ORCHARD PARK, NY — No injury triggers dread quite like a torn Achilles. First, there’s the bizarre sensation. This feels like getting kicked in the back of the leg. Once you see nobody’s there, once you realize the tendon has recoiled up your leg like a window shade, the mind immediately races to all strenuous work ahead.
Factor in the cutthroat stakes of pro football and this injury is enough to spiral any pro into a sewage of self-pity.
DeWayne Carter, selected 95th overall in the 2024 draft, missed five games as a rookie with a wrist injury. There were ups, downs, glimpses… now this? An Achilles tear in late August 2025 completely wiped out his second season. Into a pivotal Year 3, it was fair to wonder how he’d fit into Jim Leonhard’s new scheme. The sight of Carter playing 34 snaps in the exhibition finale against Pittsburgh hinted that he was on the chopping block. Most armchair GMs declared him good as gone.
But not only did Carter make the Bills’ 53-man roster — he’s been a force. He ranks second league-wide in Run-Stop Win Rate per ESPN Analytics with 11 “wins” on 21 snaps. He’s wasting offensive guards with filthy spin moves.
So… uh… how?
Well, when the rest of the football world completely forgot about Carter, he transformed into somebody else.
Here, inside the Bills locker room, the igloo-built 25-year-old taps open his cell phone to bring one daily scene to life. Carter’s favorite power lift, easily, is squats. During OTAs, his crew would rep out 450 pounds four to six times — and the room is electric. When he taps play on one video, the barbell atop his shoulders is loaded with eight 45-pound plates and a handful of others. Teammate Javon Solomon screams as Carter crouches lower, and lower, and lower before blasting back upward. Rep to rep, not one centimeter is cheated.
Nobody outside of these walls at the Kaleida Health Performance Center gave a damn.
This was his gameday.
“It’s time to go,” Carter says. “There is no, ‘Ugh.’ No, we come into the weight room? We’re lifting weights.”
Right here, is an element of pro football that gets lost amid our obsession over offseason transactions. Players do not stay stagnant from January to September. When a serious injury inevitably strikes, there are many who treat the long road back as a nuisance. The monotony is miserable. They check boxes, go home, wait for those lights to turn on. Others find the silver lining. And a team full of the latter is bound to compete for championships, the sort of “character” owner Terry Pegula told us he sees in the current Bills locker room.
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The first time Carter stepped on a scale after his offseason of hurling weights around, he was 333 pounds — 30+ more than he weighed at the NFL Combine.
Eighteen of those pounds gained, he says, is pure muscle.
Carter half-jokes that all of this was “an accident.” He was hurt. He had surgery. He couldn’t walk. But one thing he could do was toss dumbbells and barbells around nonstop. Another thing he could do was eat clean. The last time he slipped into the Bod Pod, Carter’s body fat was as low as its been in his entire life. And by Practice No. 4 and No. 5 in training camp, pads on, he mentally moved past the injury.
“It was like, ‘Alright, let’s just go. Forget everything else,’” Carter says. “That’s how we got to here now.”
He never left Orchard Park. Carter rehabbed and trained in town with head strength coach Will Greenberg and the crew’s seasonal intern Anthony Saro “every single day.” With his foot in a massive boot, he’d hammer upper body with heavy weights. That didn’t mean he completely ignored legs, either. Carter was still able to do sets of 100 leg extensions, in addition to 100 pushups and 100 situps. Not 98 or 99. One-hundred, each set.
Carter became addicted to the work, and he was not alone. Defensive end Landon Jackson’s first season lasted all of 30 defensive snaps. He suffered a torn MCL and PCL. The 72nd overall pick in the ‘25 draft joined Carter for these daily sessions. So did defensive backs Dorian Strong and Wande Owens.
They called their group, “The Yard.”
As in, treating these like prison-yard workouts.
“That’s what we modeled them off of,” Carter says. “Because when you don’t have your outlet — which is football for a lot of us — it’s like, ‘Alright, where does all of that go?’ Whether it’s the frustration, the stress, the anger, and you just put in your work.
“Obviously everybody at this level is very talented. It’s the best of the best — wherever you came from. So the mentality is where you separate.”
None of this is acknowledged, let alone celebrated, by an adoring public. But that’s the point. Carter wanted to completely transform himself in the dark to reintroduce himself in September.
Far back as he remembers, the Pickerington, Ohio native lived in a sweaty weight room.
He calls his strength coach at Duke, Dave Feeley “a maniac” and “literally nuts.”
When it was time to max out at the squat rack, the bench press, wherever, Feeley would tell everyone to stop lifting and shut off the lights. A whistle’s blown. A boxing bell dings. All eyes are fixated on you to complete the rep. There’s pressure to deliver. This is fourth and goal from the 1-yard line. “That’s where you compete,” Carter adds. “So it’s you vs. you, but also you’ve got all your guys behind you. It helped build that mentality for the turnaround we had at Duke.”
Carter was a multi-year captain for a Blue Devils team that improved from 3-9 to 9-4.
GM Brandon Beane drafted him with these leadership traits in mind. That ‘24 offseason was a transition for the Bills. Several mainstays departed on both sides of the ball.
Into the pros, Carter admits he veered away from this weightlifting lifestyle. Mainly because he feared over-doing it.
The Achilles tear forced him to get back to his roots. He stopped caring if he’d feel sore the next day and ramped up the intensity to simulate gameday. Carter knows it’s hard to breathe in full pads with a mouthpiece in during those 90+ degree camp days. So he makes all training sessions hard on himself. No AC. No music. No water. (Or, at least as minimal water as possible.)
“A mentality thing,” he adds.
“Dedicate yourself to the process and then see what happens. Give yourself a chance.”
When he wasn’t lifting, sprinting, preparing himself for this 2026 season, Carter ate a boring diet of ground beef and rice with a vegetable on the side.
The result is a third-year pro with more muscle than you typically see at the defensive tackle position. This is no pot-bellied space-eater. Carter plans to shoot gaps and be a playmaker with these 18 pounds of new muscle.
“It’s not normal,” he adds, “and it’s funny because it’s kind of a shock.”
Of course, this Bills defense is also working through the growing pains of a new scheme.
They’ve allowed 31 points in back-to-back weeks and now face a desperate Los Angeles Chargers team Sunday afternoon at Highmark Stadium. Buffalo’s secondary is struggling. It’s on the defensive line to consistently shut down the run and cave the pocket. And if there’s an early sign of optimism, it’s the flurry of different body types up front.
Deone Walker is a “unicorn,” and we’ll get to him in due time. Two games in, he has already put the NFL on notice. Michael Hoecht is back from an Achilles tear of his own.
Carter’s last 12 months hint at what’s working inside this building.
He relished the grime.
He believes this is only the beginning.
“It’s how I built my whole career,” Carter says, “whether it’s here or at Duke. It was just be the team guy, whatever team needs to win and I’m just loving the game.”
Keep an eye our for our new postgame show.
I’ll talk Bills with the team’s former director of personnel, Jim Monos, right here at Go Long after the Chargers game.
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