DJ Moore Is Carrying a Receiving Room That Has Almost Nobody Behind Him
The depth chart at wide receiver tells you everything you need to know before you read a single injury report. DJ Moore is producing at 85% of what a true starter should. Dante Pettis, the next man up, is at 9%. Trent Sherfield is at 4%. Those aren't depth numbers — they're a cliff edge with a thin rope dangling off it, and right now the Bills are hanging from that rope with two hands while Keon Coleman stands on the sideline in a walking boot.
Coleman's foot injury, which kept him out of practice this week, is the number that reframes everything else. He caught 40 passes for 450 yards and five touchdowns in 14 games last season — a legitimate complementary piece in this offense. Lose him for any stretch of the regular season and the Bills are functionally asking Moore to carry a receiving group whose backup production, in aggregate, barely registers. The front office already knew this was a problem. They signed Dante Pettis on July 30 specifically to address it, adding a veteran with seven years of NFL experience to a room that had already lost Tyrell Shavers to the PUP list and watched a newly signed receiver fail his physical on the first day of camp. Pettis was the patch on the patch. Now the patch needs a patch.
What makes this genuinely alarming rather than just inconvenient is that the Bills haven't solved the structural problem — they've been managing around it. Khalil Shakir had a strong 2025, finishing with 876 receiving yards and four touchdowns, and he's active. But the depth behind Moore and Shakir is so thin that the organization is already publicly considering free-agent additions before Week 1 arrives. That's not a sign of aggressive roster building. That's triage.
The harder question is what the available options actually look like. The free-agent market for wide receivers at this point in the calendar is not a buffet. It's whatever's left after 32 teams have already made their moves. The Bills got Pettis in late July; the names circulating now will be a tier below that. My read is that the front office understands this, which is why the Coleman situation is being watched so closely — because the difference between "Coleman misses a week of camp" and "Coleman misses the first month of the season" is the difference between a manageable problem and a genuine offensive crisis.
Josh Allen threw for 4,224 yards and 29 touchdowns last season behind one of the better offensive lines in the league. The Torrence extension in August locked up the right guard spot for four years. The infrastructure around Allen is being invested in deliberately and expensively. But infrastructure only matters if the skill positions can use it, and right now Buffalo is one Coleman setback away from asking Allen to win games with Moore, a journeyman veteran, and a receiver who barely played last year. That's not a championship-caliber supporting cast. That's a quarterback being asked to do too much — which, if you remember the 33-30 loss to Denver in January, is exactly the kind of situation Buffalo cannot afford to recreate.