Imagine a cold, snowy Sunday in late January. The wind is whipping around so wildly it makes the ginormous yellow goalposts look like they could fall down at any moment. The cold cuts all the way to the bone and you can barely move your fingers, much less grip a football. The snow is dumping so hard that you can hardly even see what's in front of you. In these conditions, it seems like a tall order to fire a cannonball in a straight line-- how could you possibly hope to throw an oddly-shaped ball of leather with any sort of consistency?
“Football weather”, as it’s so lovingly called, is really anything but. Cold nights like these, typical of the winter seasons in the cities of perennial contenders such as the New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers, turn the game we know into an unrecognizable and sometimes nonsensical affair.
And yet, games like these have the power to decide who advances to the Super Bowl, and who has a long plane ride home to think about how their months of grueling and exhausting preparation and their carefully-crafted strategy went to shit. It’s simply the way things work.
The highly-anticipated Monday Night Football showdown between the Bills and the Patriots ended up devolving into what you could reasonably call a football farce, due to such “football weather”, as winds blew up to 50 miles per hour. Patriots quarterback Mac Jones threw the ball just three times all game -- the fewest passing attempts in a game this century -- completing two passes for 19 yards. He ended up winning the game, and that win gave the Patriots control of the AFC East. Coming out of their bye week, the Patriots now hold the all-important #1 seed in the AFC, which would make them the only team in the conference to have an extra week of rest for the playoffs.
Image From: Jamie Germano/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
On the flip side, the Bills went on to lose a second-straight game to a championship contender. Though it was a hard-fought overtime loss, one which was not-insignificantly impacted by shoddy refereeing in favor of Tampa Bay, it was another loss nonetheless. Buffalo came into the season with their sights set on nothing less than a Lombardi Trophy. Yet they sit just a game over .500 as the seventh and final team in the AFC playoff field, which, if the season ended today, would earn them a trip to Kansas City to face the white-hot Chiefs.
On paper, the Bills should have won that Monday Night game. They currently boast one of the absolute best overall defenses in the league, with a scheme capable of stymying even Patrick Mahomes from moving the ball through the air. They have talent and depth in the trenches, a mix of veteran savvy and youthful exuberance on both sides of the ball, and, most importantly, a stud quarterback in Josh Allen.
So what went wrong?
The scene I set for you at the start may have been hyperbolic, but not by much. Inclement weather has a long history of affecting playoff games, so if you call yourself a contender, you need to be able to not just withstand such weather but thrive in it. You don’t need to look much farther than last year’s Bills-Ravens AFC Divisional Playoff game as an example of weather working to decide a matchup.
In a ridiculously windy setting, the Ravens suffered. Lamar Jackson couldn’t connect with his mostly-undersized wide receivers outside the numbers. Snaps kept flying over Jackson’s head, which eventually led him to get injured trying to corral one. Justin Tucker even missed kicks. Yes, kicks, as in more than one of them. It was an abject disaster, and one couldn’t help but think that one of those teams knew how to withstand that dismal weather, and the other did not.
Image From: Jamie Germano/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Last week’s game with the Patriots, however, told a very different story. The Bills couldn’t move the ball on the ground, and Josh Allen, despite making some impressive throws to keep the offense afloat, missed some crucial plays at least partially due to the wind. Worse still, the Bills rush defense couldn’t get enough stops despite almost knowing that every play was going to be a run. It wasn’t the first time those problems cost the Bills a game this season, and it likely won’t be the last.
The rushing offense continues to be a major point of concern for Buffalo, as it has been for the last few seasons. While it is true that investing in a great run-blocking offensive line and in the playbook for run plays should be the priority over spending high capital on individual running backs, the Bills just can’t seem to find a true game-changer to put in their backfield. 2019 third-round draft pick Devin Singletary is talented catching out of the backfield but is undersized and struggles between the tackles or with a heavy workload. 2020 third-round draft pick Zack Moss was a healthy scratch on multiple occasions this season. Journeyman back Matt Breida briefly seemed to take over the brunt of the rushing duties, but nobody has seemed to be able to get the job done consistently.
As a whole, the Bills rushing offense is an unspectacular unit. They rank 15th in run block win rate, 15th in total rushing yards, and are tied for 3rd in rushing fumbles. While they actually rank 4th in the league in rushing yards per carry, this may be a result of their pass-heavy offense creating lighter boxes and opening up chunk plays.
To support this, I looked at the advanced metrics for Buffalo’s rushing offense (filtering out garbage time rushing plays by limiting the statistics to when Buffalo’s win percentage was between 10-90%). The results were not kind to the Bills:
Graph per: RBSDM
The Bills rank third-last in rushing EPA and fourth-last in rushing success rate, despite a run-blocking offensive line that is exactly middle-of-the-road. This likely speaks to the sheer lack of talent in their running back room. Although Singletary, Moss, and Breida are fun players capable of exciting plays here and there, none of them are close to workhorse backs that force defenses to adjust the way they have to defend against the Bills offense, making it simpler for them to key in against the passing game.
