It’s not uncommon for Bills head coach Sean McDermott to throw his support behind a depth player on Buffalo’s roster.
It’s also not uncommon for it to be a member of the team’s defensive backs group.
On Saturday against the Pittsburgh Steelers, he liked what he saw in how hard CB Ja’Marcus Ingram played, and spoke about it to the press afterward.
“He practices the same way,” McDermott said. “His teammates love him, they respect him for the way he works and all of the work he puts in physically, all of the work he puts in on the mental part of the game. I’m just real proud of him.”
The 6-foot-2, 190-pound Ingram signed with Buffalo as an undrafted rookie in 2022 after playing in college as a walk-on at Utah State, as a transfer at Texas Tech, and then finishing with the University at Buffalo as a Bison.
He’s played in five games over the last two seasons and has been on and off the Bills practice squad, released and re-signed at times, and endured finding himself in a position to now be the team’s fourth cornerback behind starters Rasul Douglas and Christian Benford, and Kaiir Elam.
Bills defensive coordinator Bobby Babich views him as an example of the Bills approach to player development.
“Ja’Marcus, his development is really, to me, one of the cool things that when you coach, you’ve got different tiers of players. But here’s a guy that I believe came to try out at camp,” Babich said. “Came in at like 170 pounds, as tall as he is, and put in so much work and grinded and worked while he waited, and those types of things.
“Just really all the base fundamentals,” Ingram said per The Buffalo News, “and that puts you in position to make plays.”
He also set out to work on writing a children’s book called “The Little Player That Could” that will be out around Thanksgiving of this year.
“It’s based on my story,” Ingram shared. “I want to teach kids or inspire kids to have perseverance and resiliency in life and whatever dream that they’re chasing.
“But the story happens to just be about me and what I kind of went through my career to get to the point where I’m at. But I want people – well, kids – to be able to be inspired by my story, to just persevere through anything and whatever it is that they want to do in life.”
“I felt like that was something that that I could leave for my son,” Ingram said. “He just turned 1, so I’m reading him books and stuff like that. I feel like that was something that I could leave behind for him, but also be able to inspire others with the platform that I have and something that could, like, leave my work, long after I’m gone.”