Bills cornerback Christian Benford’s new contract will change his life. But not his approach.
Benford said in announcing the deal that the money, about $70 million over the life of the contract, will make an enormous difference to his family.
“Let’s be for real – like, it’s a life-changing moment,” Benford said, via the Buffalo News. “Let’s just put all things to the side. Let’s clear the air. Let’s address the elephant in the room. Like, this is life changing – like, family, legacy, everything.”
But Benford said that on the field, he’ll be the same player he’s been since the Bills drafted him in 2022.
“My drive’s already still strong to be the best in the league,” Benford said. “It don’t change nothing. I don’t feel different. My mindset is still the same. Get to the Super Bowl, be the best in the league. But yeah, for the drive standpoint, it ain’t really touch that foundation.”
The Bills recently signed cornerback Christian Benford to a four-year extension. As always, the truth of the deal comes a few days later.
As to Benford, the full details have arrived. Here they are, per a source with knowledge of the terms.
1. Signing bonus: $7.5 million.
2. 2025 base salary: $1.1 million, fully guaranteed.
3. 2026 option bonus: $12 million (guarantee details below).
4. 2026 offseason workout bonus: $500,000.
5. 2026 base salary: $2.546 million (guarantee details below).
6. 2026 per-game active roster bonus: $510,000 total.
7. 2027 offseason workout bonus: $500,000.
8. 2027 base salary: $14.49 million, guaranteed for injury at signing with $2.5 million fully guaranteed on the day after Super Bowl LX and the remaining $11.99 million fully guaranteed on the fifth day of the 2026 league year.
9. 2027 per-game active roster bonus: $510,000 total.
10. 2028 offseason workout bonus: $500,000.
11. 2028 base salary: $15.24 million, $3.164 million of which is guaranteed for injury.
12. 2028 per-game active roster bonus: $510,000 total.
13. 2029 90-man offseason roster bonus: $3 million.
14. 2029 offseason workout bonus: $500,000.
15. 2029 base salary: $12.49 million.
16. 2029 per-game roster bonus: $510,000.
Of the 2026 option bonus and 2026 base salary, $10.25 million is fully guaranteed at signing. The remaining $4.296 million is guaranteed for injury at signing. It becomes fully guaranteed on the day after Super Bowl LX.
The deal also includes up to $5 million in incentives and up to $2 million in escalators. Benford can earn up to $1 million each year under this formula: $400,000 for four interceptions or $650,000 for five interceptions or $1 million for six interceptions. He’ll make an extra $500,000 in salary for 2026 through 2029 based on being named a first-team All-Pro in 2025 through 2028.
The four-year extension was initially reported as having a base value of $76 million. But that included the incentives and escalators. The true base value was and is $69 million. That equates to a new-money APY of $17.25 million.
The total value at signing is five years, $72.406 million. The average from signing is $14.4812 million.
The full guarantee at signing is $18.85 million, with a practical guarantee of $37.636 million.
The arguments have been made. The goalposts have moved. The question is whether the ongoing effort to get rid of the tush push is good for the game.
It’s not. And the entire effort is a bad look for the sport.
Yes, some want to get rid of it. And they’ve come up with flimsy, shifting arguments.
The discussion goes something like this.
“The play isn’t safe.”
“OK, where’s the injury data?”
“There is none.”
“So how do you know it’s not safe?”
“It might not be safe.”
“How do you know that?”
“It looks like it might not be safe. We need to be proactive.”
“But you’re never proactive. Why are you suddenly being proactive now?”
“Well, it doesn’t look like football.”
“Does it comply with the current rules of football?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t look like a football play.”
“To whom?”
It all feels like a way to take something away from the NFL’s best team. While some opponents of the play might genuinely believe the reasons that have been given, the circumstances justify the very real perception that it’s less about doing the right thing and more about sour grapes.
At a minimum, the debate gives the other 31 teams a way to explain away their failure to compete with the defending Super Bowl champions.
