To think, the Bills were close to garnering our sympathy toward the end of a long offseason. A near-unanimous Super Bowl pick, an MVP front-runner at quarterback, a betting favorite so painfully obvious in nearly every matchup. A team that was slated, in the movie we’ve crafted in our heads, to avenge a premature playoff exit and finally deliver a trophy to a perpetually teased fan base that still, miraculously, believes in good things.
When does all of this hysteria on paper actually materialize? How many times have we seen a team buried under the madness they had no hand in creating?
Well, after they demolished the Rams on opening night, 31–10, we’re pleased to report the Bills seem just fine becoming the team the world thought they would be. As it turns out, Josh Allen can get even bigger and stronger. Despite having one of the most valuable arms in football, he’s still going to break contain, stick his paw out wide and maul a wobbling defender cursed with the task of bringing him down in the open field. He’s going to posterize Bobby Wagner, only one of the greatest linebackers in modern NFL history, at the damn goal line of all places.
Don’t you know it, the defense can get even harder to thread. Choking out one of the most talented wide receiving corps in football, forcing the game’s brightest offensive mind into a dink-and-dunk artist grateful for meager gains to Tyler Higbee. Pummeling Matthew Stafford, with new edge rushing chess piece Von Miller logging a pair of sacks, ghosting the Rams’ blind-side protection with the speed of a much younger man. Throwing a sheet over Allen Robinson, who joined L.A. this offseason on a three-year deal worth almost $50 million and vanished into a thicket of perfectly placed defenders every time Stafford dropped back to pass (his final stat line for the night: two targets, one catch, 12 yards).
And did you notice the first drive of the game, where Buffalo went 76 yards over nine plays, unloading months’ worth of exotic looks and motions? Running an unbalanced line that buried Aaron Donald in a rip tide of offensive linemen tugging him away from a bootlegging Allen, who got to loft a floater to Gabe Davis for one of the easier touchdowns he’ll see this year? The new offensive coordinator can dial those up, too.
The Bills are the best team in the NFL after all. Accuse us of globbing onto a small sample size all you want, but this is a continuation of last year’s ascent. This is the same team that played a perfect game against Bill Belichick in the playoffs, embarrassing one of the greatest defensive coaches in NFL history. Davis is still scoring at a torrid pace. Allen is still flicking 50-plus-yard bombs to Stefon Diggs, even though the whole world knows he’s getting the ball. Jordan Poyer and Micah Hyde, two players who were allowed to walk in free agency at one point in time and are now creeping into their early 30s, are still directing a quarterback horror show in the secondary, buying time for a deeply skilled and relentless pass rush.
To those of you out there who made the most obvious Super Bowl pick in recent memory, let out a deep sigh of relief. The Bills turned the ball over four times and whooped the defending Super Bowl champions. That simply doesn’t happen.
Playing as the favorite, especially in football, is often a psychological death sentence. There’s a reason coaches like Belichick and Nick Saban have both, amid championship runs, dug through the lowest rungs of internet refuse to find a single bad word uttered about their team to get them on edge. In fact, Saban simply made up inflammatory quotes when he couldn’t find anything. (Did Saban ever get dinged for an ethics violation here?) They wanted a locker room to feel looked down on. They wanted their players to feel disrespected. They wanted to challenge the idea that their teams had gotten so good that it was boring for the viewing public.
Isn’t it fair to wonder what the homely Bills would be once they were freed from the web of doubts we all had about them for years? About the defensive coach they hired in the midst of an offensive revolution? About the still-raw quarterback they drafted out of Wyoming who felt more like Ricky Vaughn coming out of college than Peyton Manning? About their history as a free-agency hellhole?
Miller wanted to leave Los Angeles for Buffalo. Getting piled under six feet of snow in the winter is cool now.
One game into the season, all the hype has done is embolden both the monster they’ve created on the field and the one we’ve created in our own heads. How much fun is this when the two are one in the same? How good can the Buffalo Bills be?
