Talk of Cutting Tyler Bass Highlights the Bills' Larger, Underlying Problem

While football is a team game, some positions are a bit lonelier than others. As Tyler Bass demonstrated on Sunday night, lining up at kicker is a rather solitary role. With a chance to tie the game late in the fourth quarter, the Buffalo Bills man pushed his kick wide right. The Kansas City Chiefs then secured a first down, allowing them to run out the clock and secure the win.

After the game, Bass owned up to his miss; meanwhile, his teammates said all the right things about winning and losing together. That solidarity, however, didn't stop the online chatter about replacing the kicker.

And whether that's the right or wrong decision, even exploring the option brings a harsh reality to the forefront: Buffalo is in a tough salary cap spot.

Bass' Contract Makes Moving on Expensive

Given his struggles this postseason and the role he played in the Bills' eventual exit, Bass has been feeling the heat.

After his miss on Sunday, the kicker was the butt of all sorts of social media jokes. Other comments, however, called for the team to replace him.

On the Buffalo Bills subreddit, for example, one user created a thread about how they said Bass should be cut after the wild card round. There were a variety of responses, some of which pointed out how other players also (literally) dropped the ball, but there was a general sentiment that the kicker wasn't holding up his end of the bargain.

"Anyone saying this isn't on bass is missing the point. It's not mutually exclusive. Bass needs to be gone no matter what else changes," user Zealousideal-King524 wrote in the thread's top comment, which had more than 100 upvotes as of Monday morning.

User KompromatBible shared a similar sentiment. "I am baffled at everyone defending this guy. Is he *the* reason we lost? No. But there is no excuse for the number of field goals he has missed this season," they wrote. "Our offensive calls are being shaped by his inability to reliably kick over forty yards. That is a huge problem."

The kicker's contract, however, makes that a bit complicated. According to Over the Cap's data, cutting Bass ahead of June 1 would leave the club carrying upward of $7 million in dead cap money. That could be mitigated by waiting longer—a post-June 1 release would save Buffalo $100,000 of Bass' 2024 salary—but it's still not ideal to be paying more than $4 million to a player no longer on your roster.

But wait, you might be saying, that money is nothing for an NFL team. If you can spend the big bucks on a quarterback, can't you eat a bit of cap space changing kickers?

That's true in isolation, but we have to consider the larger picture. The problem is that the Bills are already more than $43 million over the 2024 salary cap. And while teams can make space by restructuring contracts and releasing players, there has to ultimately be a compromise somewhere.

And, in this case, Bass' downsides might not be egregious enough to pay the extra money.

Ultimately, the Salary Cap Could Be the Bills' Problem

Again, it's easy to focus on Bass, since his kick was an obvious problem on Sunday night. In the big picture, though, the salary cap could be the larger concern.

While Buffalo has found plenty of regular season success with Josh Allen under center, things haven't materialized in the playoffs. The club has reached the postseason every year since 2019 but has nothing to show for it. There have been three divisional losses, one wild-card loss and one defeat in the AFC Championship.

That suggests something must change. With Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes also lurking in the AFC. Joe Burrow is also worth looking out for, when healthy, and 2023 suggested that C.J. Stroud could be a power player for years to come. That quality of competition suggests that Bills can't wait out the path to glory to simply clear out.

But making those changes requires financial wiggle room. And, as we've already noted, that's hard to come by in 2024.

Josh Allen carries the biggest cap hit for next season, and he's rightfully not going anywhere. His deal could be restructured, but that will only create so much relief. Hypothetically moving someone like Stefon Diggs would be a massive gamble; even if you save money (which would require a trade rather than a straight-up release) he'd have to be replaced. Von Miller would also be rather expensive to get off the books.

Those three names alone account for nearly $100 million against the cap, which shifts the burden further down the roster. And remember, we're just talking about breaking even and then taking care of boring business like filling out the roster with depth players; forget about spending the money required to bring in a secondary receiver behind Diggs.

When you see a field goal attempt curve wide of the target, it's easy to latch onto the kicker and suggest that he's the problem. Building a championship football team, however, is about assembling a collection of parts into a whole package. And if we consider the Bills' salary cap situation moving forward, that could be the real challenge.