Mikie2times

You might think this, but it didn't go that way with the 90's teams. I think you can sell that to yourself all the way up until that moment of adversity. Buffalo might have felt like they could win the 4th Super Bowl but after the fumble it was clear the game was over. Always loved that play

How aboot a boot? I wasn't able to watch that game and I'm glad I didn't. But you have to get outside a few times in that spot. That, or you run single wing with Allen. The sneak was just suicide.

We forced OT, so that's why I phrased it that way. But my greater point was, just because it was a dominant play this year doesn't mean we haven't had some issues with it in the past. Titans game several years back, Vikings game. For awhile we wouldn't even call it. Then we really went to it this year but right when KC stuffed the 2 point conversion you could tell, this wasn't the game. Then Josh nearly fumbles going air born and extending the ball and it was like ok, you're getting really lucky. This needs to stop. But we just kept going to it. They didn't need to get as cute as the play below but if they called that Cook is walking into the end zone and we are in the Super Bowl.

You're making Allen's number one differentiator just somebody who can scramble. Yes, the NFL has more mobile QB's. That is not what makes Allen who he is. He is one of the most gifted players to ever play. Which allows him to play sandlot QB creating almost 50% of his damage outside of the play design. He has no comp who has ever won a Super Bowl beside Brett Favre. Historically, maybe young Elway, Favre, young Vick, Cam Newton, maybe Lamar nowadays but not really. Elway got his rings after he was done doing his old Elways things. These guys didn't operate in the play. They created and it's what made them great, but it was also much more prone to breaking down and being inconsistent. If you want to categorize Mahomes that way so be it. I disagree with that view but I see why you would put him there. I don't think that's what makes him who he is. Reid is too skilled a play caller for him to live off schedule. He does it when he has to. If you want to label Hurts or Daniels that way, I REALLY disagree with that view. Lamar would be the closest current NFL QB and you can include him but it wouldn't help your case. Lot's of MVP's for these guys as they're amazing and incredible to watch, but a lot less rings compared to personal hardware. Ideally you want the style of play where somebody says "that looks easy". Easy is repeatable and repeatable holds up under pressure.

Sure it's changing, but what I said never will

Mahomes is more like Steve Young. He plays tight within a system and improvises when he has no choice but when he isn't forced to improvise the ball is out immediately. Josh is closest to Favre, modern day, Lamar would probably be the closest one. Hurts is a system QB, he rarely ever tries to even consider attempting the things Josh does. The only commonality is they both scramble. He might win one and I think Josh will as well. Having an ability to run isn't what makes Allen who he is. It's his ability to lean on his ungodly skills to do things nobody else can and lots of times it works (as it should have yesterday). But all of that doesn't change that fact that a 3-4 step and fire QB, as rare as they're modern day, is still more lethal and most likely to win late in the playoffs. It's because how they play is more repeatable and systematic.

I don't expect Allen to do anything. If you can't understand the nuance between how a Tom Brady played vs how Josh plays I don't know what to tell you. A QB with a lightning quick release, accuracy, and ability to read defenses will always beat a physical marvel with elite everything else. The game has been that way for it's entire existence. Allen is responsible for more wins than any QB in the NFL, but is his style of play optimal for a Super Bowl? No and history says as much.

Allen is prone to making decisions that make him have to make heroic plays. Brett Favre did the same thing. If you think that's the best path to a ring I don't know what to tell you. I don't blame him. He's the best QB in the NFL. But that doesn't mean how he plays is the most conducive to winning a Super Bowl. He's a sandlot guy. A reason exists why Favre got 3x MVP's to rings. What he did was incredible, but biggest moments favor precision not superman.

Fair, but that statement is sort of a microcosm of the Allen experience. Hero plays are not consistent repeatable events. You don't want a hero play there.

I mean we have been here so many times. Our fans our the best and I'm not just saying that. They're truly the best, loyal, caring people. I feel even stronger about that statement as I age. I remember when I was a kid in the early 90's after we lost. I never lived in Buffalo. But I watched how the fans supported Norwood. How the team responded year after year. I took on this F' you attitude. We are, if nothing else, resilient. I like to think our fans and this team helped instill that in me. That's what we need to be now. Support each other, support the team, believe it can be done. This team is basically a microcosm of life. It will challenge you in the ways life often does. We get thru these moments together, because we are strong and we know that one day it will be worth it in a way very few fan bases have ever felt.

