dave mcbride

He really did play better as the season went on, and the advanced stats show that.

The Bills, minus their only capable boundary CB, would have been curb stomped.

https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/nazeeh-johnson-chiefs-knew-josh-allens-tendencies-for-qb-sneaks Link

What would that be? Houston, which had a bad offense this season, stymied KC (and Buffalo earlier in the season; it wa arguably Allen’s worst game in the past 5 years) because they have elite corners who can play man well. Elam sucks, but the best player for kc in that game was McDuffie. And he made the game-deciding play in last year’s SB. I now think you conflate all early CB picks — good and bad — as *all* bad and are so conscious of being “on brand” on this message board (sorta as a gimmick) that you lose sight of what NFL teams rightly value — defending against the pass.

The Bills arguably lost to KC because of fielding marginal, low-athletic-skills secondary players vs KC. It's a huge need.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6097505/2025/01/29/bills-chiefs-offseason-roster-free-agents/ Good comments here: “If there was one thing that became abundantly obvious, it’s just how much, through coaching, the Chiefs exploited some of the deficiencies of the Bills’ roster and some flawed planning to deal with them. These wound up being many of the tiny edges the Chiefs used to help fuel yet another trip to the Super Bowl. And while it leaves the Bills at home one game shy of their goal, it can help direct them over the next few months of roster building. Four positions felt it more than the others. Cornerback One central inflection point came when the Bills lost top cornerback Christian Benford for the game due to his second concussion in as many weeks. It subbed out one of the best defenders on the roster the entire season in Benford for the lowest-graded player on the whole roster, Kaiir Elam. Until Benford’s injury, the Bills had played zone coverage on 71.4 percent of the seven Chiefs dropbacks — a standard rate for their usual operating procedure. It was a downgrade in performance and forced the Bills to pivot, likely trying to accomplish two things to give their defense a fighting chance. First, given Elam’s struggles in their usual zone-based defense, they tried to accentuate his strengths. He’s put together a handful of solid reps in a smaller sample size as a man-cover corner over three years and seems far more comfortable in those roles. Second, the Chiefs burned through the Bills’ zone coverage when Benford was in the game. They averaged 13.6 yards per dropback on five plays, including two scrambles by Patrick Mahomes. That’s opposed to allowing 4.5 yards per dropback in man coverage. So, the Bills and defensive coordinator Bobby Babich made a big switch through the rest of the game, hoping for the same results as the Ravens game. But here’s the rub: the Bills ran man coverage only twice with Benford in the game, and Benford was the only reason they forced the incompletion on receiver Hollywood Brown to bring that per-dropback average down. Despite that, after Benford left the game, the Bills used man coverage on 50 percent of the Chiefs’ remaining dropbacks — a massive uptick from their 22.4 percent rate from the regular season. And the Chiefs were ready for it after seeing it on film from the previous game, armed with better, speedier receivers than the Ravens, and the Bills were down two members of their starting secondary. After Elam entered the game, the Chiefs took off against man coverage. They targeted Elam repeatedly, and his confidence waned. When the Chiefs ran some pick plays targeting Elam, he got lost in traffic. There was a second-and-9 play where Xavier Worthy was lined up in front of Elam in man coverage, and Elam gave Worthy nearly 10 yards of cushion pre-snap. Mahomes quickly spotted it, Worthy ran a comeback to the sticks and had an easy completion. There was even a play later in the game when Elam was in press-man against JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Elam got himself crossed up, stumbled for the next two seconds and fell in coverage, allowing Smith-Schuster to be wide open over the middle of the field. That was on the Worthy catch that brought the Chiefs within the Bills’ five-yard line, and Elam went unnoticed because of the controversy around that catch and the defensive holding call on safety Damar Hamlin. On top of that, the team’s other starting cornerback, Rasul Douglas, a better zone defender than when he plays man coverage, struggled against the Chiefs receivers. How bad was it? After Benford left the game, the Chiefs completed 11 of their 12 pass attempts against man coverage for 160 yards and Mahomes’ lone touchdown pass. Five of those 11 completed passes went for 15 or more yards. Three of them went for 20 or more yards. They averaged 13.3 yards per dropback. The Chiefs preyed on them in man coverage, using their speed and separation at wide receiver to their advantage and ran pick plays to enhance it further. Ironically, the other half of the time, the Bills were in zone coverage — what they had done all season, and the Bills allowed only 3.6 yards per dropback after Benford left the game. All five of Mahomes’ scrambles came against zone coverage, so that might have been part of their decision-making to keep on going with man coverage despite the results. But right from the moment Elam entered the game, man coverage was an overwhelming liability. All of this is important because Douglas is a free agent and turns 31 in August. He’s no guarantee to be back next year. Elam has one year remaining on his rookie contract, but nothing about his showings throughout the 2024 season should make the Bills feel comfortable that he can step into a full-time starting role in 2025. Finding a cornerback to pair with Benford for the long term should be a focal point because everything over the last three years has shown Elam isn’t that player. Safety Without top starter Taylor Rapp available for the game due to an injury, the top starting duo was Hamlin and rookie Cole Bishop. Bishop had some reps he’d want back and wasn’t a plus-player Sunday, but by far, he was the safety who trusted what he saw and was consistently in a better position to make plays and chip in with run support. He nearly came away with an interception because of how he read the play, too. One of the most significant pressure points of the defense that the Chiefs pressed was with Hamlin. As the season progressed, Hamlin improved from where he began early in the year. But the Chiefs game yielded one of Hamlin’s worst showings of the season. The hesitance he played with early in the year returned, which helped expose some of his athletic flaws. And then, with the Bills playing as much man coverage as they did after Benford left the game, Hamlin was pressed into one-on-one coverage. That led to several opportunities with separation and even a defensive holding call against him. Lacking the versatility to vary up coverages in a successful manner is a difficult thing to overcome, which questions his place on the Bills roster moving forward. Hamlin is a free agent as of March, while Rapp is signed for 2025, and Bishop is signed through 2027. Unless it was on a team-friendly deal with the understanding that Hamlin is the backup behind Rapp and Bishop, they might be better off allowing Hamlin to sign elsewhere and address the depth at safety in a different way.”

