My Buffalo Blues: Season Finale

The AFC Championship game was a rough one, as the Buffalo Bills were utterly overwhelmed by the reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs, 38-24. In the wake of the (mostly) one-sided defeat, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing but the Bills got outplayed and outcoached on both sides of the ball. It’s that simple. Like most Bills fans, I’m disappointed. To have such a fairytale season end with a fizzle is frustrating. However, I’m a Bills fan and learned to manage my expectations a long, long time ago.

Bills Mafia has been amazing this season and seeing how the community supports the team and each other is truly fan-tastic (sorry, I couldn’t resist). However, in the immediate aftermath of the loss, there was a small contingent of Bills fans on social media that began to cannibalize the team and one another. Let me clarify, the vast majority of the fan base was awesome. They showed an immense amount of appreciation and gratitude for what the team accomplished this season and I love it, but I’m going to address the negatives here. 

I should have just let it go, but calling the loss “embarrassing”, saying the Bills “didn’t deserve to be on the same field” as the Chiefs, and having a general sense of entitlement that they were somehow personally offended by the Bills’ performance just didn’t sit well with me. This narrative that Buffalo just wasn’t the same team as we’d seen all season, if they had just played their best it would have been a different game, doesn’t give credit to Kansas City for locking down one of the best offenses in the game and bewildering a defense that had been very stingy throughout the postseason. It also sends this message that the Bills didn’t prepare and/or weren’t trying out there. I didn’t see a team that quit or that wasn’t trying to win. Buffalo was outmatched, they weren’t able to adjust in time, and that’s all there is to it. The loss was deflating, disappointing, and frustrating, but don’t dare tell me they didn’t deserve to be on the field with the Chiefs. The Bills franchise, their coaches, and players put in a ton of work to rebuild a winning culture. They absolutely deserved to be on that field and attempting to take that from them should get your Mafia card revoked. 

There were some head-scratching coaching decisions in the second half that made you wonder what Sean McDermott was hoping to accomplish, but this season was a learning experience for him too. I can’t fault him for kicking the field goal before the half, Buffalo was down 21-9 at the time and if they don’t come away with points there and give the ball back to the Chiefs’ offense that they hadn’t stopped to open the second half, it would have put the game out of reach. Kansas City ended up kicking the field goal to start the second half and the Bills were back down 12-points. Buffalo kicked a FG of their own on their next possession to get the lead back down to 9-points, but they hadn’t stopped the Chiefs all night and the game being close was mostly an illusion. That was the spot where not going for it on 4th & 3 inside the KC 10-yard line is an issue. The FG kept it a two-score game, and since they couldn’t even slow the KC offense, you might as well try to convert on 4th down and see if you can make something happen with your huge, athletic, mobile quarterback. The conservative nature of the decision showed that McDermott was content to keep chasing as long as the game was technically within reach. 

Kansas City answered the Bills’ FG with a TD to stretch the lead to 16-points, Josh Allen got intercepted trying to force a pass to John Brown on Buffalo’s ensuing possession, and the Chiefs punished the mistake with another TD to make it 38-15 on the early end of the 4th quarter. At that point, it was over. However, the Bills kept fighting and managed a TD drive but McDermott decided to be aggressive in that instance and went for the 2-point conversion but it ended with an interception on a forced throw to Stefon Diggs. The problem was that going for two there didn’t change the fact they still needed two TDs and failing on the conversion meant it was a three-possession game with only 4-minutes left. The Bills even recovered the onside kick attempt, but down three scores it was irrelevant. McDermott’s explanation about analytics didn’t hold much water, especially after Buffalo used the onside recovery to go kick a meaningless field goal. 

I can’t stand analytics. One firm started providing analytics for baseball, where there’s a much larger sample size of data, and wormed their way onto ESPN and eventually from there into the NFL. It’s one of the dumbest things to work its way into the game and we saw how stupid it is in both of the Conference Championship games. Football is a game of matchups and the data doesn’t represent that. It can’t. There isn’t enough information available. Perhaps you could run a simulation of the exact scenario a thousand times, but that’s not what it does and even that leaves a lot unaccounted for. The numbers may have told McDermott (and Matt LaFleur) kicking the field goal or going for the two-point conversion increased the odds of victory. However, that data isn’t representative of the game that’s actually taking place. It’s not even possible for that to be the case because the game is fluid and there way too many variables to account for. The best analytics can do is tell a coach what the league-wide averages are, but that doesn’t take into account a host of other information that isn’t present in the data set. Mainly, it takes the players out of the game. 

There is a place for data analysis in sports, but understanding the game itself is not one of them. Both McDermott and LaFleur decided to “listen to the numbers” and both of them will be watching the Super Bowl from home rather than playing in it. At least with McDermott, no amount of analytics was going to rescue them from a two-score deficit when the Chiefs weren’t forced to punt a single time. It wasn’t the Bills’ night.

It wasn’t Josh Allen’s night either. This young man had a remarkable season so it’s easy to overlook how green he still is. In my breakdown for the game, I pointed to the sacks he takes while trying to extend plays and that really reared its ugly head in this game. It wasn’t just taking the sacks either, it was not knowing when to give up. In total, Allen was sacked four times for a total loss of 53-yards. That’s more than 13-yards per sack and doesn’t include the intentional grounding penalty he took on one of those. For a guy who can be a dynamic playmaker, all those moments went against him in this game. Considering the Bills leave a lot to be desired at the running back position and were facing a lot of blanket coverage, I would have liked offensive coordinator Brian Daboll to open up Allen in the run game sooner. It would have forced some help from the secondary earlier in the game, but it’s in the past. Allen is our guy in Buffalo and it wasn’t a mistake to draft him. He took accountability after the game and he’ll get better. 

A lot of what I heard from national sports media was about this Bills team somehow being a fluke. The 13-3 regular season record was a little surprising, even for me, but I figured they’d probably be in the 11-5/12-4 neighborhood. Not only did they establish that they are one of the best young teams out there, but they also showed repeatedly down the stretch that they’re clearly the #2 team in the AFC. The only teams within the conference they lost to were the Titans and the Chiefs, both of whom were playoff teams and division leaders. Much of the national media counted them out against the Colts and Ravens in the playoffs also, but they beat both of them too. Maybe they overachieved a little for a team as young as they are, but they aren’t a fluke.

Losing the way they did is painful. It’s going to stick with them all off-season but it’s also going to fuel the fire they need to put themselves in a position to get to a Super Bowl next season. We could see some sweeping changes as both defensive coordinator Leslie Frasier and offensive coordinator Brian Daboll are in the mix for head coaching jobs around the league. There are some roster moves to make as well, but I’ll leave that for another time. For now, I’m proud of what the Bills did this season and I look forward to the future.