I wouldn't say it's the "real story". It's part of the story. The other part is two potential game winning TD's and we can't get it done. Bad talent lifted up by an all world QB. Awful situational football.

This is a bit of my own therapy..... Regardless of how you break down the game, for two straight years, we’ve had the ball down by three with our number-one-rated offense, our Superman quarterback, and a chance to tie or win the game. In both years, we failed to do so. It’s difficult to place a lot of blame on a guy who’s literally one of the only reasons we even made it to this point. But the question that we have been asking, and that we all want to know, is: why can’t we get past a certain point in the playoffs? To me, the type of quarterback Josh Allen is is at least part of that story—certainly not all of it—and clearly we wouldn’t even be here in the first place without him. Josh is the most talented quarterback in the NFL. He is the most valuable quarterback in the NFL, but he’s more of a sandlot-style player. His greatest strengths aren’t reading defenses, making pre-snap reads, delivering the hot ball quickly, or running a systematic offense. He’s not like Brady, Montana, or Burrow. And when you’re in moments where you have one drive and it needs to be executed perfectly, his style of quarterback play, in my view, is not optimal. In both years he very well could have overcome it as both of these drives we had a wide receiver or tight end drop a critical ball that could’ve changed the outcome of the game. So we this isn’t on Josh so don’t twist my position that way. Not the optimal style of play for those moments from my view. That is all, we lost as a team. Speaking on which…… We’ve missed on several first-round draft choices for multiple years—Elam, Kincaid—and while I wouldn’t say Coleman's is a straight-up miss, when the opportunity was there to potentially draft Worthy or trade up for Thomas, we chose to go with the most risky option: a player that many people were staying away from because of separation issues. We SHOULD be asking questions about our draft strategy. We’ve done a good job in the mid-to-late rounds finding starting-level talent, but we’ve failed to find elite players, elite difference-makers. Further the roster construction at times has been a bit of a head scratcher. We made a great selection in Shakir. He’s shown to be a great YAC guy and a valuable slot receiver. Then we draft Kincaid, who is not a full-time, run-blocking, pass-catching tight end—he’s a receiving tight end. And guess what? You’re not going to be splitting him out wide very often. He’s almost always going to occupy one of your slot roles. Then what do we do in the offseason? We sign Curtis Samuel, who’s another slot-type guy. If that wasn’t enough, if you review Coleman’s tape and some of his advanced stats from MSU and Florida State, you'd see he performed best out of the big slot role, which negated some of his issues, like trouble getting off the ball and separation issues. There was no cohesion in these decisions. There were no complementary wide receivers. It almost felt like when Dorsey called plays, he was calling each one individually, as if the play before had no impact on the next. It felt like we just decided to take players we thought were good and figured we’d make it work later. On the defensive side, I’ve been one of the most vocal critics of McDermott, but I’m tired of it. He’s our coach, and it seems likely he’s not going anywhere for a very long time, right or wrong. I’m tired of 80% of my posts crapping on him. We made some stops in yesterday’s game, and we adjusted pretty effectively in the second half. I trust him as a coach who can stabilize a team, even though I don’t like his system. Crap on him or not, at the end of the day, Kansas City has had incredible success against his system—more so than any other team they’ve faced in the playoffs. Those are facts. Kansas City performs exceptionally well against our defense, especially in the playoffs. We’ve been at this for eight years, and we just don’t have the horses on defense. We lost both of our starting safeties and replaced them with virtually nobody. We have no depth at corner. We had Milano, who we knew wasn’t going to be ready for most of the season, and Bernard, who was a good mid-round pick. We don’t have any players who are top 8 at their positions, outside of Taron Johnson. Maybe Benford, but we just don’t have the horses. So regardless of whether you want to call McDermott’s scheme trash, and it certainly looks that way against Kansas City, he won’t be able to execute it with this talent level. Then there’s the play-calling on offense. We’ve become so dependent on the tush push that we didn’t develop any other short-yardage plays. The only other short-yardage play we had was basically a speed option with Josh and Cook, which worked for a touchdown, one of the most amazing runs I’ve seen from a Bills player in years. But that’s about it. Look at how Kansas City schemed their bootlegs and short-yardage plays against us. When you’re dealing with a heavily compacted defense, if the end is not disciplined (and ours wasn’t), it’s game over. We had no short-yardage plays outside of the one we saw. When you’re going to scheme plays offensively to essentially put yourself in short-yardage situations, you should have a full arsenal of 1- to 2-yard plays at your disposal. But we just said, "Well, screw it, because we’re good at this." Some could argue that Philadelphia is similar, but I’ve never seen Jalen Hurts get stuffed on his own 1-yard line, fumble the ball, and nearly cost his team the game. The second Josh got stuffed on the first sneak for the 2-point conversion, that should’ve been a wake-up call. The push from Kansas City, in addition to Josh’s tentativeness, showed it was a mistake to keep running that play. I don’t care if he got the first down or not—time has told us that you cannot leave it in the hands of the refs. We have a long season ahead and a lot of thinking to do. It sucks, and I don’t know what the answer is. We have some good players, but part of the issue when you re-sign a player whose good but not great is that they occupy that role for a significant time, and you don’t get the chance to get another great player in that spot because you think you’re good enough. It really feels like this team needs a reset, and I don’t know if that’s McDermott or not. As I said, I’m not going to continue talking about him after this post. It’s too much negativity. But this team is starting to feel like it needs the plug pulled. Not because it hasn't been very successful or McD sucks or bla bla, but more because it needs a violent shake-up to go further than it has. If that costs us a year to rebuild, I don’t care. This regime and these players have failed to get it done. Eventually, we need to figure out how to stop that from happening. You can’t just keep saying, "Well, Kansas City is the best, and we lost to the best, so that’s how it is." No. We were inches away from beating the best multiple times. A little better scheme, a little better execution, and a little better roster would’ve made the difference. It was that close, but we failed again. Perhaps we just keep running it back, I just don't know how that is the answer. But when I say blow it up it's not out of hate for these guys. I just don't know what the path forward can be. Love you all and I wish we didn’t have to go thru this.

