Logic

Wild Card: Win out. Likely enter as the 7th or maybe even the 6th seed in that case. AFC East title: Win out. Phins lose to either the Cowboys or Ravens and lose to us. It's that simple. Win out and the Bills are extremely likely to make the playoffs. Lose one game the rest of the way and they'll need a lot of help. Good news is that the next two games are against Easton Stick and Bailey Zappe. So long as the Cowboys or Ravens can notch a win against the Phins, week 18 is hopefully for the AFC East title, and then we don't have to worry about Wild Card scenarios.

https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2023/12/18/24005803/nfl-week-15-hot-read-buffalo-bills-back-christian-mccaffrey-baker-mayfield The Bills have a 69 percent chance to make the playoffs. That’s right. The Bills, who even after the Aaron Rodgers injury lost to the Jets in Week 1 because Josh Allen threw three picks. The Bills, who barely survived the Tyrod Taylor Giants in Week 6, only to lose to the Mac Jones Patriots (yes, the Mac Jones Patriots) one week later. The Bills, who fired offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey after consecutive prime-time losses that stuck them at 5-5. The Bills, who have lost Matt Milano and Tre’Davious White for the rest of the season and DaQuan Jones for the foreseeable future. The Bills, who recently had to address comments made by head coach Sean McDermott during the 2019 season about the organization and effectiveness of the 9/11 terrorists. Those Bills. They’re probably gonna make the playoffs. And after what we just saw on Sunday, are you gonna bet against them when they’re there? Let’s talk about Sunday. The Bills beat the Cowboys 31-10; at halftime, they were up 21-3. It was a consummate shellacking of one of the NFL’s hottest teams—but the fact that the Bills beat the Cowboys is actually far less remarkable than how the Bills beat the Cowboys. They ran the dang ball. They pounded the daggum rock. Buffalo ended the day with 19 total dropbacks on 65 snaps—a dropback rate of 29 percent, the lowest in any game of Josh Allen’s entire career. By run rate over expectation, which adjusts for game script, as well as down and distance, this was the highest run rate over expectation for the Bills in the last three years. There are a few reasons why the Bills were capable of deploying such a run-heavy game plan. The first is James Cook. The Bills have been trying to find a young go-to back for years now, failing to find such in Devin Singletary and Zack Moss. In Cook, they seem to have finally found what they’ve long sought: a three-down player who can both churn out yards between the tackles and also run and catch on a full route tree. It’s a rare thing to have, but the Bills have it. Cook is now third in the league in scrimmage yards at 1,401. He’s on pace for over 1,000 rushing yards and over 500 receiving yards, which would make him the first player under 25 to have such a season since three players did it in 2019: Christian McCaffrey, Leonard Fournette, and Cook’s brother, Dalvin. How many backs do you know that run corner routes out of the backfield? Cook’s talent as a pass catcher speaks for itself—the success of the Bills’ rushing game, however, is a collective effort. Buffalo really started investing in their handoff game—remember, all of this data is about the designed running game, not Josh Allen scrambles—at the start of the 2022 season, when Dorsey took over as offensive coordinator following the departure of Brian Daboll. The Bills hired Rams offensive line coach and run game coordinator Aaron Kromer for the offensive line job on their staff, and an accompanying jump in run game efficiency followed. The Bills offensive line, often the culprit of disappointing losses in years past, is now the best Allen has played with. The starting unit hasn’t missed any time—they’ve played together for 867 of a possible 894 snaps. Left tackle Dion Dawkins is playing the best ball of his career; center Mitch Morse, who seemed last season like Father Time was coming for him, is enjoying a quiet resurgence; right tackle Spencer Brown, who needed to take a leap, has. Are Brown and rookie right guard O’Cyrus Torrence perfect? By no stretch. But they aren’t enormous liabilities, and both can really move people in the running game. Just ask the Cowboys defensive line. And of course, that’s the last consideration: Johnathan Hankins was out today for the Cowboys. Hankins isn’t a big name on a defense featuring Micah Parsons and DaRon Bland, but he’s a linchpin for Dan Quinn’s scheme. The Cowboys defensive line is built for speed and explosiveness—the other starting DT for the Cowboys, Osa Odighizuwa, is all of 280 pounds. They need the space-gobbling capacity of Hankins to survive against the run—especially with thumping linebacker Leighton Vander Esch out for the season. Rookie DT Mazi Smith is, theoretically, a Hankins replacement—but he has struggled in his debut season. So the Cowboys had no answer for the running game—but that doesn’t change how impressed I am that Joe Brady and the Buffalo offense committed to it. The Bills are at 7-6, with the season functionally in the balance every week, and it’s very hard to take the ball out of Josh Allen’s hands. You want to let your star players carry you to the promised land. To see the favorable matchup and run the ball at a rate you hadn’t hit in ages requires a lot of faith in an offense that has been … mercurial. Kudos to them for sticking to their plan and executing it. This dominant rushing performance from Buffalo, with their defensive performance considered (three meaningful points allowed to Dak Prescott and the Cowboys?), and the ever-present threat of Allen going thermonuclear? From my vantage point, the Bills look like a complete team for the first time all season. They’ve endured injuries and coaching changes and heartbreak and drama and somehow come out the other end looking like that which they were supposed to be all season: an AFC contender. The hay isn’t in the barn. They have to stay perfect down the stretch in games against the Chargers, the Patriots, and the division-leading Dolphins to end the season. They could use some help in the wild-card race, as the field is crowded with 8-6 teams: the Texans, the Colts, the Bengals, and the Jaguars. But ask any AFC contender who they don’t want to play come January, and I promise you: The Bills are high on that list.

