BillsFanSD

This game was all on the defense. Allen was fine.

I know the statistics don't back it up, but I thought Allen played very well today when it mattered. Not perfect mind you, but very well.

Greatly improved accuracy, willingness to take the short pass / checkdown / throwaway, migrating away from the stupid interceptions.

I figured we were likely to lose this one, so the result isn't that disappointing. But the defense was absolutely terrible for the second week in a row, and I'm starting to feel like this team is quite a bit shakier than I thought it was.

OP isn't wrong. This is a matchup that cries out for using our passing game to attack the Eagles's secondary. If the weather were normal, I would view it as a good test for our offense. With the weather the way it actually is, I feel pretty pessimistic about this one. Hope to be wrong of course.

What could go wrong?

Well done OP.

Good. Seeing as how three teams in the AFCE start the season with no realistic chance at a division title, I'm not incline to apologize for lucking out and catching an easy schedule that sets up a WC berth.

This may be the game that most depends on Josh Allen, for exactly the reason you described. I mean, obviously the play of your QB is always important, but we didn't really need Allen to "win" any of our games so far, and I think we can reasonably expect to handle most of our remaining opponents (BAL, DAL, and NE are the toughies of course) with Allen just avoiding mistakes and taking what's there. For this game, I think the clearest path to victory is with Allen aggressively attacking the secondary, which is something we haven't done a lot of this year. This should be a really interesting game.

Just another happy, friendly Monday following a Bills win.

I'm growing concerned over our inability to beat the blitz. For whatever reason, Allen is not doing a good job of hitting his hot receiver -- I don't know whether that's a result of him not being able to see pressure coming pre-snap, not finding the outlet guy fast enough, poor play design, or what, but it needs to get fixed.

I agree with this. The first two handoffs were fine -- we weren't having any problems running the ball on Miami and it made sense to lean on the running game and try to kill the clock. But on third and long, we should have gone for the first down. Sure an incompletion would have been a mild bummer, but maintaining possession was a lot more important at that point of the game than keeping the clock running for just another 30 seconds.

The defense had an off day yesterday, coming off the bye against an opponent that the whole team obviously didn't take very seriously. We've seen nothing this season to make us think that this was anything other than an aberration. I'm not worried about the defense at all.

I think he's subtracting out the 3 point cushion we get for home field advantage. We would be dogs on a neutral field.

What third quarter issues are you talking about? The Bills had one drive in the 3rd quarter and it went for the go-ahead TD. You're complaining about a 98 yard TD drive.

I had some God Sake when I was in Japan. It was okay but I'll stick with whiskey thanks.

I'm pretty sure he was on the field for the last TD to Beasley. Edit: Yes, he was lined up on the right side of the formation, opposite Beasley.

Seems about right. Bills vs. Eagles is a solid strength-vs-strength and weakness-vs-weakness matchup.

Duke returned to the game.

White Smoke Gore came up big during that 98 yard drive in the second half. That was (obviously) the game-changing drive. Everybody else seemed out of sorts for long sections of the game.

Yep. I feel like things will have gone wrong somehow if Allen throws for 300+ this week. Let's get ahead early, pound the rock, and move on to Philly.

We "stole" nothing from the Jets and Titans. Those teams are both at least decent (I think the Jets are better than decent), but we were the better team in both games and we got the wins that we deserved. There is no "number of blowouts" tiebreaker in playoff seeding. While I would like to see us score more -- who wouldn't? -- I disagree that we can't be a contender without more offense. If we can score 20 points every game, that's enough to go 13-3 or so and win playoff games on the road. The only team in our conference that I don't think we can reliably hold to fewer than 20 points is Kansas City, but even that is do-able. Heck, the Colts did it. And besides, there is every reason to expect our offense to get better as the season goes along. We have a young QB who is still developing, and nine (!) of our offensive starters are new to to the team this year. We haven't seen the best of this unit yet.

I voted A. He's the person most directly responsible for building a strong culture and team chemistry that this franchise has lacked since the SB era. Since McD arrived, our team consistently pulls out a win or two in games that we have no business winning, which reflects well on the coach. He needs better game-day management to move up to an A+, but that's a relatively small part of his job compared to the other big-picture stuff. Heading into the draft, I was led to believe that Josh Allen was a super-raw prospect from a third tier program who would need to learn the game from the sideline. Nearly everybody agreed that he shouldn't see the field during his first year, and many argued that he would need to sit and watch for two seasons before being ready for game action. With that as our starting point, Josh Allen's development has come along much faster than expected. He's not there yet, but he's in his second year and he's clearly on the right trajectory. Not much more you can ask of a coaching staff.

He also threw for 89 yards against New England with no TDs and 3 INTs. Our pass defense is not significantly worse than New England's.

This is exactly like having Steve Young ready to come off the bench to replace Joe Montana. Edit: No wait, it's actually the opposite of that.