The silver lining, if there’s one to be taken from Sunday’s 44-42 loss for the Buffalo Bills, is there isn’t a team in the AFC with a wide receiver duo as good as Puka Nacua and Cooper Kupp.
At least not presently.
The Bills might hope this was an aberration, a rare loss against a good (but not great) team on its best day of the season, as a confluence of mistakes ended their seven-game win streak.
There’s plenty to second-guess about this loss, but to put it plainly, Buffalo didn’t do very much well at all when Josh Allen wasn’t on the field. The special teams units made some big mistakes and the defense had an abysmal day trying to catch up with Nacua, Kupp, Matthew Stafford, Kyren Williams and the Rams offense.
Allen was phenomenal on Sunday. He became the first NFL quarterback to throw for three touchdown passes and run for three touchdowns in the same game. He didn’t have a single turnover. By air and by ground, he combined for 424 yards.
And every one of those big plays came with a “yeah, but.” Yeah, but can they get a stop? Or yeah, but it’s still a two-score game. Only with an offense like this one, with a quarterback like Allen, can 31-14 and 38-21 third-quarter deficits feel not quite safe.
“You lose by two, you lose by 100, it doesn’t matter you’re still losing,” Allen told reporters. “Offensively, you’ve got to find ways to score before the half and score after the half so we didn’t
do our part.”
In theory, the offense could have scored one more time than it did on Sunday. But Allen’s humility aside, you can’t blame this one on the offense one bit.
Even in a loss, nothing we saw Sunday should diminish Allen’s status as the favorite to win this year’s MVP trophy. If anything, it boosted his cause.
The same cannot be said of Sean McDermott’s cause for Coach of the Year. After last week’s division-clinching rout of the 49ers, I’d have argued McDermott belongs in that conversation along with the likes of Dan Campbell and Mike Tomlin. And while the season as a whole outweighs one regular season loss, some of the game management decisions that prevented an incredible comeback were simply perplexing.
But the biggest mistake came just near the end.
The Bills, mostly due to Allen’s brilliance (along with Khalil Shakir, Amari Cooper and others), had crawled back into the game. Down 44-35 after Nacua’s touchdown catch at the two-minute warning seemingly sealed it, they marched from their own 30-yard line to the goal line in under a minute after a pass interference call drawn by Amari Cooper. They still had all three timeouts, so a touchdown would mean the Bills could score, kick the ball off and hope (against all evidence we saw that day) the defense could produce a three-and-out and get the ball back for a game-winning field goal try.
But Buffalo called a QB sneak on first and goal, and not even a full Philly-style tush push. When officials deemed Allen short of the goal line, McDermott quickly called timeout. There went the hopes of getting the ball back without a successful onside kick. Allen got in on the next play, the Rams recovered the onside kick and Allen never saw the ball again with the final seconds ticking away with a punt to the end zone.
In that case, two decisions compounded each other’s mistake. A failed run play kept the clock running, and a timeout gave away the ability to kick the ball off. The play-call surely came from Joe Brady, while the timeout came from McDermott.
Running up to three, even four pass plays, would’ve saved a bunch of time, especially one where Allen had the ability to scramble to the end zone. But if you’re going to run, why not hurry up to run the next play rather than spend the timeout?
“If you sneak it and not use the timeout, now it’s getting really low,” McDermott told reporters. “But again, we’re talking about human… You un-pile the pile, you come back and you try and run another sneak. You’re hoping, but you just don’t know how long they’re going to spot the ball, people get up…now we’re talking about razor thin here in terms of what you’re asking.”
Of course, getting a stop was anything but a guarantee, even after the Bills’ run defense finally tightened (after a few early gashes) to hold Williams to 3.0 yards per carry and Blake Corum to 4.3. Stafford eviscerated zone defenses all game and even as a 36-year-old looked completely unbothered by the Bills’ pass rush.
If McDermott and Bobby Babich had any solutions for Sean McVay’s offense, it might not have come down to when the Bills used their timeouts. The same goes for if they hadn’t given up a massive special teams play, the blocked punt return for touchdown which gave L.A. a 17-7 lead in the second quarter. And that wasn’t the only blunder for coordinator Matthew Smiley’s unit: McDermott admitted the Bills couldn’t try to block the final Rams punt because they didn’t have 11 players on the field. Replays show it wasn’t even 10, but nine Bills on the field.
A fittingly disorganized finale to a game that couldn’t have been good for any fan’s blood pressure.