It goes both ways. We're a 12th man away from being 9-5. We're a missed 59 yard field goal in the rain away from being 10-4. We're probably one interception away from beating the Jets on opening night. You are what your record says you are. The calls and the luck of the football bounce both ways. Every team in the NFL can play the "what if" game. The Bills are 8-6 and have a realistic shot at the postseason. They recently almost beat the Eagles in Philly, they beat the Chiefs at Arrowhead, and they DESTROYED the hottest team in the league yesterday. Let people be excited.

As someone who recently and repeatedly stated that I'm ready to see the Bills move on from Sean McDermott, it seems only fair for me to say this: The team has very clearly not quit on Sean McDermott. They are not in any way acting or playing like a team who doesn't like their head coach or who want a change. If anything, the Dunne article seems to have united the team and provided an "us against the world" rallying cry. Furthermore, yesterday's game was a "Sean McDermott's perfect ideal of what football should look like" game if ever I saw one. Masterful defense, the offense imposing their well, and physicality across the board. Very, very impressive. The thing that stood out to me on TV is that you could SEE how hard the Bills were playing. The defense was absolutely flying around, hitting hard, popping pads, and playing MEAN and with swagger. The offense was physical and relentless. The whole team LOOKED like it was playing playoff football, whereas the Cowboys absolutely did not. For the defense to play as well as it did, missing as many key players as it is, against such a great offense, was MASSIVELY impressive. For the offense to impose its will and dominate physically the way it did, just running the ball over and over and over, was also massively impressive, both from a physical standpoint and from a "Joe Brady is just gonna keep doing the simple and obvious thing until you stop it" tactical standpoint. Yesterday was the most thorough, impressive, across-the-board win I've seen from the Bills in quite some time. Great jobs from both offensive and defensive coaching. Great jobs from both lines of scrimmage. Great jobs by the players in executing. Just a no-doubt-about-it 60 minute ass whoopin. What else can I say? Give Brady his flowers. Give McDermott his flowers. Give Cook and the o-line their flowers. Masterful, impressive, awesome win. GO BILLS!!!

That dude flip-flops more than a gold medal gymnast.

It stinks that AJ is out, but... Leonard Floyd is having an exceptional season. Greg Rousseau and Von Miller both had good weeks against Kansas City. Ed Oliver has been beastly in the middle. I think his absence is survivable. I'm more concerned about Micah. The dropoff from him to Rapp/Lewis is big. Not only that, it reduces the degree to which the Bills can operate out of dime packages, and it potentially puts Tyrel Dodsen on the field more often against the pass, which is not ideal. Either way, as others have said, the Cowboys have injuries, too. Bills need to take care of business.

