close
close

Can Keon Coleman become the Bills’ next No. 1 receiver?

Gillberg
Can Keon Coleman become the Bills’ next No. 1 receiver?

The Buffalo Bills are in the midst of a rebuild on both ends of the ball. That’s certainly true of the receiving corps, as there are more new faces than there were before. Gone are Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis, the team’s former alphas. Now, it’s almost entirely new receivers: Curtis Samuel, Marques Valdes-Scantling, Chase Claypool, Mack Hollins and KJ Hamler are among those trying to get used to catching Josh Allen’s frozen ropes in Joe Brady’s passing game… which, by the way, is Brady’s first full season in Orchard Park.

While tight ends Dawson Knox and Dalton Kincaid should be expected to be important pieces of the passing game — Knox has a four-year, $52 million contract extension with $31.2 million guaranteed, and Kincaid was the team’s first-round pick in 2023 out of Utah — you could also argue that when it comes to having a true alpha receiver — whether you think teams need one or not — it could come in the form of Keon Coleman, the Bills’ first-round pick in 2024. Buffalo got Coleman with the first pick in the second round because they saw him as a big, fast, ball-winning player with those key attributes.

“I think his style of play is what we needed in our offense,” Allen recently told NFL Network. “I talked to our offensive coordinator (Joe Brady), our quarterbacks coach (Ronald Curry), (general manager) Brandon Beane and, of course, coach (Sean) McDermott, a guy that’s big and can win a back-shoulder fade and isn’t afraid to be a physical receiver.

“I think you pair him with some of the guys we have in our room right now, I think Mack Hollins has been a great addition so far to this room with his mentality, his mindset is contagious to others. Curtis Samuel, he shows up every day ready to work. … If you start pairing those guys with Dawson (Knox) ​​and Coleman in that mix now, we’re going to have a pretty solid group working together.”

As he made clear to me when I spoke to him recently, Allen is not at all shy about congratulating the rookie.

When you watch Coleman’s video with Florida State in 2023, and even his video with Michigan State in 2022, you can see why the Bills are excited. Allen is a quarterback who likes to extend plays in and out of the pocket for the promise of a big reward downfield. Last season, Coleman caught eight passes of 20 yards or more on 24 targets for 257 yards and four touchdowns, and he did it in an offense that didn’t feature the deep ball. Florida State quarterbacks completed just 23 deep passes all season, according to Pro Football Focus.

But when a guy with Josh Allen’s arm throws the ball? Yeah, you can see things like that right away.

That could also work in Allen’s favor. Everyone knows Allen has one of the best long arms in the NFL, but it takes two to tango. Without a consistent, big-time long receiver last season, Allen completed just 29 long passes on 82 targets for 962 yards, eight touchdowns, nine interceptions and a 73.4 passer rating.

And while Coleman isn’t the fastest straight-line receiver in this draft class — his 40-yard dash time of 4.61 seconds at the scouting combine was in the 17th percentile among receivers since 1999 — his 10-yard dash time of 1.54 seconds was excellent for his size, and you see some of that short-yardage separation on tape.

Of course, all that fantasy goes out the window when you have a gigantic receiver who can just Godzilla any cornerback in press coverage – which is becoming more and more of a thing in the NFL.

Sure, Coleman will need to work on some of the nuances of the game — his route-running palette was limited mostly to hitches, screens, go balls and the occasional corner or over — but that can be expanded over time. But it’s easy to see in the abstract why the Bills are so interested in Coleman’s potential.

If you view Coleman as a potential DK Metcalf-style player who could leverage his unusual physical gifts for short-term production, and become that guy no one wants to deal with down the road once the little things are all plugged in, that might not be too far from the truth.

Related Posts