The Buffalo Bills did their best at trying to improve their roster during the 2026 NFL offseason.
Between the draft, free agency and trades, plenty of roster movement happened in Buffalo. However, ESPN does not agree with all of those moves.
The Bills landed wide receiver DJ Moore in a trade with the Chicago Bears. Adding playmaking talent around quarterback Josh Allen was a need this offseason.
The marquee addition was Moore but ESPN is not completely sold. Could the Bills have made a better decision?
ESPN’s Bill Barnwell called trading for Moore Buffalo’s worst Bills move of this offseason. His breakdown on the Moore trade can be found below:
Worst: Everything that happened with DJ Moore. Though Beane anticipated the market and found real value in re-signing McGovern, every step of the Moore process felt like a franchise acting out of desperation. It’s clear that the Bills were frustrated by their wide receivers in 2025, as players such as Brandin Cooks, Gabe Davis and Tyrell Shavers were getting meaningful reps late in the season. Keon Coleman, who hasn’t lived up to expectations on the outside, became the public scapegoat for what felt like an organizational policy of trying to hit singles at one of the league’s most important positions.
Under that lens, making a significant move for a receiver made sense. I’m just not sure this was the right one. Moore is coming off what was comfortably his worst season as a pro, one in which he seemingly fell out of favor with Ben Johnson in the Chicago offense. The Bears had little leverage in dealing with Moore, given that they were about to be on the hook for $49 million over the next two seasons for a guy who might have been their fourth option in the passing game heading into 2026. This should have essentially been a salary dump scenario for Ryan Poles.
Instead, the Bills sent a second-round pick to the Bears for Moore. That was already a curious choice by Beane. Even more inexplicably, the Bills ate all of the salary that was already owed to Moore and then guaranteed their new wideout $13.5 million in 2028, committing money three years down the line to a player who had no leverage as part of this trade. If Moore had a no-trade clause or was about to become a free agent, making that sort of move might have made more sense.
The Bills are spending $59.5 million in cash on wide receivers this year, the seventh-highest total in the league. That ranking will rise to fifth once A.J. Brown and Brandon Aiyuk move on later this offseason. Four of the organizations ahead of them are teams with superstar wideouts (Seahawks, Eagles, Bengals and Cowboys). The other one is the Titans, who used a top-five pick on a potential WR1 in Carnell Tate. The Bills are committing plenty of cash to finding Josh Allen playmakers, but I still don’t think they have a player whom Allen can rely upon in a key spot — and they haven’t since Stefon Diggs left town.
This article originally appeared on Bills Wire: ESPN names the Bills’ worst move of the 2026 NFL offseason
Reporting by Nick Wojton, USA TODAY / Bills Wire
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