In six days, the Bills will host the first regular-season game at their new stadium. On the second new field there.
The team decided to replace the grass after only two preseason games.
Via Tim Graham of The Athletic, NFL field expert Nick Pappas explained what went wrong with the first field installed there.
“The aspect of the field that appeared to be an issue was that there were major deformations happening, large divoting outside of what we typically see at many of our NFL grass fields — although not something we haven’t seen before,” Pappas told Graham. “That lent itself to say there was an opportunity to improve that surface, and that’s what the Bills have stepped up to do and made that decision to replace it.”
Pappas explained that, whenever a new stadium is built, “There’s a period before it gets turned over to Bills staff. So, you’re now reliant on the general contractor or the installation company for maintenance over a certain period of time.”
He attributed the situation to a “combination of the sod quality from the start, the challenges, and maybe the management up until the Bills’ grounds crew were able to take over, and then you couple it with a very new growing environment that needs to be worked through.”
Pappas said the new sod “will come in thicker” than the prior version.
The next challenge becomes preparing the field for three home games in three weeks: Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.
Pappas thinks another replacement will likely happen during the season.
“Recovery needs to outpace usage,” he said. “But if the weather is great and all goes well over that three-game stand, maybe they’re looking at Week 8 to replace it, or they can look at the weather and say, ‘Hey, based on where we are today, we have three weeks to recover. We can bring the grow lights out. We can provide our agronomic program with fertility and grow it back.’”
Given the weather challenges in Buffalo, Pappas said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Bills need three or four fields per year.
That’s one of the reasons why some teams prefer artificial turf. It’s cheaper. It doesn’t require constant evaluation.
But if teams and owners care about giving their players the surface they prefer, it’s worth the money and the effort. Despite the challenges the Bills are facing, they deserve credit for trying to give the players the best possible surface.
Bills Clips
Bills quarterback Josh Allen has a 96-46 record as a starter in regular-season and postseason games. That’s a 67.6-percent success rate.
Against Sunday’s opponent, he’s right on the Mendoza line.
Allen holds a sluggish 1-4 career record against the Texans, and 0-4 in Houston.
The Week 1 game happens in Houston.
Most recently, Allen was sacked a career-high eight times in a 23-19 Thursday night loss in Houston. He had two interceptions and no touchdown passes in the game.
Countering his one career win against the Texans are eight playoff victories. Per NBC Sports research, that’s the most for any quarterback who did not play in a Super Bowl.
As he starts the ninth year of his career, the clock is ticking. The pressure is increasing. While the postseason narrative can’t change until January, Allen has a chance to alter his history in Houston by finally getting a win there, in his fifth try.
The Bills have three players on their final injury report ahead of Sunday’s game in Houston.
Head coach Joe Brady announced that defensive lineman T.J. Sanders, running back Ty Johnson, and defensive back Jordan Hancock are all listed as questionable.
Sanders, who is listed as a starter on the team’s depth chart, missed Thursday’s practice with a knee injury, but was back on the field at the open portion of Friday’s workout.
“Something that showed up in practice. It was just a little tweak or something, but all is well,” Brady said, via the team’s website.
Johnson missed a month with a hamstring injury before returning to practice this week. Hancock is dealing with a quad injury.
The Patriots are going to have to bounce back from their season-opening loss to the Seahawks without the help of wide receiver A.J. Brown.
Brown suffered a high-ankle sprain in his Patriots debut on Wednesday night and Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that the team is going to place him on their injured reserve list. Brown will miss at least the next four games before he will be eligible to return to action for New England.
The Patriots will host the Steelers in Week 2 and then head on the road for games against the Jaguars and Bills. Week 5 will bring them back home for a game against the Raiders.
Romeo Doubs, who had a crucial drop in Seattle, will now be at the top of the receiver depth chart for the Patriots. Mack Hollins, Pop Douglas, Kyle Williams, and Efton Chism are the other wideouts on the 53-man roster.
Patriots wide receiver A.J. Brown’s ankle injury is expected to keep him out for an extended period of time.
According to multiple reports, an MRI on Thursday confirmed that Brown suffered a high-ankle sprain when he was injured during Wednesday night’s 13-10 loss to the Seahawks. Those reports also say that Brown is expected to miss at least four weeks while he recovers from the injury. That time frame would make him a candidate for injured reserve, but there’s no word on the team’s plans at this point.
The Patriots face a run of 2025 playoff teams during the first weeks of Brown’s expected absence. They host the Steelers in Week 2 before traveling to Jacksonville and Buffalo for their next two games.
Navigating that stretch without Brown will be tougher and it’s not an ideal start to the wideout’s tenure with the team. Drake Maye is coming off a three-interception fourth quarter in Seattle on Wednesday that also featured a crucial drop by Romeo Doubs. Doubs was the most prominent addition to the receiving corps for most of the offseason and the team will need him to thrive in a prominent role to get the offense on track without Brown.
A perusal of the many published predictions for the 2026 season finds a lot of support for the Bills and Texans as two of the strongest teams in the AFC.
One of them is likely to exit Week 1 with an 0-1 record, however. The two teams will meet in Houston on Sunday afternoon in a matchup that Texans defensive end Will Anderson believes will be a preview of one of the games that both teams hope to be playing in come January.
“This is an AFC Championship matchup,” Anderson said in a Wednesday press conference. “Two really good teams. We have a ton of respect for them. Josh Allen leading the way, really great offensive line. James Cook, best running back in the league. . . . The type of atmosphere that I’m feeling like it’s gonna be on Sunday is gonna be that AFC Championship-type feel.”
