The first week of the 2026 season featured three fouls that will count toward possible suspensions.
Bills defensive back Sam Franklin was fined $9,425 for a blindside block, Packers defensive back Evan Williams was fined $7,087 for a hit on a defenseless player, and Dolphins cornerback Chris Johnson was fined $17,911 for a hip-drop tackle.
Under a new rule adopted for this year, players who pick up three fouls for five specific player safety rules will be suspended. The three fouls above all qualify under the rule as well as fouls for horse-collar tackles and launching. The suspension would come into effect for three violations of the same rule.
Players can appeal the fines and any player that ends the season with one violation of a rule will get 50 percent of the fine paid back to them.
Bills Clips
After defeating the Lions on Thursday night, the Bills will have a long weekend to rest up and heal before hosting the Chargers in Week 3.
That’s good news for a club that has a pair of key players banged up.
Head coach Joe Brady did not have much of an update on receiver DJ Moore — who exited the game with a shoulder injury — or Ed Oliver, who was inactive after injuring his hip during pregame warm-ups.
“We’re still obviously going through [it],” Brady said. “One of the perks of the Thursday night game, not a lot of perks, but one of the perks of it is you do get that long weekend, and guys will recover. So we don’t practice again until next Wednesday. No different than any other — we’ll see how these guys are going to recover and how their body will take it. As you guys who have been around DJ or know DJ’s past, he’s as tough as they come. So, if he can be out there, he’ll be out there.
"[Oliver is] another guy, we’ll just see how he’s progressing,” Brady added. “The guys that are getting tests and MRIs and all that, they’re getting that now.”
Additionally, Brady noted that running back Ty Johnson and defensive lineman T.J. Sanders were close to playing against the Lions. With the extended break before Week 3, both may be able to be back for Buffalo’s next game.
The Bills will host the Chargers on Sunday, Sept. 27.
The Bills have started the season with two wins over two teams that entered the season as favorites to win their divisions. They have to be pleased with their 36-31 win over the Texans and their 41-31 win over the Lions.
At least, they have to be pleased with scoring 36 and 41 points in their first two games. Giving up 31 points in each game is not so pleasing.
In fact, the Bills are just the third team ever to start the season 2-0 despite giving up more than 30 points in both games. Previously, the 2000 Rams won their first two games by scores of 41-36 and 37-34, and the 1991 Bills won their first two games 35-31 and 52-34.
Via Josh Dubow of the Associated Press, only four teams in NFL history have given up 62 or more points while starting 2-0: This year’s Bills, those 2000 Rams and 1991 Bills, and the 2018 Chiefs.
The good news for the Bills is, the three previous teams to give up 62 or more points while starting 2-0 made the playoffs. The bad news is, all three of them lost in the postseason — and all three of them gave up more than 30 points in those losses.
The Bills’ offense looks great through two weeks of the season. It remains to be seen whether they can win a championship with this defense.
The Bills christened their new stadium with both the American and Canadian national anthems, with the quartet known as Barenaked Ladies singing O Canada before kickoff. It was not a political statement, at a time of plenty of friction between the respective governments.
“For us, it’s all about the business,” Bills chief operating officer Pete Guelli said, via Tim Graham of The Athletic. “This is part of a broader marketing effort into Southern Ontario and Toronto. It’s been a critical part of our business model, and it’s going to continue to be. This has been in the works prior to anything that’s come up on the [geopolitical] front.”
At one point, the Bills played a small handful of regular-season games in Toronto, with the goal of expanding the team’s footprint.
“Buffalo’s a small market, but when you combine it with the Greater Toronto Area, it’s a top-five NFL market,” Guelli said. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 percent of our PSL holders are Canadian. Our waiting list is closer to 20 percent.
“We’ve built a multibillion-dollar stadium and firmed up this team in our market for the next 30-plus years; Canada was an important part of that and always will be.”
The Bills will play the Canadian anthem before every home game, to the likely chagrin of those who inexplicably have beef with our neighbors to the north.
It certainly didn’t look like anything was out of the ordinary for Josh Allen during Thursday night’s 41-31 victory over the Lions to open the new Highmark Stadium.
But after the game, Prime Video analyst Richard Sherman revealed Allen had been feeling ill leading up to kickoff.
With Allen and Dion Dawkins next to him on the postgame show, Sherman said that Allen needed an IV and was “shivering in a hot tub.”
Allen sat somewhat stone-faced and did not confirm or deny what Sherman had said.
But Allen’s head coach, Joe Brady, may have also subtly referred to Allen’s pre-kickoff illness.
“You watch how [Allen] plays, and it’s like, how does everyone else not feel like they need to empty it out,” Brady said postgame, via Matt Parrino of nyup.com. “Because he literally gave everything he had out there. He put the team on his back in a lot of those situations.”
Allen finished the contest 20-of-31 passing for 248 yards with three touchdowns. He also rushed for 69 yards with two TDs.
The Bills shredded the Lions on Thursday night for 41 points and 446 yards. After the game, linebacker Jack Campbell addressed Detroit’s defensive performance while fighting back tears on multiple occasions.
