The week after they faced arguably the best receiver in football in Puka Nacua, the Buffalo Bills will see the NFL’s best receiving tight on Sunday when they face the Las Vegas Raiders.
That is no slight to Dalton Kincaid, or George Kittle, Trey McBride, Sam LaPorta, or any of the other excellent tight ends in today’s increasingly tight-end happy league.
Brock Bowers is a different beast.
In his first professional season, Bowers caught an NFL rookie record 112 passes. Not just for a tight end. A rookie at any position. And he did so at a remarkable 2.02 yards per route run. It’s not as if the Raiders just funneled him targets to re-write the record books. He was legitimately efficient on his 592 routes and 148 targets that season, as he amassed 1,194 yards — the same yardage figure as CeeDee Lamb that year on only two more targets.
This season, Bowers missed the first two games due to injury.
In the three outings since his return, he has 10 catches for 116 yards and one touchdown on 12 targets, six catches for 86 yards and a score on 11 targets, and eight snags for 110 yards and a touchdown on nine targets.
His yards per route run figure of 2.79 is tops in the NFL among tight ends.
And he aligns everywhere, so he’s not a tight end by the classic definition.
Entering this game, Bowers has run routes from the outside 40.1% of the time, the highest rate among all qualifying tight ends. It’s almost identical to the percentage at which Zay Flowers has run his routes on the outside.
While certainly not the largest, nor most physical imposing tight end in the league, Bowers has maintained ridiculous reliability in traffic. He had a 53.3% contested-catch rate as a rookie. Then it was an outstanding 65.2% a season ago, and he’s 7-of-10 in those scenarios this season entering this contest.
He’s not a huge tackle-breaker — only nine thus far in his NFL career. He gets open. He catches everything.
Kirk Cousins has a 136.5 rating when targeting Bowers in his three games. And the tight end leads Las Vegas in all receiving categories.
In a game after the Bills saw Puka earn 24 targets and catch 17 of them — albeit at a very minimal 8.1 yards per catch — Buffalo’s defense could be in for another individually high-volume, funnel-the-offense-through-one-player type of outing if they don’t specifically make it a top priority to limit Bowers in this game.