Are the Bills back?
Buffalo is becoming a prime-time attraction. Here’s how it can continue its path to the playoffs.
The Buffalo Bills only had one prime-time slot this season, but they certainly made it count.
Not only did the Bills take down the Dallas Cowboys, but also they did it front of a massive audience on Thanksgiving.
Buffalo’s 26-15 win over Dallas averaged a 13.5 rating and 32.54 million viewers on CBS, according to Nielsen fast-nationals.
The Bills’ victory was the most-watched program since the Super Bowl, topping the Academy Awards, held in February.
As long as they avoid a colossal collapse that would entail losing their last four games, the Bills are nearly a shoo-in to earn their second postseason berth in three seasons under Sean McDermott
There is still much work to be done to ensure this season is memorable.
In Week 14, the Bills have a home game against the scalding-hot Baltimore Ravens and their MVP candidate, quarterback Lamar Jackson, then a potentially tricky game at Pittsburgh, a national TV Saturday showdown in New England and a home regular-season finale against the revived Jets.
Here are seven ways the Bills can stay hot:
1. Keep best offensive players on field: Brian Daboll has been mixing and matching personnel all season, but starting with the victory in Miami on Nov. 17, the offensive coordinator came to the realization that he needed to use his best players for the majority of the game.
Since then, the Bills have won three in a row and you can point to Daboll sticking with a regular unit that features Devin Singletary in the backfield, Dawson Knox at tight end and John Brown, Cole Beasley and Isaiah McKenzie at wide receiver with Josh Allen as the puppeteer.
In those three games, the Bills have scored 83 points and have averaged 401 yards of offense; Allen has completed 67% of his passes with six TDs and just one interception plus two rushing TDs; Singletary has rushed for 244 yards; Beasley has 16 catches for 224 yards; and Brown has 14 catches for 202 yards.
2. Use Robert Foster more: The one place Daboll might want to tinker is finding a way to get Foster a little more involved because in the last two games he has displayed the type of bigplay player he has briefly flashed.
Foster had such a promising finish to the 2018 season when he averaged 20 yards per catch, but then he disappeared this year with the signings of Brown and Beasley. Going into Dallas he’d played only 13.1% of the offensive snaps, but he was on the field a season-high 28 snaps against the Cowboys.
He has only three catches this year, but all have gone for at least 20 yards, and he has drawn a couple of pass interference penalties the last two games on deep routes, plus had a 22-yard run on a reverse against Denver.
3. Get the run-pass options figured out: Daboll has incorporated the trendy run-pass option plays into his offense because Allen has outstanding running skills.
However, Allen seems to be struggling with the reads on some of these, and lately when he keeps the ball and runs, it’s gone nowhere.
The Bills could establish a traditional run game with Singletary and occasionally mixing in Frank Gore, rather than continue to put Allen in harms’ way on these plays and use more play-action off that.
When he drops back to pass, if Allen sees a lane to scramble, he should take it because that’s when he’s at his best, such as the 15-yard TD scramble in Dallas.
4. Get Stephen Hauschka on track: Hauschka came to Buffalo in 2017 with the thirdbest field goal accuracy mark in NFL history at 87.2%, and in his first season, he was superb. He hit 29 of his 33 field goal attempts and all 29 of his extra points.
Since then, he’s 37 of 49 for a 75.5% success rate on field goals, and he’s missed three extra points.
The Bills need more from Hauschka because they play so many close games where every point matters.
5. Let Shaq Lawson eat: The 2016 first-round pick out of Clemson, who struggled to make his mark his first two seasons, is playing the best football of his career.
He had another strong game in Dallas with two tackles for loss including a shared sack. Over the last three games he has 31⁄2 sacks, raising his season total to 51⁄2 which is a career high, and the Bills need to get him on the field more.
“I am hot right now,” Lawson said with a playful smile. “I don’t know what it is. My medication is working. I feel like the college me.”
6. Keep bringing the heat: The Bills have recorded 15 sacks in the last three games, and they’re doing it by mixing blitzes into the defensive package, a noteworthy trend.
Defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier, under the direction of McDermott, has not been a blitz-heavy play-caller in his three seasons in Buffalo. The Bills like to rush four and cover with seven, but they’ve changed their mode of attack recently and it’s paying off.
Linemen had all four sacks of Dak Prescott, who had been sacked only 12 times in the first 11 games, but a couple were the product of the Bills rushing extra men off the edges, be it linebackers or defensive backs.
The Bills should keep blitzing because they are so sound in the secondary with players who can hold up in man coverage.
7. Stop wasting timeouts: McDermott has been on a roll lately with his replay challenges, but he continues to misuse timeouts. Although it hasn’t burned him this season, there might come a day when it does.
He routinely uses timeouts on defense in key third-down situations, the strategy being that once the offense shows its formation, he can take the timeout to plot his counterpunch.
He wasted two timeouts against the Cowboys. One came before an extra point, presumably because the Bills didn’t have the right personnel on the field. If that was it, that’s inexcusable. Hauschka is struggling, but if you take a delay of game, is there really much difference between a 33-yard extra point and a 38-yarder, especially indoors, at least as it relates to the value of timeouts?
In the second half, the Bills had a 3rd-and-23 on their first drive and McDermott spent a timeout for an unexplained reason. The chances of converting 3rd-and-23 were infinitesimal, so a delay penalty makes it 3rdand-28. Big deal. All the Bills were trying to do anyways in that spot was get half the yardage and then kick a field goal.
Game management is still the one area McDermott needs to improve, and if this team is playing in January, there’s zero room for error.