Joe B agrees, especially re the secondary: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6097505/2025/01/29/bills-chiefs-offseason-roster-free-agents/

4 of those who made it didn’t have byes and 6 who made it did. 12 teams had byes in those five years; 58 didn’t. I like my odds with the bye given that basic math. It’s hard to argue against that math.

Well put.

It's quite rare in the last 10-12 years for this to happen. Prior to the Chiefs run, the Pats had byes from 2011-2018 and made the championship game every year, going to the SB five times. The only that got the SB in the AFC with no bye in that time period was the 2012 Ravens. The bye and home field are huge advantages, and the stats show that. Of course, there are times where it doesn't work out for the team with the bye (the Lions this year, Baltimore last year), but going back to 2007, in the AFC a team without a bye has only gone to the SB three times (2012 Ravens, 2021 Bengals, 2023 Chiefs). 15 out of 18 times, a bye team made the SB.

Well said.

It really is all about the bye. The Pats had a bye in the divisional round in 2010 and inexplicably lost to the Jets despite featuring their best roster over the entire BB era (IMHO), but had a bye every year after that and reached the championship game 8 years in a row with 5 SB appearances. Very similar trajectory.

I just thought the details were interesting. Torrence was lost on that fourth down play because he had been coached to anticipate a different blitz, and Rousseau kept surrendering the edge because he had been coached to anticipate something else when the Chiefs were in that formation. To me, it represents the difference among coaching staffs between responsible, situationally aware, and adaptive creativity and diligent, studious, and (unfortunately) rote memorization.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6092739/2025/01/27/bills-locker-cleanout-chiefs-afc-title-game/ (My takeaway: a lot of our criticisms of players on the field (Rousseau, Torrence) aren't all that fair because their misses are a product of being outschemed by a staff exploiting the Bills' dedication to past film.) ... Start with the fourth-and-5 at the end of the Bills’ final offensive drive. The fact that the ball hit Dalton Kincaid in the hands makes him an easy target for blame. But the only reason Josh Allen was in that position, heaving up a prayer off his back foot, is because of the blitz Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo called. The Bills had seen it on film, but the tendency was different. “We called protection to slide left,” Bills right guard O’Cyrus Torrence said Monday as Bills players cleaned out their lockers. “From film, they would blitz from where they weren’t showing it from. They showed it from the right, so we were thinking they were doing it from the left. But they actually brought it from the right this time. You could say it was an error, but they just called the better play than we had on offense.” ... One of the main differences in the game was the way Patrick Mahomes was able to stress Buffalo’s defense with his legs. The Athletic’s Mike Sando detailed earlier this year how Mahomes scrambles a lot more often in the fourth quarter of one-score games. He’s also added more EPA by scrambles in those situations than any quarterback in the NFL since the beginning of 2023. Mahomes finished the game with 11 rushing attempts for 43 yards and two touchdowns. And 17 of those yards and one touchdown came on two rushes in the fourth quarter. Bills defensive end Greg Rousseau said some of the situations Mahomes ran in caught them off guard. For instance, Mahomes’ 10-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter came with a formation in which the Chiefs had two tight ends lined up next to Mahomes. Rousseau said he didn’t see that on any of the breakdowns he watched during the week. “He’s a dual-threat quarterback,” Rousseau said. “Sometimes with him, you look at the film from the regular-season game and he was more so throwing the ball. Then last night he was running the ball a lot more. It was a lot more boots and they kind of changed up the game plan. You kind of don’t know what you’re going to get with a quarterback like him.” According to TruMedia, this was the second-highest scramble percentage Mahomes has had in a game in his career. The only time he scrambled more was in a 2020 regular-season win against the Bills. He was pressured on 29 percent of his dropbacks. He’s only lost six times in his career when pressured at that rate or lower. This is also the first time in his career he’s had two rushing touchdowns in a game. “The plays where he got out, it was just Mahomes magic,” Miller said. “He saw a little crease and got out. Whether it was a stunt that we had that way or whether it was a blitz that we had the opposite way. We knew in the playoffs the odds of him running