Buffalo Bills

Safety Sam Franklin will be sticking around Buffalo.

Franklin joined the Bills late last summer and appeared in all 19 games that the team played during the 2025 season. He’s set to play in a lot more games for them because Jeremy Fowler of ESPN reports that he’s agreed to a three-year deal with the team.

The contract is reportedly worth up to $7.5 million with $5 million set to come Franklin’s way in the first two seasons.

Franklin saw almost all of his playing time on special teams in 2025 and had 13 tackles on the year. He was also a core special teamer over five seasons in Carolina before moving on last year.

Bills owner Terry Pegula caused a stir when he singled out receiver Keon Coleman as a coaching-staff draft selection in the press conference just after firing former head coach Sean McDermott.

Since then, new head coach Joe Brady, General Manager Brandon Beane, and quarterback Josh Allen have all come to Coleman’s defense as the young wideout heads into his third season.

In his Tuesday press conference at this year’s scouting combine, Beane was asked what Buffalo needs to see from Coleman in order to trust him.

“I think we need to see Keon have the offseason he had a year ago, which was excellent,” Beane said. “We couldn’t have asked for anything more. He came to Phase I, Phase II, all that stuff, dialed in, ready to go. You could tell he’d been working out and then, a lot of the people here were at training camp. He had an excellent camp. Let’s do that again. And then not, you know, some of the things we’ve talked about is just, it’s the maturity, it’s the off the field, that can get in the way.

“I’ve been in this league 28 this will be 29 seasons. I’ve seen that many times get in the way of people’s opportunities to grow and not only on the field, but expand their net worth off the field. And so that is kind of the challenge to Keon. Can you go back and do what you did all offseason and your training camp? And you know, if you remember, he had a great game, game one against Baltimore. Don’t let some of the maturity issues off the field affect the product on the field. If he does that, he’ll have every chance. I know we’ve got some new coaches, and they’re excited to meet him and get to work with him, and were aware of him in the draft process a couple years ago. And so they kind of want to, you know, try to start mold them in the way they see and envision him for our team.”

Coleman, the No. 33 overall pick of the 2024 draft, caught 38 passes for 404 yards with four touchdowns in 13 games with six starts in 2025. That came after his rookie season, in which he caught 29 passes for 556 yards with four TDs in 13 games.

Tight end Dawson Knox’s contract has been a topic of conversation for Bills General Manager Brandon Beane in the early days of the offseason.

Knox is heading into the final year of his contract and is set to have a cap number of $17.068 million for the 2026 season. Beane called that “a tough number” while speaking to reporters from the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis on Tuesday and said the team has had conversations with the tight end about ways to proceed.

Releasing Knox would clear over $9.6 million in cap room, but leave $7.4 million in dead money. Beane said that there is still time to come up with other solutions that would lower Knox’s cap hit while keeping him in Buffalo.

“We’re not to the point where we need to do anything yet. We’ll continue those,” Beane said, via Sal Capaccio of WGR. “Like many decisions we have, we’re down to a couple weeks to make those. So there’s no answer. There’s no resolution in the next 24 hours or anything like that, but the discussions have happened and they’ll be done.”

Knox was a 2019 third-round pick and has spent his entire career with the Bills. He had 36 catches for 417 yards and four touchdowns last season.

One of the hot topics on Tuesday at the Scouting Combine was the future of Eagles receiver A.J. Brown. And while the Eagles are saying all the right things regarding Brown’s future in Philly, odds as to his next team have emerged.

At DraftKings, the current favorites are the Eagles, at -130.

Next on the list is the Patriots, at +275. The Chargers land at +750, with the Bills at +900.

A return to the Titans is a +1000 bet. The Raiders are +1400, with the 49ers, Dolphins, and Ravens at +1600.

Eagles G.M. Howie Roseman made it clear that they’ll listen to any team that makes any offers about Brown or any other player. The question is whether another team will make the Eagles an offer they won’t refuse.

Graffiti at the new Bills stadium shut down construction for nearly a week. And a six-figure reward offered by the general contractor on the project has boosted the effort to crack the case.

Via WBEN, the investigation has focused on two construction workers as “primary suspects” for the vandalism of four luxury suites in the facility.

A $100,000 reward was offered by Gilbane|Turner. It prompted, per WBEN, a “flood of calls” to a tip line.

The graffiti consisted of “spray-painted pornographic images, quite a few of them,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz recently told WIVB. “It seemed to be stating that an individual was LGBTQ because of the way the statements were made. Everything about it is bad, attacking someone for their sexual orientation is bad.”