Put simply: If there's one area of the roster that I'm simply not concerned about as long as Sean McDermott is around, it's defensive backs. I expect Douglas, Benford, Elam, and Jackson will be the outside quartet next season, with Taron Johnson at nickel and some late round camp competition brought in. Unfortunately, it may be time to bid farewell to the beloved TreDavious White. I wish it wasn't so, but the Bills have to find places to cut salary. At safety, Hyde and Poyer will likely be gone, and McDermott will likely fill one spot through free agency (maybe Rapp, maybe someone else) and one spot through the draft. He'll coach the new guys up, as he always does with safeties. There will be a dip in production and cohesiveness early on, but once they get up to speed, it'll be all systems ago. For whatever other deficiencies may exist across the roster going forward, call me crazy, but I'm not too worried about the DB room.

Cowboys are dog water on the road. Everyone talks about how they average 40 points per game over their last five, but...When on the road, the Cowboys average 23 points, and they give up an average of 20 points. Dak is also historically not particularly good in temperatures below 40 degrees. Give me the desperate Bills team, in front of a fired up Highmark Stadium crowd, in the cold rainy weather, on prime time. Bills by a billion.

A torn ACL this late in the season really stinks, especially in a contract year for this player. It knocks him out not only the rest of this season, but also for most of next season. Just Brutal. Football is a cruel game. This year seems PARTICULARLY bad with injuries across the league. Just look at the QB lineup in the AFC, for instance. Yikes.

I agree, but I'm done looking in the rearview mirror. The 1-seed is not happening for Buffalo this year, BUT...all they have to do is lose one game or less moving forward, and have the Dolphins lose two (very possible with Cowboys and Ravens and even Jets on the horizon), and Bills can win the division. Yes, the bad losses this year were frustrating, but what's done is done. Everything still in front of the Bills. Just gotta take care of business now.

Add me to the pile of people who turned the game off after the second 4th quarter Titans fumble. I figured that down 27-13, there was no way a Will Levis QBed team was coming back to win. It wasn't until my brother-in-law started machine-gun texting me breathless all-caps messages that I realized what had happened and went back to watch the highlights. HOLY ***** *****! This changes EVERYTHING for the Bills. It is not at all unreasonable to think that the Dolphins will lose two of their remaining games and the Bills will lose zero or one of theirs, and either way, the week 18 game would be for the AFC East title. INSANE loss for the Dolphins. Wow.

I felt the yesterday's game was the first time Brady has faced real adversity as an offensive playcaller, and I can't say I was particularly impressed with the results. I like Brady so far. I feel he's a better play caller than Dorsey. He has better sequencing and more logical use of plays, he uses them to set up future plays, and he seems to have a better feel for game flow than Dorsey did. He also seems less like he's just randomly calling plays and more like his gameplans and playcalls have purpose. All of that having been said, the Chiefs defense adjusted in the second half to what the Bills were doing, and Brady mostly failed to counter-punch. Specifically, he got away from what was working with James Cook (yes, I understand this his pass blocking deficiencies will keep him off the field at times), abandoned the run, stuck with the WR screens too long, failed to get the WRs meaningfully involved (other than those screens), and had a bad end-of-game sequence on the Bills' final offensive drive. No play-caller is great 100% of the time. Sometimes, you get outcoached. Steve Spagnuolo is a veteran and very savvy DC, so it's forgivable that his very formidable Chiefs defense, playing in Arrowhead, got the better of Brady's offense in the second half. Going forward, I'll be interested to see how he rebounds after faltering a bit down the stretch in Kansas City. Can he get Diggs more consistently involved? Can he keep the run game and James Cook humming, and stick with them when they're working? Can he generally keep up the offensive production and avoid stagnation as opposing defenses have more of a "book" on what he likes to do as a playcaller? Early returns are good, and I'm cautiously optimistic. But I am not yet ready to crown Joe Brady or commit to him as offensive coordinator for next season. I need to see how the rest of the year plays out.

