Road to the Super Bowl
Josh Allen’s resilient Bills face stiffest test yet against K.C.,
The Buffalo Bills have won 15 football games and lost three.
The Kansas City Chiefs have also won 15 games, but lost only two.
The difference was a game that could have easily defined Buffalo’s season, the kind of defeat that leaves a scar on a team and ends up being erased only in future years when players move on and the memories fade.
Except it didn’t work that way for this special Buffalo team. Instead, the way in which the Bills shrugged it off like water off a duck’s back became a part of their story.
The game was Nov. 15 in Phoenix against the Arizona Cardinals and exciting young quarterback Kyler Murray. A 17-point third quarter by Murray and Co. had erased a 23-9 Buffalo lead and put the Cards up 26-23 late. Then, with 39 seconds left, a 21-yard touchdown pass from Josh Allen to Stefon Diggs put the Bills ahead 30-26.
That shouldn’t have been enough time on the clock to lose a game. But Murray was magical that day. He completed two passes and called two timeouts. He then hit Larry Fitzgerald for nine yards to the Buffalo 43 with 11 seconds left.
The Bills called a timeout. Leslie Frazier, the defensive co-ordinator, delivered his orders on what would surely be a heave to the end zone, if Murray could get enough time to throw.
Murray took the snap standing on the large red Cardinal head at midfield. He rolled to his left, making a deep throw more difficult. He dodged one Buffalo tackler and then, one stride short of stepping out of bounds, he twisted his upper body and whipped the ball downfield.
DeAndre Hopkins, Arizona’s best receiver, had three Bills around him. Somehow his black gloves managed to rise higher than those of his opponents and he came down cleanly with the football.
Shades of Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan. Cardinals win, Cardinals win.
The Bills lose and fall to 7-3. A crushing defeat, right? The kind of loss that really sets a team back. In this case, going into the bye week, it was a defeat that left the Bills with
too much time to review their mistakes and ruminate on the loss.
“It stinks because it’s the only thing we’re going to think about for the next week and a half,” said Allen.
Except it didn’t happen that way. In fact, the Bills haven’t lost since.
From colossal late-game mistake to unbeatable. Just like that.
Every team in every sport talks about overcoming adversity. I swear, if Don Shula was still around he’d talk about all the adversity the ’72 Dolphins had to overcome.
That’s just how teams talk, standard cliche stuff, and if these Bills go on to beat Kansas City on Sunday night and then win the Super Bowl, undoubtedly they’ll blather on about adversity, too.
But they didn’t simply overcome it. The Bills just shook it off. Like an own goal. Or missing an easy dunk. Or doublefaulting to lose serve. Like it never happened.
Ben Hogan once said “the most important shot in golf is the next one,” and that’s how the Bills treated that shocking defeat. They just moved on.
That’s a big reason why they’re facing the defending champion Chiefs, and are just narrow underdogs against Andy Reid’s explosive team. Sure, the uncertainty of Patrick Mahomes’ availability until he was declared good to go on Friday influenced the line. Even with Mahomes cleared from concussion protocol, you have to wonder if he’ll be at his very best on Sunday after being knocked woozy by a Cleveland linebacker last weekend.
A brain injury is a brain injury.
If he’d sprained an ankle there would be endless debate about his readiness, but there’s still this belief in sports that players can just shake off a brain injury in a day or two, or once they are cleared to play. Strange.
The Bills, meanwhile, aren’t viewed as anything close to the same team they were last January, when they blew a 16-0 lead to lose a playoff game in overtime to the Houston Texans. Think about that for a second. A Texans team that completely unravelled as an organization this season eliminated these Bills a year ago. Now you wouldn’t even put the two teams in the same conversation.
Allen has matured, and that’s a big reason why Buffalo is viewed differently. He’s not making the big errors at the wrong times any more. The offensive line has emerged as a strength, Diggs is a superstar, and the defence really improved after that Hail Murray disaster.
They’ll need all those elements — Allen, the line, Diggs, the D — to knock off Kansas City. Interestingly, neither the Bills nor the Chiefs delivered a superb performance a week ago. Buffalo shut down Lamar Jackson to beat Baltimore, but didn’t look as cohesive on offence. The Chiefs looked great early against Cleveland, then stalled, then lost Mahomes and needed perfect execution on a very clever fourth-down call to finish off the Browns.
The Chiefs might get away with a similar performance this weekend. Mahomes-Tyreek Hill-Travis Kelce is the best trio in football, and Tyrann (Honey Badger) Mathieu seems weirdly out of position at times but makes game-defining plays.
The Bills, on the other hand, will need to play excellent football to advance. It should be cool but not cold in Kansas City, maybe with rain, and Allen and the Bills need to score at least 24 points. Probably 30, because you know Mahomes and his collaborators are going to score. K.C. only scored less than 20 points once this season.
The Chiefs always figured to be here. The Bills? Well, late in the day on Nov. 15 you might have wondered if they’d even make the playoffs after such a crushing setback.
Yet here they are. Like it never happened.