Rousseau Is Playing Well. The Ground Beneath Him Is Shaky.

Greg Rousseau is listed Active and has been one of the quieter good-news stories of Buffalo's early season — a pass rusher doing his job on the edge while the interior around him has been a revolving door of suspensions, injuries, and thin depth. That contrast is worth noting right now.

The interior situation is familiar ground by this point. T.J. Sanders remains Questionable, Greg Gaines is the starter at defensive tackle and hasn't been dominant, and Phidarian Mathis only just cleared his three-game suspension last week. The depth chart behind those names is essentially empty in terms of meaningful snaps. When the pocket does get pressured from the outside — when Rousseau does his job — there's real question about whether the interior holds long enough to matter.

The edge-versus-interior imbalance is a structural problem, not a personnel one that gets fixed with a single return or signing. My pieces on Sanders and Mathis over the past two weeks have tracked this. Rousseau being healthy and effective is genuinely good. It just doesn't solve what's happening between the tackles.

Worth watching as October deepens: whether opponents start scheming away from Rousseau's side entirely, putting more weight on an interior that has already shown it can be leaned on.