ORCHARD PARK - Jim Leonhard saw firsthand last January how poor a tackling team the Buffalo Bills could be.
He watched from the coach’s booth in Denver where he served as the Broncos’ defensive passing game coordinator as the Bills’ defense missed 11 tackles per Pro Football Focus charting in Buffalo’s 33-30 overtime loss in the divisional playoff round.
During the regular season, PFF had the Bills with 152 missed tackles and then another 19 in the postseason, and those issues were part of the reason why the Bills ranked 24th in the league in third-down conversion percentage allowed at 41.3%.
As Leonhard installs a new defense in Buffalo, the X’s and O’s are obviously important as players are finding their fit in the new scheme and learning their roles and assignments. But when it comes right down to it, reliable tackling is what will make the new scheme either succeed or fail.
“It’s the biggest one, in all reality,” Leonhard said following Tuesday’s practice. “Schematically, you’re getting guys in places to make plays, that’s my job. But who can finish? Who can finish, get guys on the ground? That was an Achilles heel here last year, so that’s the No. 1 thing we have to correct and the No. 1 way to do it is to get population to the football.”
During the offseason program the Bills are never in pads so it’s impossible to truly gauge tackling ability, and even in training camp, while things ratchet up physically, there is still very rarely any live tackling.
All Leonhard and his coaches can do in practice is fine-tune techniques and teach taking proper angles to the ball and all that. He won’t get a chance to see if those lessons are being applied until the games begin, which is why he can’t wait to get on the field at Highmark Stadium Saturday afternoon for the preseason opener against the Carolina Panthers.
“I think the plan is for guys to play and get a taste of this game live, let's go finish,” Leonhard said. “It's going to be exciting for guys to get out there and just kind of let it rip. Obviously in preseason one, it's gonna be pretty straightforward and you just want to see who can go out there and execute and finish, as all teams around the NFL are doing schematically right now. But excited to stop beating each other up and get another jersey in front of you.”
Only Arizona, Cincinnati, Dallas, Las Vegas, Miami, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Washington missed more tackles than the Bills. Among the 11 teams that played two or fewer playoff games, Buffalo’s 19 missed tackles were the most.
The greatest offenders during the regular season were linebackers Terrel Bernard and Shaq Thompson who missed 14 each and that’s alarming because neither played a full season due to injuries. Cole Bishop had 12, Joey Bosa 11, and Tre’Davious White and Dorian Williams had 10 each.
Leonhard’s candid take on Buffalo’s 2025 tackling was refreshing to hear, and it’s on him to get that straightened out.
“The effort you play with and getting more than one guy to the ball, it’s, in reality, the biggest piece,” he said. “Scheme is scheme but if you can’t get people on the ground you’re going to have to make adjustments and figure out how you can help them do that.”
Head coach Joe Brady will determine how long the first units play against the Panthers. He may reveal the plan later Thursday when he speaks to reporters, but we can assume that on both sides of the ball they’ll likely play about a quarter.
Panthers head coach Dave Canales announced that his starters will be playing between 10 and 20 plays depending on game flow and Leonhard is glad that he’ll be able to see his first-string defense go against the Panthers first-string offense, however brief it may be.
“You obviously want ones versus ones,” he said. “You want the same level of competition and it's always great to play another offense. It's not what you've seen every day, and sometimes you kind of fall into a rhythm of, ‘I know this blocker, I know how this blocker's going to attack me.’ Any time you get against different competition, things change.”
Leonhard said that during the practice inside Highmark Stadium last Saturday, when there were some competitive full-team segments, there were definitely things that need correcting, particularly on the defensive line, and he wants to see improvement against the Panthers when his defenders don’t have to play touch football and can actually make tackles.
“For the most part, our guys have been very stout up front and we've handled a lot of different things, but I thought the red-blue, we were a little bit leaky, it didn't look great,” he said, though acknowledging that not being able to tackle live skews the evaluation.
“To me, it’s the physicality up front. Let’s go get that done. There’s going to be mistakes that are made, but can we fly around, be physical when it’s the first opportunity to finish? Tackling, tackling, tackling. Getting guys to the ground in live situations, making plays on the ball. Attacking the football or creating turnovers, those are huge evaluators in this preseason, right? It’s big to see because you finally get the opportunity to see the end of the play being real.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for more than four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer/columnist for the D&C. He has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Bills coordinator identifies Buffalo's biggest defensive problem