For most NFL offenses, the deep ball is the marshmallow in a bowl of Lucky Charms — an occasional delight that serves as the highlight of the whole affair. For the Buffalo Bills against the Miami Dolphins Sunday afternoon, Josh Allen made it clear he only wanted the sweet bits.
Allen threw deep early and often in an effort to wipe the Dolphins off the face of the earth. Because he’s Josh Allen, this often worked out to great benefit. He completed six passes that covered at least 20 yards in the air and threw for 352 yards. He turned a back foot throw into an absolute dart that hit Gabe Davis in the perfect spot for a 22-yard touchdown:
Things we love to see.
📺: @NFLonCBS pic.twitter.com/w9iQPYZKfE
— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) January 15, 2023
But like any all-marshmallow diet, the threat of a crash looms. In a game where the Bills led throughout the fourth quarter, Buffalo failed to deliver a knockout blow on offense. Instead, behind a struggling run game and general distaste for shorter, safer passes, Allen’s team twice punted the ball and offered Miami the opportunity to drive for scores that could have either tied the game or taken the lead. The Bills’ longest drive in the fourth quarter lasted a shade under four minutes.
This feels like a tertiary complaint; a way to poke holes in a win. But just because that inability to grind out clock-killing possessions didn’t matter against Skylar Thompson doesn’t mean it won’t come into play against Patrick Mahomes or Joe Burrow. Buffalo pulls off high-risk, high-reward opportunities better than arguably anyone in the league. This doesn’t mean the offense is infallible.
Let’s take a look at how this becomes problematic. Allen threw deep balls — passes that travel at least 20 yards beyond the line of scrimmage — on 13 of his 39 passes. Per SIS, that’s more than Brock Purdy threw in seven games (12) as the 49ers’ quarterback in the regular season. Three of these came in the fourth quarter, with deep routes also featured on snaps where the Dolphin pass rush got home for sacks.
In that final frame, Allen’s dropbacks resulted in a net gain of 26 yards, or 3.7 per play. Only one of his throws was in the short or intermediate range. That’s not because these opportunities didn’t exist, but because he wasn’t especially interested in them. Here’s a pass where he launched an incompletion to Davis 32 yards downfield — as the camera pans, you can see a wide open Devin Singletary in the middle of the field for what could have been an easy first down:
Josh is playing insane hero ball rn look at Singletary on that Davis deep shot pic.twitter.com/b792DnkFDe
— Theo Ash (@TheoAshNFL) January 15, 2023
That drive ended in a three-and-out, burning 59 seconds from the clock. On the Bills’ next possession, Allen turned his preference for deep shots into a 31-yard Khalil Shakir gain. But without quick routes to rely on he also took a pair of drive-killing sacks seconds later. Buffalo punted the ball back to Miami with 4:24 to play. Fortunately, its defense was able to smother the Dolphins’ game-winning hopes out near midfield.
There were more factors at play than Allen’s unwavering confidence in the fact he can throw a football over the horizon and into a bucket on the other side. After solid early returns, his run game averaged only three yards per carry after halftime. Isaiah McKenzie, the team’s most-targeted player in the intermediate range — his 8.7 air yards per target were significantly less than Stefon Diggs’ 11.2 or Davis’ 15.3 — missed Sunday’s game due to injury.
With the odds of runs or short passes being successful roughly the same as launching passes deep, it made sense to lean into the latter.
This worked against the Dolphins and their 25th-ranked pass defense. It may not against the AFC’s more qualified secondaries. This feels like a minor quibble in a win, but it’s also a boom-or-bust approach that can deliver dizzying highs (a 52-yard strike to Stefon Diggs, the Davis touchdown above) and plummeting lows (sacks, fumbles, a Xavien Howard interception).
This is, of course, correctable. McKenzie could return for the Divisional Round and be Allen’s short-range huckleberry and punish opponents for keeping their safeties deep. Devin Singletary and James Cook could carry the load on the ground, grinding the clock with explosive runs. Allen could keep taking chances and winning, which is a very Josh Allen thing to do.
But the Bills we saw in the Wild Card round gave an inferior quarterback too many opportunities to stick around. Doing so against the Bengals or Chiefs could be fatal. Allen’s decision to lean into the sweetest part of his passing game worked to kick off his 2023 NFL Playoffs. Asking him to do it again might not be viable — but hey, it’ll be extremely fun to watch.