Jeff Skversy of Fox 29 posted the video of the locker-room session with the 2023 first-round pick, who signed a four-year, $81 million extension in the offseason.
“It’s on me,” Campbell said. “I gotta be better. And I ain’t got no other thing to do than look in the mirror and be better, so that’s really where it starts. It starts with us.”
He said the run defense was the most frustrating part of the performance.
“Just guys not getting off blocks, not doing their job,” Campbell said.
He was asked if something didn’t feel right going into the game.
“No, just — I mean, every time I lace up my cleats, I’m going 100 percent,” Campbell said. “Yeah, put it on me. I played terrible, so I gotta be better, especially for the offense and for all these guys in the locker room.”
Were they doing anything special schematically?
“No,” he said. “Just played bad. . . . I don’t know how to explain it. You just feel like you’re letting your teammates down, honestly. And that’s what it is. I just gotta be better, so.”
The good news for the Lions is they get some extra time before their next game — and the next three before the bye are objectively winnable: Jets, at Panthers, at Cardinals.
If all goes well, they’ll be 4-1 with two weeks to get ready for back-to-back home games against the Packers and Vikings. If they should lose one, or two, of the next three games, there will be plenty of soul searching during the early-season break.
And more questions about whether the Super Bowl window has indeed closed.
Josh Allen’s skills were on display in Buffalo’s win over the Lions on Thursday night and his performance was the latest reason why any quarterback should be excited about being compared to the Bills star.
That was where Ravens defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver went when he was asked about Saints quarterback Tyler Shough at a Thursday press conference. Weaver said that he believes the “sky’s the limit” for the second-year quarterback during an answer that included a comparison to Allen.
“Yes, I like that kid,” Weaver said, via a transcript from the team. “We played them towards the latter half of the year when I was in Miami last year, and I was impressed with him then as a rookie. He reminds me a little bit of like a poor-mans Josh Allen. Has all the arm talent in the world [and] can run. I don’t think he gets enough credit for how good [of] an athlete he is. So, particularly as you get down to the low red [zone], we are constantly going to be conscious of just his ability to scramble and create those extended plays.”
Calling someone a “poor-mans” version of something could be seen as damning with faint praise, but Shough is preparing to make his 11th NFL start so anything that brings Allen to mind is a good sign for where his career can go. A win over the Ravens would be a step toward getting there, but Weaver isn’t going to get caught off guard this Sunday.
Thursday night was a good night for the Bills on most fronts, but one exception was the shoulder injury that knocked wide receiver DJ Moore out of the game in the second quarter.
Moore was ruled out for the rest of the night after halftime and head coach Joe Brady had no update on his condition in his postgame press conference. On Friday morning, Adam Schefter of ESPN reported that Moore avoided a major injury and is considered day-to-day moving into Week 3.
The Bills will have extended time before hosting the Chargers on September 27, which should help Moore’s chances of making it back into the lineup without missing a game.
Moore did not have a catch before leaving the game, but did run once for one-yard loss. He had five catches for 100 yards and a touchdown in Week 1.
Josh Allen had a lot of big games in the old Highmark Stadium, but it’s hard to top the one he came up with for the first game in the new one.
Allen opened the game with a one-yard touchdown run and then went on to throw three scores while running for another one in a 41-31 win that pushed the Bills to 2-0 on the season. He now has four games with at least three passing touchdowns and two rushing scores in his career and he’s the first quarterback with five passing touchdowns and four rushing scores through the first two games of a season.
Those would be special results under any circumstances, but they hit even harder in the first game on a new field. Allen said after the game that being in the spotlight in the new stadium meant something extra to him.
“I think at the national anthem, I caught myself like taking it all in and understanding my job is the coolest thing in the world,” Allen said, via the team’s website. “It’s everything that I’ve ever wanted to be the quarterback of an NFL franchise. And I’m just very fortunate that I ended up here in Buffalo and got to be the first quarterback to open this stadium. It’s a special spot.”
No one is calling the new Highmark Stadium “The House that Josh Allen Built” at the moment, but there’s little doubt that he’ll be the center of attention in every game he plays in the building and they just might come up with a way to name it after him if he can cap off the first season in its history with the first Super Bowl title in franchise history.
Many teams choose to defer to the second half after winning the coin toss before games, but Bills head coach Joe Brady did not do that on Thursday night.
Brady elected to take the ball to start the first game at his team’s new stadium and that turned out to be a wise move. Running back James Cook ran three times for 23 yards while quarterback Josh Allen completed two passes for 22 yards and ran four times for 40 yards, including a one-yard touchdown to set off a frenzied celebration in the team’s new home.
“I’ve said all along, it was important for us, and I wanted to take the ball in this environment and set the tone,” Brady said, via WGR. “I thought we had some good third downs, we finished in the end zone, and that stadium was electric. That was the start that we needed.”
Brady was remembering another drive involving third downs because the Bills never faced one on that trip to the end zone, but that’s understandable because his team had six touchdown drives over the course of the 41-31 win. All of that success can run together, especially when it plays out to a soundtrack of joyful Bills fans celebrating a memorable night in franchise history.
