Franklin Gets His Game Back. Gardner-Johnson Doesn't.

The appeals process split the two Bills spitting cases down the middle. Sam Franklin Jr.'s one-game suspension was overturned by a hearing officer and converted to a fine. Franklin had denied the incident occurred at all. C.J. Gardner-Johnson's suspension, meanwhile, was upheld — Gardner-Johnson had already apologized publicly for spitting toward Raiders players, which left him with considerably less ground to stand on at the hearing.

So the secondary gets Franklin back, and Gardner-Johnson serves his game. For a unit with only one cornerback logging meaningful snaps and no reliable depth behind the starting safeties, the difference between losing one DB and losing two is not trivial. Franklin is the team's special teams captain and the third safety on the depth chart behind Gardner-Johnson and Geno Stone. Having him available keeps the rotation from getting genuinely threadbare.

The Gardner-Johnson absence is still the bigger problem. He's the top-producing safety on the roster, and the depth chart behind him is thin enough that Buffalo will be leaning on Stone and Franklin to cover for a starter-caliber player. That's manageable for one game. It's the kind of thing that gets harder if anyone else goes down.

The spitting story is effectively closed now. What remains is a secondary that was already stretched before any of this started — and one game where the Bills will find out exactly how stretched it is.