Buffalo Bills: Get just a tad more dangerous
The tone of Buffalo’s postmortem is quite a bit less rosy than its NFC counterparts, both because this was just another episode of the recurring postseason nightmare it cannot escape but also given the dangerously simple path forward to make another run.
The Bills have to leave this postseason feeling as haunted as ever. Not just that they lost to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, again, but because of how close these two teams felt both throughout the course of the season and on Sunday night.
To lose ever so slightly on the margins once again, and fail to exorcise the demon that’s cursed your playoff dreams since you became a true contender is crushing. To lose to them when your operation has been as smooth as it was all season and there were a few chinks in their armor is all the more devastating.
The more complicated part of this for Buffalo, especially as it compares to Washington’s offseason to-do list, is that the path forward is some damning mix of simple and complex.
The Bills team we watched on Sunday night is very close to being a Super Bowl team. A few breaks in the other direction and they could have been there this season. They have the right quarterback, continuity on the offensive line and an overall good, well-coached roster.
However, you also felt like they were missing a blue-chip star on both sides of the ball — a coverage-dictating pass-catcher on offense and a game-closing edge rusher on defense. Pointing out when you don’t have those guys and projecting the impact a hypothetical version of said player could have had in big moments is easy. Finding them is not quite a bit more difficult.
There’s a feeling around the Bills offense of the relationship where you come away thinking, “We just couldn’t get the timing right.” The Bills used to have one of those blue-chip star pass-catchers in Stefon Diggs. That era ran its course, but it was incredibly productive at the time. The problem is that during the best years of that period, Buffalo never had the rushing ecosystem or bevy of complementary pass-catchers that this current version offers. That allowed opposing defenses to too easily key on taking away Diggs, sometimes successfully, in big games without fear of a run game that could take advantage of light boxes or consistent receivers able to win in plus matchups.
The Eagles are a great example of the nightmare-matchup offense the Bills could be if they find an alpha wideout. The second you forget that they have an elite wideout while dwelling on their dominant run game or quarterback-designed carries, that’s when A.J. Brown obliterates man coverage on the perimeter. That attack is on the table for Buffalo and they have the exact ecosystem to drop in that type of WR1 but again, it’s easier to say these ideas in theory than it is to find this player in practice.
Josh Allen showed without a shadow of a doubt this season that he’s one of the premier quarterbacks in the game who raises the ceiling and floor of the offense all on his own. He was the second-highest-scoring fantasy quarterback this season despite his top pass-catcher, Khalil Shakir, registering 821 yards on 97 targets. He will compete again to be the QB1 overall next season, no matter who is around him.
Allen is a talent-elevator and Buffalo has plenty of competent-to-good passing-game pieces in his orbit. With that as the setup alongside an excellent run game, we've seen the level this team can reach and how high Allen can fly from a production standpoint. Yet, we all know there’s another threshold in reach for both.
Identifying that is easy; finding the solution in an offseason that presents an aging free-agent receiver crop and a draft class rumored to lack the talent of the previous few years, is quite a bit more complicated.
