Coming into Sunday’s divisional round game, the Buffalo Bills ranked third in Football Outsiders’ Defensive Adjusted Line Yards metric, which is to say that their run defense has been quite good all season. They’ve stuffed opposing runners on 25% of all plays (stuffs are tackles at or behind the line of scrimmage), which leads the league, and they’ve been one of the best teams in power situations — they haven’t allowed a ton of runs on third or fourth down, two yards or less to go, that achieved a first down or touchdown.
So, it stood to reason that even though Cincinnati Bengals running back Joe Mixon is a top-quality player, the Bills would have Cincinnati’s running game on lock. Through the first two Bengals drives of the game — both of which ended in Joe Burrow touchdown passes — Mixon had five carries for 34 yards, and it was the ways in which Mixon was able to make big gains on two specific plays that should have Buffalo’s defense worried.
The first run came with 1:45 elapsed in the first quarter, and this was a pitch to Mixon from Burrow in which Mixon followed a perfectly-blocked path for 10 yards, running over top safety Jordan Poyer in the process.
That’s what I call sealing the edges. pic.twitter.com/dVgWYdqude
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) January 22, 2023
Then, with 9:24 left in the first quarter, Mixon had this 16-yard run. As ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky points out, this was by design — the Bengals used motion to create a formation advantage, and Buffalo’s defense has struggled to deal with this kind of stuff throughout the season.
Buffalo better get this fixed. Talked about it all season long teams have attacked this a ton. pic.twitter.com/5T8v8jyRFQ
— Dan Orlovsky (@danorlovsky7) January 22, 2023
If the Bills are going to get back into this game, they’ll have to figure out how to counter Cincinnati’s offense — especially an offensive line that is starting several backups due to injury, but is looking like a line of All-Pros early on.