go way up because he’s the guy over there. Just like Josh (Allen). Josh runs a little more in the playoffs. He was just seeing those creases and making it happen. Out of all the stuff that happened, it all came down to just a couple of plays. ... But regardless of the ball spot on that quarterback sneak, the Bills had a much tougher time with that play against the Chiefs than they did throughout the season. In the regular season, Allen had 17 rushing first downs on 18 tries on third or fourth down and 1 yard to go. The Chiefs stopped him three different times in those situations. What was often an impossible play for defenses to stop this season became predictable for the Chiefs. “Those plays you always just have to win your block I would say and hopefully the call is good enough,” Torrence said. “It’s still just a game of inches. You watch film and think you know what the defense is going to do and then they come out and do something different. I think that’s kind of what was getting us a little bit. They slammed a few times and sometimes they didn’t. Crowding the ball real well, things like that.” Like in other areas, the Chiefs had answers when the Bills didn’t. It’s fair to second-guess offensive coordinator Joe Brady for not adjusting, especially with how well James Cook was running. But that’s also a play that has been Buffalo’s go-to in those spots. “That has been a staple in our offense when we get to that, we always do that,” Torrence said. “That’s why we never went away from it. If we’re going to get it, we’re going to get it because we’ve been getting it all year. So I don’t feel bad that coach was calling it because he put the game in our hands and gave us a chance to get the first down.” ... When Allen spoke Monday, he did so with his right hand and wrist wrapped. He said the injury happened on the two-point conversion attempt at the end of the first half. He had some swelling Monday, but the pain was manageable during the game. In a game that came down to the slimmest of margins, though, having your franchise quarterback’s throwing hand and wrist banged up isn’t ideal. Allen doesn’t anticipate any of the minor aches and pains he had coming out of the season to require medical attention beyond rest, though. Also on the injury front, tight end Dawson Knox revealed that Kincaid was playing on two injured knees. He had a torn PCL in one knee and had a bunch of fluid in the other knee. Both Knox and Allen were quick to defend Kincaid for his drop at the end of the game. The degree of difficulty was high on the play, but Allen somehow hit him in the hands. But that was just one moment in an underwhelming second season for Kincaid. The 2023 first-round pick had just 448 yards and two touchdowns this season and then added only six catches for 71 yards in the playoffs. “I have to be better for him,” Allen said. “I didn’t feel like I put him in enough situations this year ball placement-wise. Even the one last night, I left it behind him and allowed 32 (Nick Bolton) to make a play on it. He can sit there and think about that play over and over, but I have to be better. That’s what it comes down to. I know he’s been battling throughout the entire year, bumps and bruises, probably games he shouldn’t have played he was in. But he’s a tough sucker and I have nothing but love for him and how he’s approached this year. He’s going to be so much better next year. ... Allen spoke glowingly about how unselfish Cooper was and how much he loved playing with him. Cooper is a free agent, and he said he doesn’t know yet what the future holds. He’s open to returning to the Bills if it makes sense for both sides because he would love a chance to finish what he started. He also said quarterback play would influence his decision in free agency, and he knows what he has in Allen. “It’s a huge factor,” Cooper said. “Truth be told it’s the most important position on the field. Their position just holds a lot more weight based off the responsibility that they have. Whoever is in that position at any given team is going to say a lot about the team and their ability to win in the big moments. It’s very important.” ... “Coming into training camp I still wasn’t sure that I could play football,” Miller said. “I think I proved myself that I’ve done enough for myself to build the confidence up that I can come back for Year 15. Year 16 that’s way down the road, but I have Year 15 on the books for sure.” Miller said he’ll keep coming to One Bills Drive as long as his key card works. He wants to return to the Bills and thinks that feeling is mutual.

That's not really 100 percent accurate in the sense that there WAS a lot of interest in taking him high. KC traded with the Bills because they were certain that Sean Payton/Loomis were going to take him at 11. It's interesting to think about Mahomes in a Payton system. He probably would have performed similarly.