HappyDays

Kincaid absolutely has to make that catch, but one thing that's striking to me is that nobody on KC had to make an outstanding individual play. Ok I'll give them Worthy's contested "catch". But nothing like Cook's effort on his 4th down TD or Josh leaping over a pile of bodies. All KC had to do was what the coaches told them to do and execute the plays as called to get a fairly easy win. Our players have to stand on their heads doing magic tricks and it still wasn't enough.

The more I reflect and read about the game the more I come to this conclusion. The dead giveaway is that all of their TD drives were easy with barely any resistance, while ours relied on multiple 4th down conversions, James Cook making a miraculous individual play at the goalline, etc. We were threading needles and biting our nails while they were casually waltzing downfield. Just a massive coaching gap on both sides of the ball. I don't know how we are going to suddenly bridge that gap while Allen is still in his prime. It's demoralizing to think about.

I don't really buy this. In our regular season game we made it a point to contain rush him and it was a big reason why our defense performed so well in that game. So I was shocked at how comparatively poor our rush fundamentals were in this game. We gave Mahomes free reign to move anywhere he wanted for the entire 1st half. It's just bad coaching.

On one hand it feels like we are so close to beating them. But the necessary changes are fundamental, not superficial. And I just don't see those fundamental changes coming any time soon. Even if we add a Maxx Crosby I'm not convinced that solves the underlying problems.

Honestly worse. The more I think about the loss the less confident I feel that we can fix the coaching and roster deficiencies that ended our season. We have zero stars outside of Allen, an OC still finding his way, a defensive head coach that gets massively out schemed by Andy Reid every year. It feels like we are stuck in purgatory.

I'm actually not sure that it does. All of these games are coming down to one possession. A few plays scattered across the entire game IS the difference. Their coaches compared to ours in those moments is by far the biggest gap between us IMO. I mean the whole game yesterday could be flipped just on the short yardage plays. That's how close it is.

See I don't think coming up with a few new creative plays is mastermind stuff. That's standard fare for winning a championship. But every year we just go out there and run our plays. What was our surprise play, a telegraphed fake screen on the final drive? It's laughable.

It's still mainly coaching IMO. Did we call any offensive plays we hadn't put on tape this year? No, we ran the same set of plays we always run including on that final 4th down. Way too easy for a coach as good as Spags. I'm not sure this coaching staff understands what is needed to overcome this era's dynasty. You can't just "do what got you here." You need to shock and awe them and put them on their heels. Bring the fight to them. We went conservative/safe and suffered the consequences.

I don't agree with that all. It's zone and his zone is completely vacated. He needs to stop running about 5 yards before he does. Where is he running to? Then he needs to see the ball in the air and track it like a punt. He runs himself out of the play, fails to track the ball properly, then makes an awkward attempt to make up for it and can't finish the catch that he made more difficult for himself.

And still I don't know why the obsession is over the protection call. It didn't matter. Even if the protection was perfect, Kincaid was wide the hell open and would have been the target and would have needed to come down with the catch. For as wide open as he was a pop fly was the best possible throw because it's impossible to conceive that he could fail to track and catch it with so much space around him. Look at it from this angle: There's nothing but space in every direction! This is worse than muffing a punt. There's nothing else about this play that is worth talking about. The guy that we traded up for in the 1st round choked, plain and simple.

Why are we thinking the outcome is any different even if the protection call is better? All year long Kincaid has overrun his zone window and put himself in poor position to make a catch. And he has an 8% drop rate. He's not the player you want on the other end of a crucial 4th down in the AFCCG, even if everything else works the way it's supposed to.

I went with one more year, for a couple reasons. First is that I said I would lay off McDermott if he defied expectations and got this team to the AFCCG. To me that was the floor I needed to see from him and I won't go back on my word despite feeling a certain kind of way about him right now. Second is that the two ideal candidates were Vrabel and Johnson, and they're now both off the board. In fact if one of them were still available I'd be willing to break from reason #1. But as it stands there are no obvious remaining candidates. A year from now there very well could be. The disclaimer to all this is that when I say one more year I really do mean one more year. And for me that applies to both McDermott and Beane. They're a package deal now. I'm not interested in playing the blame game - their respective individual failures are obvious. This offseason they can get a lot of bad cap space off the books and they have a good amount of draft capital to work with. The full coaching staff is coming back (hopefully except for Smiley). The core group of players will all be back. So zero excuses next year. Get a Super Bowl appearance or let's give someone else a try as Allen enters his 30s. I think that is more than reasonable.

Yeah it's like I said earlier, that play encapsulates everything about his underwhelming play this year - poor understanding of zone spacing, poor body positioning, and finally a drop. He did everything wrong on this play. It turns out there's a reason we didn't get him involved a lot this year and it isn't because Brady doesnt know how to use him or because Allen just happens to be randomly less accurate when throwing in his direction - he just flat out hasn't been good enough. If I'm the Bills I'm walking into the offseason with the assumption that Kincaid and Coleman are both busts, and I'd make my draft and FA decisions accordingly. If one or both of them take a big step in their development, great that is found money. But I'd assume the worst and plan from there.

I haven't seen a lot of NFL media people talking about Allen's legacy today. Mostly they're talking about the drop and his teammates letting him down again. It would have been nice if I had called scissors when my opponent called paper. Spags' brilliance is in his unpredictability. He has by far the best blitz packages in the NFL. There's no tell pre-snap. You're left guessing. Wouldn't have mattered anyways. I don't have confidence that Kincaid would have made the catch even if the play developed normally because he failed in every big moment last night.

I wish the play call had featured a hot route. You have to know Spags is likely to blitz on 4th down even if you don't know from where. But most of all I just wish Kincaid had tracked the lob pass and made the easy catch. Oh well.