The Texans pass rush got the best of Allen and the Bills last November. Anderson had 2.5 sacks in that game and the Texans will be looking for something similar as they try to get an early leg up in the race for the actual AFC Championship Game.
The Buffalo Bills will be opening their new home with a special welcome to their neighbors from the north.
Yes, near the shores of Lake Ontario, an American football team will play the Canadian national anthem before kickoff of a game.
The Bills have announced that both anthems will be played prior to the start of next Thursday night’s showdown with the Lions. It comes at a time when tensions are high between the respectve governments over trade issues, but when the citizens of the two countries have little or no real animosity between them.
Canada has been our next-door neighbor for a very long time. And most Americans are wired to act neighborly. In this specific instance, the Bills are making a very neighborly gesture.
Still,it’s just a matter of time before someone who once wanted to buy the Bills has something to say about this. In all caps. Perhaps with a dash of AI slop. Before thanking us for our attention to this matter.
The Bills fired coach Sean McDermott two days after an overtime loss to the Broncos in the divisional round of the playoffs. That’s not stopping McDermott from rooting for his former team — or from believing that they can get farther in the first year after his exit than McDermott took them in nine seasons on the job.
“With what they’ve done, the moves that Brandon Beane has made, and the activity they’ve had on the roster, just so over the last, you know, ‘X’ amount of months has, I think, been very important,” McDermott told Rich Eisen on Friday. “And so I think, if you’re betting on the Super Bowl contender, they’re certainly one of them. I don’t see why, you know, why you wouldn’t bet on them? Because the games, at the end of the day, have to be played, right? It’s one thing on paper, but it’s another thing to play the gams.”
Eisen asked whether this means McDermott envisions a Rams-Bills Super Bowl, which would be a rematch of their Week 5 Monday night showdown.
“It';; be Bills-Rams,” McDermott said. “It’d be a great Super Bowl. Those Rams. Listen, people ask me all the time, ‘Hey, do you still root for your old team?’ And I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Right? Of course I do. I mean, the impact that you want to have as a head coach on a team and a community, that’s one thing. But, man oh man, the impact that that team, that building, and that community had on me and my family, we’ll remember that for the rest of our lives, Rich, and that’s part of sports, right? The wins and the losses are important, but it’s, like, the impact you leave, or that is left on people and the fan base and them on you, and that’s the real part of sports.”
In the NFL, the real part of the game is that plenty of coaches are shown the door, after every season. McDermott was one of 10 who left, voluntarily or otherwise, after the 2025 season. And he’s clearly hoping that, after the 2026 season, he’ll have a chance to fill one of the inevitable vacancies to come.
Which means that his freedom to root for the Bills and only the Bills may be short-lived. Come 2027, McDermott could be coaching another team in the AFC — and possibly another team in the AFC East, if there’s eventually an opening with the Jets.
Carl Spackler is having his day.
With the Bills ripping up the grass at their new stadium after only two preseason games and installing a new one for the regular-season home opener, various grass experts have sounded off. Tim Graham of The Athletic has collected and published their comments.
The legendary George Toma said this as to the failed field: “That hurts me. That’s terrible to happen at all, but so soon? Somebody fell asleep.”
Another “award-winning sports agronomist” with extensive experience installing pro and college surfaces, but who requested anonymity for apparent fear of Big Sod, said that it was “the worst sod I’ve seen in the NFL in my career. I can’t even imagine how that could have happened.”
Added Tony Dick, sports management professor at Baldwin Wallace University and former Cleveland Browns assistant head groundskeeper: "[N]atural turf is safer in a perfect setting. But if you have the situation like you have in Buffalo — and I went back and watched the film — you cannot tell me that field was safer than the artificial turf they just left. . . . I’m never putting Josh Allen on a field in that condition.”
The Bills had this to say about the issue, via Graham: “We have consulted with the NFL and an independent expert who works with multiple NFL teams. These consultants recommended utilizing this three-week window before the home opener to install the sod. The NFL inspects every field and determines whether it meets league standards. We are confident that they are the appropriate group to ensure the field performs at the necessary level.”
Still, the unnamed agronomist is skeptical. “They will have a difficult time,” he said. “There’s so much going wrong, and there’s so little time. If that field makes it through the second game, I’ll be shocked.”
Professor Dick offered a prediction: “You might have artificial turf back in there within three years, just because it’s safer than whatever that was.”
The first test of Sod 2.0 is only 13 days away. That’s when the Bills host the Lions, the first of three Buffalo games in three weekends.
The Bills announced their practice squad additions on Monday.
They include quarterback Shane Buechele, who the Bills cut on Sunday. He rejoins a quarterbacks room with Josh Allen and Kyle Allen.
Buechele played the entire game in the preseason finale, completing 26 of 38 passes for 196 yards.
The Bills added three players who were not with the team in training camp, as wide receiver Greg Dortch, linebacker Shaq Thompson and offensive tackle Jedrick Wills Jr. agreed to join their practice squad.
Willis was the 10th overall pick in 2020 whom the Bears released Sunday. He missed the 20205 season while rehabbing.
The other players on the Bills’ practice squad are offensive guard Nick Broeker, defensive lineman Travis Clayton, defensive back Te’Cory Couch, running back Frank Gore Jr., wide receiver Stephen Gosnell, inside linebacker Keonta Jenkins, outside linebacker Andre Jones Jr., offensive tackle Chase Lundt, wide receiver Ja’Mori Maclin, wide receiver Trent Sherfield Sr., safety Geno Stone, cornerback Kani Walker and cornerback Anthony Kendall.