Great post and exactly where my mind was. Running exactly what KC did with the QB boot would have been wide open. It's nice to say, it's only an inch so run it back but they showed a pretty strong ability to stuff it all game. We just never developed more off it during the season.

I have about 35 years in as a fan and have spent the last 15-20 with very little expectations or hope with any of it. I enjoy the great plays, I enjoy the wins. But at the end of the day I never let my mind drift into thinking "this is the year". If I'm lucky (as I was this year) I will get a few moments where I feel those old childlike emotions of excitement bubble up again. It started when it was 22-21 and we had the ball. It ended when we failed on the 4th down. But in the end, here we are. I'm pretty down and haven't fully absorbed the loss, but I'm also not catatonic because I didn't let myself buy into this feeling that we would win it all. Perhaps that's just aging or perhaps I'm a little B and just want to keep my emotions protected. Either way I know at some point we will win this and when that happens it will be probably one of the better feelings any fan can have because of what we have been thru and the loyalty and love we have for this team. Huge hug to all my Bills brethren.

With ya, brutal. They played with a lot of heart.

That's got some truth as far as how he plays, but I do think he's a champion. But sure Josh is more of a sandlot guy and that has more variance with execution. But still, the dude put the ball on our 1st round draft picks numbers and he didn't catch it. Nobody could have made that throw. So to pick on Allen seems to be a bit much here.

Then rock it out man. I have about the 80% of the last 1000 posts crapping on him. We could have made the Super Bowl with him this year. That is my final takeaway. Two years in a row we had the ball with a chance to win vs the likely SB champions and we didn't score. So to lazor focus the blame on him just seems a bit much. I don't think he is some amazing HC, but again, I'm going to take a break on the bashing for awhile. Plenty of blame to go around for this one.

And we had the ball with a chance to win and our guy dropped it. I don't think McD is taking us to the next level, but we could and likely should have won this game. Is it worth all the negative focus all offseason on him when it was pretty obvious we just didn't have the horses?

Defense did enough. Not going to be talking negatively about him this year. I might not think he's the savior but it's a lot of negative energy on him when we had multiple paths to win this game. If anything, I'm looking more at Beane to be honest.

I'm taking the year off on giving McD crap. We had a chance to win our last drive for the second straight year. We did enough on defense.

Donate to Kinkaids charity

That’s not the call

Same as last year. If you get one drive to win you take it.

That’s actually not a bad deal.

To end the Billsy we need to win one of these. That simple. They have fought like champions so far.