Just when it looks like the Bills won't have to deal with the Chiefs in the playoffs, here come the Patriots to stand in their way once again.
There’s a darkly comic, laugh-to-keep-from-crying feel about the Buffalo Bills these days.
Their four Super Bowls, no-rings history is so well documented that “the Buffalo Bills of … “ is shorthand for any repeated close-but-not-quite effort. They spent the first two decades of the 2000s staring up at the New England Patriots, winning exactly zero division titles between 1995 and 2020. Once the Patriots imploded, the Bills conquered the AFC East, five times and counting … only to slam against the immovable wall of the Kansas City Chiefs, season after season.
And now that the Chiefs at last are foundering on the rocks, now that the road to the Super Bowl runs past the wreckage of Kansas City, look who’s back, once again ready to ruin yet another Buffalo season: the newly reconstituted, very dangerous, 11-wins-and-counting New England Patriots.
It’s enough to make Buffalo fans dive headfirst into a table, without any pregame lubrication to numb the pain.
Everything was looking so good this season for the Bills. Buffalo began the year with a massive come-from-behind victory against Baltimore, then running off three more wins to get to 4-0. And then, a full-on face-punch from the Patriots, a 23-20 loss on a last-second field goal at home.
Since then, Buffalo has struggled to put together any kind of consistent attack, oscillating between notable wins (Kansas City, Tampa Bay) and incomprehensible losses (Atlanta, Miami). Buffalo hasn’t won more than two games in a row since September, which really doesn’t seem like a sustainable formula for success. They enter this weekend in the No. 6 spot in the AFC playoff hunt, and it’s very much up in the air as to whether this is a good team with too-frequent lapses, or a bad team bailed out by its generational quarterback.
This weekend ought to bring more of an answer. The 9-4 Bills visit the 11-2 Patriots for one of Sunday’s marquee games, a battle for both playoff positioning and, maybe, a divisional title.
"It's not going to be easy, this is a very good football team," Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel said of the Bills earlier this week. "There's a reason they've won this division five years in a row. A lot of respect for them. They're never out of it."
That’s true, but Buffalo has a way of making things tougher on itself. The Bills needed to rally from 15 points down to beat Baltimore in the season opener, and from 10 points down last week against the Bengals.
The Josh Allen-led offense ranks second only to the Cowboys with 383.7 yards/game of total offense, averaging 28.9 points a game. (The Patriots aren’t far behind at 27.0.) The Buffalo defense ranks more toward the middle of the pack, surrendering 307.1 yards and 22.5 points a game. Buffalo’s real problem is turnovers; the Bills are just 1-4 when losing the turnover battle, as they did in Week 5 against New England. Also of note: Buffalo is much better at home (6-1, with that one loss to New England) than on the road (3-3, to be updated after this weekend).
New England, on the other hand, is playing a proverbial “hat and shirt” game — as in, a playoff clincher, what would be its first postseason appearance since 2021. In one of those we’re-all-getting-old stats, New England hasn’t hosted a playoff game since 2019, Tom Brady’s final year with the team. The Patriots have played just one postseason game since then, a 2021-season wild card 47-17 road blowout to … these Buffalo Bills. It’s not too much to say this is the biggest game in Foxborough since that day four years ago.
After Sunday, Buffalo faces Cleveland before finishing out the regular season on the road against the Eagles and Jets. New England goes on the road against Baltimore and the Jets, then wraps the regular season against Miami. That slate would seem to indicate there’s not much margin for error for Buffalo this weekend to stay in the divisional hunt, and a wide-open opportunity for New England to claim that first-round bye.
Plenty on the line for both teams … plus a weather forecast calling for snow flurries and a high of 31 degrees. Bundle up and tune in, this is going to be a good one.
Category: General Sports