Not on the QB. Spags is the best defensive coach in the NFL. I mean there's no accounting for that. You're basically just guessing.

To be clear I'm talking about our matchups with KC in the playoffs. Adding Crosby or Garrett would certainly lead to better defensive results in the regular season. But nothing about the game last night is making me think "if only we had a premier pass rusher." What's the point? Andy Reid out schemed us and Mahomes was getting the ball out to a wide open WR within 3 seconds on most plays. Rousseau is supposed to be the best contain EDGE in the game and he completely failed in his responsibilities. If anything on defense I want to see us add to the secondary, clearly the entire secondary needs to be rebuilt outside of Benford. But that can't be the primary focus of the offseason. The primary focus has to be developing an offense that can score on every drive against KC and especially the last drive. That's how we get over the hump. Twice now Allen has had the ball in his hands with a chance to win and we couldn't finish them off, because the players around him failed to support him.

The problem is that our offseason strategy made it impossible to be patient. Coleman was forced into a role he wasn't ready for because there was no one above him in the depth chart. That's why I keep saying they need to over invest. Everyone understands draft picks are lottery tickets. We keep buying one at a time and expecting to hit the jackpot. We need to make a repeated concerted effort to add to the room like the Steelers have done for years and just by sheer luck we will probably get a couple hits. KC has had a bunch of disappointing WR picks but they hit the jackpot with Rashee Rice and Worthy looks like he could be a good pick, all because they kept investing in the position. I'd like to make a major FA investment too just to be 100% sure we have a stud in the room. The half measures strategy isn't cutting it.

My take is and has been that a stud pass rusher isn't going to make this defense perform notably better in the playoffs, but a stud WR would make this offense perform notably better.

One thing that really bothered me was our offensive game plan seemed to be hyper focused on getting into short yardage situations, and then getting just enough yardage to convert those into 1st downs. We didn't try to push the envelope at all and it burned us at the end. It's too hard to make a living on nonstop 3rd/4th downs against an extremely well coached and talented defense. Yet getting to those downs was seemingly our goal throughout the entire game. Meanwhile KC was moving the ball at will through the air with no fear. The respective game plans had us on our heels the entire game and when we had a chance to really take control of the game in the 2nd half we blew it with the same conservative play calling.

I've become almost resigned to it. McDermott is going to be the head coach. The defense is going to do this every year in the playoffs. So what strategy can we follow to still break through even with these barriers? For me I think we need an offense that can put up 40 consistently. Make the defense irrelevant. I know every team has trouble getting past KC, but we're the only one having trouble in this specific way. Their other playoff opponents aren't giving up literally historic production. McDermott and his hand picked DCs just can't figure it out.

I'll just throw this stat out there, heard it from Joe Marino - Mahomes had a 64% success rate on dropbacks last night. That is the highest ever of his career. Not his playoff career mind you. His entire career. I said I'll lay off McDermott this offseason and I will. But here we are again, defensive head coach and we are giving up historic production in sudden death games. Will it ever end?

Genuine question for you - if before the game you could have accepted the Bills scoring 29 points, would you have taken that? I would have for sure. I thought coming into this game that holding KC below 30 was the bare minimum expectation. I mean we did it to Baltimore who unquestionably had a better offense. But at least now we know that as long as our current coaching staff is in place KC will always be able to score 30 on us. No matter how much we invest on defense, no matter how healthy we are coming into the game, no matter where the game is played, they will get their 30 points. So now we have to move forward with that knowledge and make decisions accordingly. We need to score a minimum of 34 points to feel confident (although not certain) that we will win the game. That's not really a fair standard for our offense of course, especially against an elite playoff defense, but it is the standard and we need to invest appropriately to make sure we can deliver that result. So I see both sides of this argument because I'm on both sides. On one hand it's plainly ridiculous that the offense should need to perform at an almost perfect level just to have a better than even chance of beating KC in the playoffs; on the other hand it is a simple fact that that is what is needed, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Do what's necessary to make the defense a non-factor and maybe Allen will get his one Super Bowl win.

I'm not going to say the officials lost us this game - we made plenty of our own mistakes and deserved to lose. But in a game that everyone knew was going to be decided by one possession, the officials literally stole one possession from us. Period. No debate, that's actually what happened. That's worth noting and it's worth being angry about. And it's not just Bills fans' anger - NFL fans from across the social media world are all angry about it too. There are people I follow on Twitter that don't usually comment on football, and even a few of them have brought it up unprompted. I've never seen anything like it. It's become the dominating narrative of the game, rather than the great matchup between two heavyweights that we all just watched, and that just really sucks. I want football to be about football, not about this stupid crap. Of course the problem is that the NFL has no reason to care. The controversy actually drives engagement so to them it's a good thing. I don't think anyone is fixing games, it is just human error that the NFL is actually incentivized to let continue. Sure they could easily put a chip in the ball but the drama of those moments would be lost and that's a lot more valuable to them than a 100% accurate outcome.

This is where I'm at. Funny enough i was in this thread just minutes before the game arguing with a couple people about how I thought Kincaid had been mediocre this year (I didn't realize at the time I was foreshadowing disaster). I was told that his low catch percentage isn't his fault, that Allen needs to throw him better passes or Brady needs to get him more involved. Well here on the final play of the game we see all of the reasons why he wasn't getting involved this season - he failed to get himself to the spot of the throw, he failed to position his body properly, and finally he failed to make the catch. He was drafted in part of because of his elite hands but he had 3 drops over two playoff games (one of which was incorrectly called a catch against Denver). I'm putting him in the Gabe Davis bucket of players I'll never trust again. Not without sustained consistently good play and even then I'll need to see him do it in a big moment before I'll fully buy in.