Last week, the Bills made the decision to make arguably their most dynamic athlete on offense take the majority of the rushing duties-- that player being Josh Allen. Allen operated as their quarterback and their lead rusher in a gutsy effort against the reigning champion Buccaneers on the road, taking 12 carries for 109 yards and a touchdown, on top of passing for 308 yards and 2 scores. Meanwhile, Singletary only handled 4 carries and Breida took just 3. Ultimately, though, Buffalo couldn’t come out with a win, and worse still Allen sustained a low-ankle sprain on a scramble play.
(On a side note, Lamar Jackson sustained the same injury this past week, just the second of his career and with both injuries occurring while he was behind the line of scrimmage, not while he was a runner. Take note of which player the media is saying should be “proof” that “running quarterbacks” are “risky” and should not be drafted high or awarded elite-level contracts, and ask yourself why that is.)
Allen’s injury near the end of the game seemed to be the football gods calling out to Sean McDermott as if to tell him, “This isn’t sustainable!”, and they would most likely be right. Bill Belichick has stopped entire offenses by neutralizing just the team’s best weapon from an deep arsenal of threats; think about what he could do to a Bills offense that can’t pass the ball in inclement weather and can only run the ball in the hands of Josh Allen.
It won’t be pretty.
On the flip side, the Bills rushing defense which was one half of a monstrous unit miles ahead of everyone else stat-wise to open the season, has started to falter. Most notably, they got demolished almost single-handedly by Derrick Henry, and then demolished even further by Jonathan Taylor. Both games were so catastrophic for Buffalo’s run defense that it propelled each of those running backs into the MVP conversation as a serious contender, even in today’s quarterback-centric world. And although they fared better than the numbers showed against New England as the majority of the Patriots’ rushing yards came on a few big chunk plays, they weren’t able to get the job done against an offense as one-dimensional as possible.
Over the first five weeks, before Henry or Taylor came to town, this is how Buffalo’s defense was performing:
Graph per: RBSDM
Pretty good, you could say. More specifically, they led in almost every advanced stat RBSDM tracks: total EPA/play, total success rate, dropback EPA, rush EPA, and rush success rate. The only stat they didn’t lead in was dropback success rate, in which they were second behind Carolina.
Since then, the team as a whole has regressed, even in pass defense:
Graph per: RBSDM
Though the advanced metrics for Buffalo have dipped, their season-long ranks in every major statistic in pass defense remain stellar:
Meanwhile, major season-long rushing defense rankings for Buffalo are as such:
While those rushing defense statistics are indicative of a good-not-great unit rather than an abysmal one, it is notable that they have struggled mightily against the best rushing offenses they have played, namely Tennessee, Indianapolis, and New England. This is despite the fact that all three of those offenses operated relatively one-dimensionally relying on the run in those games-- perhaps they knew that they could abuse that rushing defense and stuck to the run as a result.
Furthermore, Buffalo has benefitted from facing some rather anemic rushing offenses this year which may make their rushing defense look better than it actually is. They’ve played Miami twice, who rank 31st in rushing offense, Houston, who rank 32nd, the Jets, who rank 30th, Pittsburgh, who rank 28th, and Jacksonville, who rank 23rd, to name a few.
In fact, the Bills have played top-ten rushing offenses just three times this season. As you may have guessed, those teams are the Titans, Colts, and Patriots.
Considering that perhaps no other NFL team gets affected by winter weather quite as badly as Buffalo does, it’s frankly shocking that these are the Bills’ biggest issues. For what it’s worth, the Bills aren’t completely oblivious to their own weather -- part of the reason they were so dead-set on Josh Allen being the quarterback they wanted to target in his draft class packed with talented signal-callers was that his arm was far stronger than anyone else’s, and thus had the best chance to cut through the howling Buffalo winter winds in crucial situations. Still, it is imperative that the Bills fix one of their issues regarding the running game, but preferably both, if they hope to stand a chance in the playoffs, which may very well end up running through Foxboro for about the 347th time.
The championship window in Buffalo isn’t guaranteed, despite their abundance of young talent and quality coaching; lots can change in the blink of an eye in the NFL. Though having Josh Allen as your quarterback will bring stability that most other teams would kill for over the next decade or so, keeping a nucleus as talented as this around him is exceedingly difficult. If the Bills don’t shape up for the playoffs -- worse still, if they have to watch their archnemesis in New England make a Super Bowl run, after finally turning their own franchise around and trying to assert dominance in the AFC East -- there’s no telling what could happen next.
Image From: Jeffrey T. Barnes/AP
The Bills are too talented for “football weather” to be their undoing. If they want to capitalize on the last year of Josh Allen’s rookie contract and end the decades of agony that this franchise has endured, they must learn to beat more than just their opponents; they must learn to beat Mother Nature herself.
Comments
Post a Comment