Remember when the Patriots were constantly accused of cheating? Yes, they were guilty of some cheating. But the accusations became ridiculous. Still, when owners demanded to know why their teams couldn’t compete with the Patriots, saying “they cheat” sounded a lot better than admitting they’re smarter, they work harder, they’re more innovative, and they’re just better than their competitors. (The Chiefs have been dealing with that recently, with their success being undermined by the misguided idea that the officials are trying to help the Chiefs win.)
The current tush push debate, regardless of its outcome, allows teams that can’t beat the Eagles to blame it on a play that isn’t a football play and that basically is cheating but for the fact that at least 24 teams haven’t decided to make it cheating.
It’s a dangerous precedent. If a team comes up with a consistently successful technique, the goal should be figuring out how to stop it and/or figuring out how to do it. The strategy should not be to hide behind safety or aesthetics or any other half-baked justification in an effort to come up with enough support to kill the play or, at a minimum, to create the perception that it’s unfair or wrong to use it.
The Eagles might be tempted to say, “Fine. Ban the tush push. We’ll still run the quarterback sneak in a way that no one can stop it.” Here’s hoping they don’t, for two reasons.
First, the next proposal could target the quarterback sneak. Second, surrendering would legitimize the effort to counter a play that works by getting rid of it. Or, at a minimum, by raising the idea that there’s something wrong with using it.
The second reason is the main reason for the Eagles to stand firm. Those who can’t compete with a successful play shouldn’t be able to collectively cook up pretextual reasons for removing from the game the thing they can’t handle.
For now, it’s the tush push. At some point, it’ll be something else. While it might not be good for the game to have one team dominate until other teams can come with an answer, it’s horrible for the game to let the answer be coming up with trumped-up reasons to remove a play that other teams don’t like.
The Packers made a flawed proposal aimed at neutralizing the tush push. It nevertheless won support of half of the league.
Kalyn Kahler of ESPN.com reports that 16 teams supported Green Bay’s submission, which would have banned players from “immediately” pushing the player who receives the snap. While that number fell eight votes short of the minimum needed to change the rules, the 50-50 split confirms that the debate is very real — and that, when the owners gather again in May, it could go either way.
Still, at least half of the teams that weren’t prepared to vote for the Packers’ proposal will need to change their minds for the status quo to be altered.
The problem could very well be the formulation of Green Bay’s proposal. That rule would have cracked open a separate can of worms for the league regarding the proper way to officiate the play, introducing subjectivity and potential inconsistency from crew to crew regarding whether a push was, or wasn’t, immediate.
And if, for instance, a flag is thrown to nullify a key tush push touchdown when the shove arguably wasn’t “immediate,” the league would have to deal with criticism of the officials that could morph into claims from the tinfoil-hat crowd that the fix is in.
The question becomes whether it makes sense to rewind the clock to 2005 and prohibit all pushing of a ballcarrier. The rule changed because downfield shoving of a player who was fighting for more yardage was never called. No one realized 19 year ago that this would eventually morph into the dilemma with which the stewards of the sport are now wrestling.
A complete ban on pushing the player with the ball would become much easier and cleaner to officiate. And while there could be instances where an offensive lineman rumbles to the pile and gives a healthy shove without a flag being thrown, it would eliminate the strategic use of pushing and shoving as an affirmative strategy at the line of scrimmage.
It all comes down to whether 24 owners will get behind the idea of keeping teammates from getting behind the quarterback and ramming him past the line to gain or the goal line. A complete ban on pushing would more directly and conclusively solve the problem, with no need for the officials to determine whether or not a shove was “immediate.”
An answer is coming before Memorial Day. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is about as immediate as it could happen.
The tush push has become the story of the week. With the subject tabled until the next league meetings in May, it could become the story of the entire offseason.
It feels at times like a moving target. Is the concern safety-related? Is it about football aesthetics? Are both a pretext for good, old-fashioned jealousy?
Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie met with reporters on Tuesday, and the first question related to his team’s bread-and-butter play.
“I think for everybody, including myself especially, health and safety is the most important thing when evaluating any play,” Lurie said. “We’ve been very open to whatever data exists on the tush push and there’s just been no data that shows that it isn’t a very, very safe play. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be pushing the tush push.
“But I think, first of all, it’s a precision play. It’s very practiced. We devote a lot of resources to the tush push. We think we have an unusual use of personnel because we have a quarterback that can squat over 600 pounds and an offensive line that’s filled with All-Pro players. That combination with incredible, detailed coaching with [offensive line coach/run game coordinator Jeff] Stoutland, has created a play we can be very successful at. There’s other ways of gaining that half yard, that yard. There’s quarterback sneaks, other types, but we’ve been very, very good at it.”
He also made a point that often gets made in this context: Any team can use it.
“It’s a play that’s available to every other team in the league, and I think it hasn’t been used more than five times by almost every team in the league,” Lurie said. “Buffalo is an exception. The usage rate has gone down over the last year dramatically in the league. We’re still very good at it. We’re not as good as we were the year before. We’ve got to adapt.”
Adaptation is the key. Trends come and go, offensive and defensive. It’s incumbent on defenses to stop a good offensive technique, and it’s for offenses to counter effective defensive strategies.
“I think for all of us that have followed NFL football over the decades, there’s an ebb and flow to offense and defense,” Lurie said. “And typically one of the great things about professional football is that defenses adjust to offenses and offenses adjust to defenses every year. When we won the Super Bowl a few years ago, we really banked on the RPOs and were very, very successful. It didn’t take long for defenses to adapt to the RPOs, and if you notice, we weren’t as successful and we stopped using it nearly as much. As the passing game becomes more explosive, you see more styles of defense to prevent explosive plays that open up the running game.”
Coming up with new approaches and counters to those approaches is part of the fabric of the game.
“It’s part of what I think I personally, and I think most of us love about football, is it’s a chess match,” Lurie said. “Let the chess match play out, and if for any reason it does get banned, we will try to be the very best at short yardage situations. We’ve got a lot of ideas there, but I think it’s a credit to using our personnel in a way. There aren’t that many teams that have 600-pound squat quarterbacks and that offensive line. Listen, if there were any injury concern, I would be concerned.”
For now, he’s not buying the idea that the play has a heightened injury risk.
“I want to know what data there is,” Lurie said. “I don’t think there is any. If you want to say that it could be, it’s hard to make rules on could be’s and should be’s. The quarterback sneak is one of the reasons we like using the tush push, we think it’s a safer play than the quarterback sneak. . . . The quarterback sneak, if you talk to quarterbacks about it, there’s more spearing going on. They’re less protected by players around them. One of the reasons we got motivated to develop an expertise in this play is it was more protective to the quarterback.
“It’s ironic that people would bring up health and safety. We’re at the top of the game in terms of wanting health and safety on every play. We voted for hip drop tackle and defenseless receiver. We will always, always support what is safer for the players. It’s a no-brainer. If this is proven to be less safe for the players, we will be against the tush push. But until that’s the case, to me, there’d be no reason to ban this play.”
Then there’s the concern that it doesn’t look like football.
“You know what?” Lurie said. “I remember reading about the forward pass, and they said it really was an odd play that is no part of American football. It was controversial when the forward pass came out. I think aestheticism is very subjective. I’ve never judged whether a play looks OK. Does a screen pass look better than an in-route or an out-route? I don’t know. To me, it’s not a very relevant critique that it doesn’t look right or something like that. I don’t know what looks right. Scoring. We like to win and score.”
Ultimately, it comes down to whether 24 or more owners are willing to eliminate the ability to push a ballcarrier. Whatever they do, they should make a final decision and stick with it. It’s not good for anyone to have the question linger.
Everyone knows what the play is. Everyone knows how it came to be. Keep it or get rid of it. Make a decision, and stick to it.