I still say that traits like jealousy, narcissism, and refusal to take accountability are all a reflection of one's character. I don't think "jealous narcissist who deflects blame" is strictly a "workplace description", I think it's a character description. I get your point, I'm just not on the same page. We can agree to disagree.

Among other things, Dunne's article painted Sean McDermott as jealous of his assistant coaches, a narcissist, a liar, and someone who refuses to take accountability. Those things together do constitute a bit of an attack on his character, in my opinion.

Yeah it's weird. I have no idea why networks cannibalize their own audience, just like with the Manningcast thing. I don't get it. A double-header? Sure. Or even staggering it by 90 minutes, so that if the first game stinks, you can switch at halftime. But starting them at the exact some time? Bizarre.

Forget to say in my post, and I'm sure it's a sentiment echoed by most of the posters here... The post-game behavior by Mahomes at midfield and the post-game comments by both he and Reid were super bush league. Made them both look like crybaby chumps. They're not even wrong that the refs in the NFL are a serious problem this year. But choosing THIS moment -- when the player actually DID commit a penalty, and an egregiously obvious one at that -- to kvetch about it was a bad look. The Chiefs are quite often the beneficiaries of over-officiousness. The ONE time it bites them in a big moment -- and again, that penalty arguably SHOULD have been called, and it WAS egregious -- they complain the way they did? And for Mahomes to show the lack of sportsmanship he did in the post-game handshake, when Josh is always so gracious even after crushing losses. Just a bad, pathetic look by him. And thankfully, the NFL media world at large mostly seems to agree. Have seen quite a few voices from all over the spectrum echoing the sentiment that Mahomes and Reid looked like babies for the way they behaved. Personally, I lost a lot of respect for Mahomes last night.

Hmmm... A lot to digest from that one, and with this thread at 54 pages, looks like I've already missed a lot of the digesting. - I liked the Bills' offensive gameplan in the first half - I did not like the Bills' offensive gameplan for most of the second half - The Chiefs had better second half adjustments than the Bills. This has been a trend this season. - Below average year for the Chiefs offense or not, it's still impressive to hold them to 17 points at Arrowhead without Milano, Daquan, Tre, Hyde (for a half), etc. - AJ Epenesa's loss was felt. He's turned into a good pass rusher, and once he left the game, our pass rush took a hit - That said, thank God for Leonard Floyd and Ed Oliver, who should both get game balls for yesterday's win - Josh Allen likes running into people. Let him do it. It gets him fired up and loosens him up. How great was that TD run?! - Josh Allen -- Super human. Unreal. That sideline fadeaway pass in the 4th quarter? My goodness. - I thought it was weird to go away from Cook after the opening drive of the second half the way they did. Should've stuck with the hot hand - That said, it is SO refreshing to see them actually use the pass-catching talents of Cook instead of only throwing it to him on checkdowns - The Wheel route adjustment up the sideline to Cook was all Allen. It was not drawn up that way - The wide receivers got shut down yesterday. Good thing we had Cook, Kincaid, and Knox - How insanely relieved did McDermott look when the Bills stopped the Chiefs on 4th and sealed the game? Woah. For all of the nuance we can pick through, at the end of the day, it was a Bills win when they direly needed it. The funny thing is that the game didn't really look all that different than recent Bills games this season. Stretches of great offense, stretches of stagnant offense, moments where the D made big plays, moments where they gave up big plays. Josh missing an open Gabe in the end zone at the end. The Bills taking the lead at the end and then the other team getting the ball and driving it down field and scoring. Groundhog's day. Deja Vu all over again. The only difference is, this time the OTHER team messed up, and the Bills were the beneficiaries. The Chiefs out-Bills'd the Bills. Imagine having that must-win game -- which the Bills dominated the majority of -- end in Chiefs victory on a miracle lateral play like that on the friggin day that Frank Wycheck passes away? It would've been absolutely crushing. It would've destroyed me. It would have played on an endless loop on NFL Network for a full week, back to back with the Music City Miracle. Thank GOODNESS Toney was Offside. Instead, the Bills rallied around their coach, stuck together, played for each other, and did enough to win. For all the nuance, all the detail, all the coulda shoulda wouldas, and despite the fact that it ultimately looked just like recent games this season...the bottom line is that the Bills won. In this league, that's all that really matters.

