Heading into Monday night’s game vs. the Tennessee Titans, the Bills were favorites, riding a four-game win streak and could seemingly do no wrong. However, things did not go according to plan.
The Bills trailed by three-points late and opted to go for it on 4th down, rather than kicking the game-tying field goal to send it to overtime.
Bills quarterback Josh Allen lost his footing on a QB sneak, failed to pick up the first down and the Bills fell to the Titans, 34-31. Buffalo dropped to 4-2 on the season.
While it is a tough way to enter the bye week, the Bills are no stranger to the situation.
If you remember back to last season, the Bills lost to the Arizona Cardinals, thanks to a last minute Hail Mary entering their week off.
After coming back from the week off of dwelling on the loss, the Bills rattled off six-straight wins to close out the season. A blueprint they are hoping to duplicate this time around.
“We’re 4-2 into the bye week. Going back to last year, taking a loss the way we did against Arizona, Hail Mary, bye week, this is a resilient team,” Allen told the media. “I got no doubt that we’re gonna use this to fuel us and be ready to go in two weeks.”
When asked to further explain the parallels between the two losses, the Bills quarterback attributed using the experience to respond, despite the fact that doing so with games in different seasons isn’t the norm,
“I think it’s very similar feelings, you know, the way we lost both of these games,” Allen continued. “Typically, you know, you don’t carry anything over from year to year, but we do have that type of experience going back to last year and just coming out of the bye week really hungry, really ready and we gotta go and do that again.”
While the pain of the moment is a normal human response, Allen said due to the number of missed opportunities vs. the Titans, the pain would only intensify later on.
“So many should have, could have, would haves, that we’re gonna look back at this film and feel even worse than we do right now,” Allen said. “But again, it’s one game. Like I said, we’re not gonna try to blow this out of proportion. Learn from it and move on.”
While the Bills quarterback feels the team can use the experience vs. Arizona in a similar fashion this season, head coach, Sean McDermott, gave an answer befitting to his personality of being matter of fact.
“Every year’s different,” McDermott said during his postgame press conference. “I appreciate you bringing that up. You know, you want to win every game and now we got a week to sit on this one and learn from it and come back stronger. So that’s the goal every week… and that’ll be the goal next week as well.”
While the Bills missed an opportunity to improve to 5-1 and find themselves in a tie with the Baltimore Ravens for the best record in the AFC, they are still in a good spot at 4-2, especially when it comes to their division.
There is no doubt this will be a tough one to swallow for both the Bills and their fans, especially given the fact they won’t play again for 13 days… but if Allen is right in that the team plans to use this loss to motivate them in a similar way to last year… things should work out just fine.
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