Bills Are Right Where They Wanted to Be, With a Shot at the Chiefs

So, we’ve arrived back in the same place even though the feeling is completely different. Like going back to your frat house in your 30s or eating at a new restaurant that you’re pretty sure used to be a Wendy’s.

The Buffalo Bills will host the Kansas City Chiefs next week for a chance to go to the AFC championship game. After nearly every Bills game this year looked like a complete and total slog. After injuries cleared out a handful of defensive stalwarts. After the offensive coordinator was fired midseason. After a series of cryptic social media posts, training camp absences and passive-aggressive body language that forced us all to wonder whether the Buffalo Super Friends were starting to grow tired of one another. After the head coach of the football team had to come out and apologize for using the 9/11 attackers as an example of good coordination. I mean, who hasn’t been there?

The tenor of this Buffalo season has been decidedly different from years past. This team was always the NFL’s beating heart but, coming into Monday’s rescheduled beatdown of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the lot of us were probably unsure whether to hug them, boo them or lay a little cash down on Mike Tomlin’s team to cover the spread.

It won’t matter next week, of course, if the Bills knock out the Chiefs at home. That matchup, because of its deep and hurtful recent past—the 2020 conference title game in which a 9–0 early lead became a 38–24 defeat, and the much more famous divisional round game the following year in which Patrick Mahomes had 13 seconds to force overtime and Josh Allen never touched the ball again—may have a cleansing property to it. And, just as the Bills spent most of this season looking nothing like the Bills, the Chiefs have been nowhere near the Chiefs as we’ve known them. Kansas City’s equivalent of Buffalo’s internal tumult has been something of a painful rebuild, the breaking in of new players and perhaps older ones phasing themselves out thanks to the inevitable crunch of time. Given what this rivalry has meant historically to Buffalo, and how it has prevented the Bills from crossing the Rubicon from stewards of a half decade of enjoyable football in a frozen outpost to immediately memorable, free-beers-for-life legends, the matchup couldn’t have come at a better time.

All it took was the entire AFC collapsing in on itself. Or, perhaps, for everyone to stop expecting that the Bills would finally win the dang Super Bowl.

While we have to consider the opponent and the situation, there was some vintage Buffalo to be had this season, even though vintage Buffalo was a kind of disposition the Bills were actively trying to overcome. The fired offensive coordinator, Ken Dorsey, was supposedly less effective than his former counterpart, Brian Daboll, even though Dorsey was simply trying to save Allen from himself. He was trying to create a more sustainable offense that wouldn’t require Allen to hurl his body bull-rider style at the defense every couple of downs. Alas, Allen has been on the injury report every week since Week 7 and had to remove himself from a game two weeks ago at the end of a Patriots win.

Against Pittsburgh in the wild-card round, he rumbled for 52 yards on one touchdown run. In all, he ran eight times for 74 yards. It seemed to activate that part of his biomechanical engine that turns Allen into a more athletic, oddly responsible, peak Ben Roethlisberger, capable of hitting the absurd cross-body throws to Stefon Diggs, who led the team with seven catches, too. A little bit more like old times.

In the fourth quarter, we watched Khalil Shakir rip himself away from one of Pittsburgh’s best defensive players, leaving only a playing card’s worth of space between his rear end and the ground as he whipped his way toward the end zone. The score elicited a visible eruption of snow, and, while I’m not accusing Bills Mafia of mailing it in during the difficult portions of this season, the celebration had that we’re back kind of heft to it.

We also saw the Bills of this year, with a defense so overtaxed and stretched thin that I’m almost positive I saw a fan fire a snowball at Diontae Johnson in the corner of the end zone, unconfident that anyone on Buffalo’s roster could provide better coverage.

The stage is set to erase all that, of course. Real or imagined, authentic or phony, winning next week is a necessary salve for Buffalo. The tough times are not going away. Just look at any team that has been competitive for this long. Watch how age and ego and injury and finances rip it all apart. How lucky, then, to have at least one more shot at the Chiefs.