate and quarterback knockdown rate despite games against QBs with well-known quick releases like Matthew Stafford, Kirk Cousins, Jared Goff and C.J. Stroud.
But while the adjustment to Leonhard's preferred 3-4 scheme has paid off for the rush mechanism, the same can't be said for the coverage apparatus, which is taking a longer time to adjust to Leonhard's favored style of more match coverage and fewer disguises in the back end.
"There's too many times where we look confused when I don't think there's enough options for us to be that confused," Leonhard said.
To Leonhard, this is less a personnel issue and more a communication issue. It's a matter of trust. Each play, depending on coverage calls, has its own "lead communicator." Once that player makes a decision about what he sees, the other defenders in the back end have to respond and react with their own observations. And the chatter can't end once the ball is snapped.
"Every person has a different angle of the offense," fifth-year cornerback Christian Benford said. "Everyone should be vocal about what they're seeing. Everyone should be talking pre-snap alerts, post-snap. It'll help us all play as one string."
The Bills don't have to look far for valid excuses for lacking secondary chemistry. Along with safeties Cole Bishop and Damar Hamlin and fellow cornerbacks Maxwell Hairston and Jordan Hancock, Benford's one of several holdovers from former coach Sean McDermott's regime having to adjust to a new way of doing things under Leonhard.
Combine that adjustment with the offseason arrivals of rookie Davison Igbinosun and veterans C.J. Gardner-Johnson and Dee Alford, offseason injuries that limited Hairston's and Bishop's reps, in-season injuries that have forced Benford, Alford and Hancock to miss time and Gardner-Johnson's ejection and looming suspension for spitting, and it's a wonder any group of five DBs has ever taken more than a couple snaps together.
But again, this is a team with Super Bowl aspirations and the calendar's about to give way to November. Coming off a bye week, the expectation has to be for early-season communication issues to correct themselves.
Maybe that's where a familiar voice with an outsider's perspective comes in.
At the start of the bye week, the Bills signed two-time Pro Bowler Tre'Davious White to the practice squad. White started 16 games for the Bills last season but spent the first few months of this season watching the Bills from his couch. He says he got so invested in the Bills' "Monday Night Football" win over the Los Angeles Rams in Week 5 that he put one of his old helmets on so he could watch the game through his facemask.
White says his role as communicated to him by coaches and front office is to come in and be an extension of the coaching staff. A sounding board. A truth-teller. Someone who tells teammates what he sees through the eyes of a nine-year veteran.
So what's he seeing now that he's back in the fold?
"A lot of guys haven't played together," White said. "That comes with a lot of reps and a lot of doing it over and over, a lot of trial and error. As a defensive back, it's all about communication and being on the same page. It's a new defense for everybody. Those are the growing pains of being in a new system.
"The guys are open to the coaching. They're open to getting better. We know we have to get better to go where we want to be. That's the job."
This is, as even Brady will admit, a lot of negativity about a team tied with the best record in the AFC. Brady's whole coaching philosophy essentially boils down to the idea that good enough isn't good enough, though.
Any time he's asked about the defense's struggles he finds a way to spin the narrative toward why he thinks the offense hasn't been good enough either. An offense that, remember, leads the NFL in scoring and yards per play.
So the question at hand is less a matter of whether Brady and Leonhard think the Bills' defense needs to be better -- they obviously do -- and more a matter of whether the buttons they're pressing to ensure things get better end up working.
As for what those buttons are, veteran pass rusher Bradley Chubb says the message has been "full steam ahead." The emphasis is on communication and trust, sure. But it's less about trust in the sense that players need to believe their teammates know what to do and more about trust in the sense that no one player has to go out of his way to make up for all the deficiencies.
The unit and the scheme as Leonhard's designed are, in the coaches' opinions, strong enough to course correct.
"The message was just to put our identity on tape each and every day," Chubb said. "That's on the practice field, that's in the meeting room. Our identity as a team, as a football team, as a defense is to play hard, play fast, play physical, not letting up, no relenting.
"I feel like if we approach it with that mindset on the field, in the meeting room, on the game field, that's just been a message to go all out."