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Buffalo Bills
Their opponent, the Baltimore Ravens, pounded Buffalo back in Week 4. The 35–10 beatdown was as thorough as it gets. Baltimore ran for 271 yards on 34 carries, while holding Buffalo to 3.5 yards per rush. Lamar Jackson’s passer rating (135.4) was nearly double Josh Allen’s (73.9). Baltimore went up 14–3 on the first play of the second quarter and it never got closer than that.
The Bills were beaten every which way on that final day of September. So last week, Sean McDermott’s staff went looking for answers—with defensive coordinator Bobby Babich dispatching his coaches on a journey through the Ravens’ entire season. Every game. Every play. Every detail.
“I don’t think a full staff that I’ve been around has ever done this,” McDermott said, leaning on a table in the Bills’ training room, around 10 p.m. Sunday night. “I did it for the Super Bowl, for myself, as a play-caller [with the Carolina Panthers] years ago, looked at every play from their whole season. … Late, late nights. But you got to do what you got to do in order to try and figure out a plan that would at least manage them.”
What Babich and his staff found only confirmed what Week 4 showed—the Ravens were really, really good. It would take everything they had to slow down Lamar & Co.
On Sunday, the truth is, they did, with a rare Mark Andrews drop coming on a potential game-tying two-point conversion to preserve the Bills’ 27–25 win. There was no magic wand that Babich, McDermott or anyone else could wave coming out of those early-week meetings. More so, it was just knowing that the fight the Bills had on their hands was very real, and would, in all likelihood, take all four quarters to settle.
And four quarters it took at Highmark Stadium, with the Bills never harboring much doubt about how this one would end, even if a fan base that’s been beaten down over the years with heartbreak had every reason to think bad things might happen.
Inside the locker room, this year, that idea has been flipped on its head. In fact, if you ask what’s different about this group, the answer will come back that this is a more poised team than the past few iterations of the Bills—and, as such, there was a certain calm about the team not just coming into the week, but within the game itself.
“I’ve seen it,” McDermott says. “Now it’s kind of just who we are. They understand. Every week of the season, their focus has been there. We haven’t always won, but every week of the season, Albert, they’ve been so darn consistent with when I see them Wednesday morning, first thing. They’re in there, they’re focused on improving, they’re focused on how they can become better teammates, how they can eat better, how they can rehab better.
“They’re all about the process that leads to winning, which is not different than our other teams. It just seems like it’s at a little bit of a higher level.”
So where there might’ve been some nerves for past Bills teams going into a showdown like Sunday’s, this group had none—just belief that doing the right things would keep yielding positive results, as has been the case, really, all year for the team.
Against the Ravens this time around, with the chance to atone, that meant they’d just keep responding. Baltimore opened the game with a breezy eight-play, 73-yard touchdown drive. The Bills came back with an 11-play, 70-yard touchdown drive of their own, then scored again to take a 14–7 lead. Their 21–10 halftime lead shrunk to 21–19 after a third quarter Baltimore owned, so the Bills grinded out a few first downs and Tyler Bass nailed a 51-yard field goal to stem the tide. It happened over and over and over.
“It’s just the resilience, man,” linebacker Terrel Bernard, one of two team captains (along with Allen), said later, in a cleared-out locker room. “We’ve had to find ways all year to win. Different guys made plays all year. Josh has been great all season. That’s the confidence, where that comes from, it’s that we’ve been through a ton already this season and we find ways to win. So we know when we get in those situations, we’re going to find a way.”
On defense, that meant going and getting the ball.
Through that intense film study, the coaches saw a Baltimore offense that made things simple on its players, but hard on opponents, through a lot of shifts and motions and window-dressing designed to confuse. With the weather conditions, though, there was the thought that the Bills’ advantage might be in any way the Ravens slipped with their ball-handling.
Sure enough, Jackson sailed a ball that Taylor Rapp picked off, a Damar Hamlin sack led to Jackson dropping a ball that Von Miller would collect and run back, and Bernard was able to pop one free from Mark Andrews and recover it himself. And implicit in those things happening was the that if the Bills kept playing, those sorts of chances would come and any one of the Buffalo players would be there to pounce.
“We all just leaned on each other,” Bernard says. “I don’t think there’s anybody that looked outside that, that they’re the ones that have to make the play every time. I felt like we put equal responsibility on everybody out there. And we have the best quarterback in the NFL. So we feel like as a defense, if we can get the ball to him, we’ll be successful. That’s our whole idea, our mantra: .”
And Allen did, albeit in a little different way, moving the chains, and running for two touchdowns, and taking care of the ball when it mattered most.
Then, there was the emotional lift he gave the team.
With old leaders and captains such as Micah Hyde, Jordan Poyer, Tre’Davious White, Stefon Diggs and Mitch Morse gone (though Hyde is now back on the practice squad), Allen’s been thrust into a more vocal role as a leader this year. Each week, that can mean something different. This week, his message was clear—he heard the outside world doubting his team.
The players talked about it before the game. Allen reiterated it at halftime.
“Before we went back out there,” McDermott recalls, “he just said, .”
That was tested in the third quarter, and again at the end, when Jackson led a wild eight-play, 88-yard dash to the end zone to cut the Bills’ lead to two. The two-point conversion was next, and Andrews was open—only to drop the ball and essentially secure the Bills’ win.
Of course, that’s not how anyone would’ve drawn it up.
But the game going off-script really surprised no one. The Bills knew how good the Ravens were coming in. They also believed they could be just a little bit better.
Which, it turns out, they were right about.
