The Buffalo Bills are crashing and the blame shouldn’t be on Josh Allen
After an embarrassing loss, heads roll. That’s the way the NFL goes.
Offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey was the man the Buffalo Bills chose to take the fall after the team’s 24-22 loss to the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football.
No matter that Dorsey doesn’t coach the defense that had 12 men on the field at the end of the game, a penalty that gave the Broncos a second chance at their winning field-goal after Wil Lutz missed his first attempt. Or that the Bills’ offense has been finefor much of the season. Or that the offense has had the worst starting field position in the league from weeks five to 10, thanks, largely, to injuries on the defensive side of the ball. Or that Dorsey didn’t call for plays that ended in drops or fumbles, problems that have plagued his group in recent weeks.
It doesn’t seem to matter, either, that the Bills’ five losses this season have all come in one-possession games, a notoriously unreliable way of judging any team.
When times feel desperate, organizations feel the need to do something.And the Bills have been living in desperation mode since their 13-second loss in the playoffs to Kansas City in 2022. It’s why they handed Von Miller an eye-watering contract in free agency in 2022 – and why they murkily parted ways with defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier last offseason, despite Frazier delivering a top-seven unit.
When you’re 5-5 in a supposed Super Bowl season, someone has to take the fall.
Dorsey shouldn’t be completely absolved of blame, though. Yes, at the time of his firing, Dorsey’s offense ranked third in the league in DVOA, first in success rate, third in EPA per play, third in yards per play, second in thirddown conversion % and third in redzone efficiency. Pick your measure, and you will find the Bills in the top-three. But it’s tough to separate the impact of the coach from the individual excellence of Allen; letting Dorsey go is the Bills’ way of saying that the offense performed despite the architecture constructed by its coach.
After Dorsey, Allen is next up on the ritual blame-athon. This week kicked off the ‘are we sure he’s good’ phase of Allen’s career, soon to be followed by the traditional ‘why can’t he get it done in the big one’ sequel. What drivel. Allen ranks second in the RBSDM composite, which measures the value of a play and how much the quarterback can be deemed responsible for that value.
Still: Yards and fancy metrics don’t win or lose games. Turnovers do.
Allen continues to cough the ball up at a league-leading rate. Since 2022, Allen leads the NFL in turnovers, throwing 25 interceptions (the most in the league) and losing eight fumbles (the second-highest mark in the league). But there’s noise in those numbers. Turnover luck is fluky – sometimes a fumbled ball bounces to an opponent, sometimes to a teammate. And Allen has been lessreckless this season compared to last year. Last season, PFF deemed 4.2% of Allen’s throws were turnover-worthy. That’s fallen to 2.4% this season, putting him 27th among eligible quarterbacks and better than
Patrick Mahomes (3.3%), Jalen Hurts (3.2%), and Lamar Jackson (3%), three frontrunners for MVP.
The eye test supports those figures. Allen has curbed his own worst instincts. For much of last year, the Bills’ offense was a chaotic mess. Too often, it was fractured in two, with a bunch of deep threats paired with a get-out-ofjail option underneath, and nothing in between. It was an offense that struggled to challenge all three levels of the field and indulged Allen’s penchant for HeroBall. When defenses figured out how to attack Buffalo’s lopsided setup, neither Allen nor Dorsey could find solutions that would balance the quarterback’s needs with the coach’s wants.
To deal with that, the Bills have ploughed resources into surrounding Allen with talent, reinforcing the offensive line, drafting and trading for multiple backs and dipping into the draft to add a pass catcher. In the most recent draft, they selected tight end Dalton Kincaid in the first round to pair with Pro Bowl tight end Dawson Knox.
It was all a part of a broader vision. General manager Brandon Beane wanted to modernize the Bills’ offense. We’re talking positionless football, multiple formations, interchangeable players that can toggle between spots in the formation and create matchup nightmares for opposing defenses.
But Beane’s plan missed a couple of crucial points. Firstly, if you’re going to