Last October, a home win over Buffalo flipped New England's whole season into a Super Bowl run. A year later, the Patriots head back to Bills country looking for a sequel — except this time the Bills have already blown up their coaching staff trying to catch up.
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SUN OCT 4 · 1:00 PM ET
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Both franchises spent the offseason reacting to how last January ended. Buffalo fired Sean McDermott after Josh Allen turned the ball over five times in a gutting overtime loss to Denver in the divisional round, and Joe Brady is now the one trying to build a culture reset around a quarterback who spent the spring recovering from surgery on a broken bone in his right foot. Brady has called Allen "good to go" heading into camp, and Allen made a point of showing up for every offseason session to set the tone early. Across the field, Drake Maye enters year 2 with Josh McDaniels calling plays, and the Patriots overhauled his receiver room by trading Stefon Diggs's old role to newly acquired A.J. Brown.
New England's the team with less turnover, at least on paper. Maye and Brown have already flashed chemistry in offseason work — a back-shoulder fade, a twisting red-zone score — while Romeo Doubs slides into the underneath, chain-moving role Diggs used to fill. The tight end room took a hit when Julian Hill went down with a season-ending knee injury in OTAs, which puts more on Hunter Henry and leaves an opening for Eli Raridon to claim the No. 2 spot. Buffalo countered by adding DJ Moore to a corps that already had Khalil Shakir and Keon Coleman, giving Allen more to work with even as the coaching staff installs a new system.
The health situations are worth watching on both sides. New England gets Christian Gonzalez back at corner after he reported to mandatory minicamp, a real boost for a defense that will need to slow down Buffalo's receiver room. Buffalo, meanwhile, is already down corner Dorian Strong for the year and nursing a questionable linebacker in Dorian Williams — not disqualifying this early, but the kind of depth question that tends to matter more in October than in June.
New England Patriots
Buffalo Bills
Context matters here beyond the win-loss column. New England went 14-3 a season ago, beat Denver 10-7 on the road to win the AFC, and still got shut out for three quarters in a 29-13 Super Bowl LX loss to Seattle — a defense-first collapse that's shaped a lot of what McDaniels has emphasized this offseason about Maye playing faster before the snap. Buffalo's 2025 ended a round earlier, at home, in the kind of turnover-strewn collapse that gets a coach fired. Sunday, October 4 in Buffalo is an early measuring stick for which team actually fixed what broke it last winter.
New England Patriots
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Fully healthy — no injuries to report
Buffalo Bills
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Fully healthy — no injuries to report
Kickoff is set for 1:00 PM ET, and for a division that's decided its last two AFC representatives, this one carries more juice than a typical Week 5 game. New England arrives with more continuity and a louder receiver room; Buffalo arrives with a healthier-sounding Allen and a coaching staff still finding its footing. Neither team is 0-0 in stakes, even if the record says so.