Did you also see the post-game presser he did, though? Said something like "you can question coaching decisions, or my decision as a player, but you can't question coach McDermott as a person. He's one of the better humans on this planet".

We tend to think of things in black and white. "Either this, or that, but not both". But in the case of this article and of coach McDermott, I think both things can simultaneously be true: I think Tyler Dunne probably DOES have a bit of an axe to grind against the Bills, he DOES seem to come out with one McDermott hit piece per year, the article IS a bit of a hatchet job, it DOES lack objectivity (like any quotes from people who actually LIKE McDermott to balance things out) and DOES present a one-sided view, and some of the quotes DO sound far-fetched and/or like sour grapes from other people with axes of their own to grind. AND I think coach McDermott probably DOES micro-manage, that he IS a bit of a hypocrite with regard to taking accountability for mistakes, that a lot of what Dunne says IS true and fair and accurate, that a lot of the quotes from the sources are valid and legitimate, and that no matter how you paint it, 25 people is a lot to be able to find to say bad things about a coach. On the one hand, I think some of Dunne's articles may be a bit heavy-handed and do have the smell of an agenda against McDermott. On the other hand, I think a lot of what Dunne says is correct and legitimate and real. Personally, I feel the same way after reading the article that I did before I read it: I think it's time to turn the page from Sean McDermott as head coach of the Buffalo Bills. I don't think he's as bad as his worst detractors say, nor as good as his staunchest defenders insist. There is nuance. There are layers. At the end of the day, I remain unmoved. I'm ready for a fresh start for the Buffalo Bills, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of the players are, too.

This is my biggest feat with McDermott. The Bills' two most important players and biggest team leaders, Allen and Diggs, are funny, loose, fun loving guys. They are anchored to a head coach who is serious, conservative, and -- as we're discussing -- tight. Anxious. Whereas the Bills should be a team that is visibly having fun and exhibiting swagger and braggadocio and taking on the personality of Allen and Diggs (their on-field leaders), they are instead a team that is visibly tight, cautious, and exhibiting carefulness and fear, and are taking on the personality of McDermott (their off-field leader). Unfortunately, if the rumors are true, there is "zero chance" of any coaching change this offseason, so the best I can do is hope that I'm wrong and that the Bills go on a run. Frustrating.

Yeah, you're right. My nostalgic recollection paints 2021 as more enjoyable than it actually was. As you say, catching fire in the playoffs colored things differently. So in that case, it's been THREE straight years of stressful, anxious Bills football. No wonder everyone's exhausted. Do you have a link for that Chuck Pagano quote, btw? It's a great one, and I hadn't heard it. If that's a real quote....yikes.

Put simply: The Buffalo Bills have been an emotionally exhausting team to follow ever since 13 seconds. 2020 and 2021 were FUN! In those seasons, we SAW how good this team could be. It felt like they were just getting started at what could be a potential dynasty or, at the very least, a championship winning football team. 2022 and 2023 were stressful. We saw the team make the easy things look difficult week after week. We saw them, for whatever reason, struggle to move the ball for long stretches, and struggle to live up to their sky high potential. There's this feeling that the Bills are smack dab in the middle of a window of championship contention, and every year they don't at least get to the AFC Championship game feels like a waste. It very much feels like a "Super Bowl or bust" team the past couple seasons. Maybe it's the weight of Bills history, maybe it's the way the roster and its contracts are structured, maybe its irritation at seeing all the fawning over Mahomes being a generational talent when we know we have one of our own...whatever it is, it has just been a frustrating couple of seasons of feeling like our team is falling short of expectations. There have probably only been a small handful of games this year that were actually FUN to watch because the team was playing as well as we know they can. In all the rest, I've been frustrated because they're playing below their potential. I don't know if the solution is solely Joe Brady or if, as I have espoused on here in recent weeks, McDermott needs to go, too. I certainly lean toward the latter. All I know is, whatever it takes: MAKE BUFFALO BILLS FOOTBALL FUN AGAIN!!!