Cleveland, Ohio (WGR) - Defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard made it clear what he wants to see from his unit when the Buffalo Bills take the field for a joint practice Thursday against the Cleveland Browns.
“Number one is the physicality,” he said on Tuesday before their open practice inside Highmark Stadium. "You’re going against somebody else. That always lifts the intensity of a practice. You get sick of beating up your own guys. They know what you’re doing, you know what they’re doing. In some ways you’re game-planning them, you’re watching them a little bit, but it’s a little bit more of you don’t exactly know what you’re going to get, so just play ball.”
The Bills and Browns will hold a joint practice Tuesday at 1:20 p.m. at the Browns training facility in Berea, about 16 miles west of the city. Then the two teams will play a preseason game at Huntington Bank Stadium in downtown Cleveland.
Leonhard would love to see his group build on their excellency performance in last Saturday's 29-14 preseason win over thew Carolina Panthers when the defensive starters began the game with three consecutive three-and-out series and the unit as a whole gave up just 201 total yards in the game.
"Any time that you have a new system and you get guys that have to react on the fly a little bit, because in a practice setting you're going to see more things than you're going to get in a preseason game, for instance," Leonhard said. "So that's the biggest thing, is can our guys just go out there and play with confidence, react to certain things that they have't studied, they haven't seen, or they haven't repped for a couple weeks, that's the biggest thing, just seeing if we can get through our adjustments and be clean with our communication and still play physical and confident."
Bills head coach Joe Brady is scheduled to speak with the media at 12:50 p.m. prior to the two teams tasking the field.
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