The vandalism caused significant damage to the stadium.

“The estimate that I’ve received today is, it costs more than $150,000 in damage because it’s a lot of work that has to be redone,” Poloncarz said. “With the way the paint was used, you can’t just wipe it off. It’s permanently damaged, some areas where they have to take tile off the wall, retile, redo items.”

The stadium is due to open in 2026.

The Bills will bring defensive tackle Phidarian Mathis back for the 2026 season.

The team announced that Mathis has signed a new one-year deal with the team. He was set to become an unrestricted free agent next month.

The Bills also confirmed that they have re-signed offensive lineman Alec Anderson to a one-year deal.

Mathis had 13 tackles in six games for the Bills last season. He also appeared in one playoff game.

Mathis played in 23 games over three seasons with Washington before making the move to Buffalo. He had 25 tackles and a fumble recovery during his time with the NFC East squad.

The Bills will be moving into a new stadium for the 2026 season and they’ll commemorate the moment with a patch on their jerseys.

The team unveiled the design for a patch that they’ll wear for their first home game at the new Highmark Stadium. The date for that game will be revealed later in the offseason when the 2026 schedule is announced.

A Bills logo is depicted over a rendering of the new stadium with “Inaugural Season” and 2026 on the top and bottom of the circular design.

The Dolphins, Patriots, Jets, Chiefs, Chargers, Bears, Lions, and Ravens will be visiting Buffalo during the regular season and the identity of the first opponent will be announced with the rest of the schedule.

Competition Committee co-chairman Rich McKay does not expect there to be a lot of rules changes heading into the 2026 season, but his group is discussing many aspects of the game this week as they prepare for any proposed tweaks to the current rulebook.

One area that has come up in meetings are the rules that govern what is or isn’t a catch. That part of the game came back into focus during the divisional round of the playoffs when a long pass to Bills wide receiver Brandin Cooks was ruled an interception after the ball moved from Cooks’ hands to Broncos safety Ja’Quan McMillian as the wideout hit the ground. Officials ruled that Cooks did not fulfill the rules for possessing the ball before McMillian took it away, which was disputed by former Bills head coach Sean McDermott and others after the Broncos went on to win the game.

It also appeared to be a different ruling than officials came up with on similar plays at other points during the season and McKay said on Sunday that the committee “had a long discussion” related to the catch rules. He also said that the way plays look when subjected to replay has to be part of any conversation about how the rules are written moving forward.

“I think the issue on catch/no catch is that our technology today is just extraordinary,” McKay said, via longtime NFL reporter Mark Maske. “And so the ability to go frame by frame and slow things down is . . . a great solution for a lot of things, but it does present challenges for others. And you need to make sure that your rules as written don’t just match up [with] what’s on the field, but how it’s looked at in replay.”

The lack of a full replay review or full explanation of the ultimate ruling on the field during the Bills-Broncos game didn’t help create confidence that the ruling was the correct one. It’s unclear if a change to how the rules are written would have avoided the ensuing controversy, but the lack of other proposals could lead the committee to devote more time to devising language that would avoid the same kind of conjecture about future plays.

Bills offensive lineman Alec Anderson will stay in Buffalo in 2026.

Anderson signed a one-year, $3 million contract with $1.8 million guaranteed, his agent told Ian Rapoport of NFL Network.

After originally signing as an undrafted free agent out of UCLA in 2022, Anderson has played his entire career in Buffalo, spending two years on the practice squad before making the active roster for the last two seasons. Anderson would have become a restricted free agent, but now the Bills have locked him up.

A versatile lineman who can play center, guard or tackle, Anderson has played every game for the last two years, with six starts. He’ll have a chance to compete for a starting job in 2026.

Bills tackle Dion Dawkins has beef with JetBlue.

Via Jenna Lemoncelli of the New York Post, the Bills tackle recently claimed that employees of the airline stole items from his fiancé’s bag during a recent flight from Los Angeles to Ft. Lauderdale.

Dawkins said jewelry and “Rolex watches” were taken.

“We take these reports very seriously and have launched a thorough investigation into the matter,” a JetBlue spokesperson said in a statement to WIVB.com. “In addition to conducting a comprehensive internal review, we will coordinate closely with law enforcement and other airport authorities to support their efforts and help ensure the issue is fully addressed.”

Dawkins should do more than complain on social media. He should file a police report. The authorities should investigate. It can’t be very hard to figure out which employees had access to the bags from the moment they were dropped off to the moment they slide onto the belt.