Dalton Kincaid named 'X-Factor' for Bills offense in 2024

The 2024 NFL season is officially underway, and it will be an important one for the Buffalo Bills.

It will take a full, team effort in all three phases to continue to compete without any dropoff, despite many roster changes at key positions with new and younger talent on board.

Even still, an impact player can have a special impact on their respective unit, and ESPN has named who those players may be for each team with their NFL X factors for 2024 season: Key players for all 32 teams list.

The outlet picked receiving tight end Dalton Kincaid for Buffalo.

Here’s what ESPN’s Ben Solak had to say about Kincaid as an X Factor:

Buffalo Bills: TE Dalton Kincaid

Two-hundred and forty-one targets: That’s how many vacated opportunities are left behind as both Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis left Buffalo this offseason. The Bills have opted for a committee approach at wide receiver, which I like, but to whom does Josh Allen turn on third-and-6 among his many options? For whom does offensive coordinator Joe Brady design the “gotta have it” play?

That player might be Kincaid, whom the Bills drafted with the intention of becoming an offense that can run through an elite pass-catching tight end. He was an efficient, high-volume target last season — his 73 catches were third highest for a rookie tight end since 1970 — but that cushy underneath gig worked only when Diggs and Davis were pushing the defense downfield. If the Buffalo offense is to work with this new look, Kincaid must be used downfield more frequently — or develop a George Kittle-like profile after the catch.

The former is far more likely, and the good news is this: Kincaid catches everything. 77.7 reception rate is amazing, even for the easy targets he was offered. As his trust with Allen grows, expect him to start leading the Bills in targets in more games than he doesn’t, and watch for Brady to scheme around Kincaid’s versatility in alignment and routes to open up other players as well. He’s the skeleton key of this passing attack.

Kincaid, the Bills’ first-round pick in 2023, shined in his first year with Buffalo, setting records as a rookie and making a consistent impact for the offense.

The Bills will certainly hope he can build on such a strong rookie campaign and help take on some of that vacated workload left behind by the departures of Diggs and Davis.

They will need him to continue to play the versatile and go-to target role he took on more and more last season, including the Diggs plays and looks he gradually took on as the 2023 campaign progressed.

At age 24, Kincaid has already seen a successful sample size share on offense in Buffalo in only his first season with the Bills. With his elite hands and positional versatility, he figures to see more opportunities to improve on that impressive rookie campaign with the Diggs/Davis workload needing to be distributed among reliable targets.