The Buffalo Bills walked out of Kansas City on Sunday with a 24-20 win vs. their AFC rivals, the Chiefs. Buffalo enters their bye week with a 5-1 record, good for first in the conference.
While guys like Josh Allen, Gabe Davis and Von Miller received a lot of the attention for the knocking off the Chiefs, one reliable star showed up for the Bills down the stretch, yet again… wide receiver Stefon Diggs.
Diggs finished the day with 10 catches for 148 yards and a touchdown. More importantly when Allen needed a reliable target on the game-winning drive, Diggs, as he often is, was there.
“Yeah, just trusting him,” Allen told the media during his postgame press conference. “Just trying to move him around and get him in different spots. They were doing a good job on defense on switching up their calls… they switched it up on us quite a bit. They brought some good pressures tonight and they got home a couple times, so stuff to clean up for sure, but when you get into that point of a game you gotta trust the guys that you rock with and he is who he is for a reason, you know? And he works his tail off and does all the right things. We love him for that.”
Diggs himself asked if there is any sort of additional pressure that comes with being “the guy” in those big moments.
“I put a lot of time in as far as like my craft and what I’m trying to do, not only for my team but for myself, Diggs said after the win. “Pushing myself and challenging myself and in those moments you want the game to be on you. You want your quarterback to trust you. So it actually gives me a level of comfort and puts you… in a different space mentally that I’m out here for a purpose, I’m out here for a reason, you know what I’m saying? That he’s counting on you. And as you can see, Josh has that energy that makes you want to play, makes you want to play harder. Makes you want to get open and catch the ball for him. So it’s the opposite of feeling pressure. Because pressure is something that you’re not really ready for… Some people call it ‘good pressure,’ but for me it put me in the right mental state of he’s counting on me and I’m ready.”
While this time around the Bills came out on the right end of the big moment, it hasn’t always been the case vs. Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. It’s hard to ignore that some of these games start to feel like a movie that gets replayed over and over to the horror of many Bills fans.
“Yeah, it’s crazy cause we’ve been there before,” Diggs continued. “And in those moments it seems like, not even deja vu. It’s seems like something brand new, but on the other side. Like, we’re prepared, we’ve been here before. We’ve battled through the storm multiple times, good and bad. You know sometimes it didn’t really go our way, so as far as us having the poise and having that, I guess, like energy of ‘we’ve got it.'”
While this is only the regular season and as we saw last year, that only means so much… Sunday showed, sometimes there’s a different ending to a familiar story.
A mindset that will help the Bills come playoff time when inevitably they meet their familiar foes once again. And having a guy like Diggs there to help re-write the narrative, is all any team, quarterback and fan base can ask for.
[mm-video type=playlist id=01eqbw1j59gmjw5gdj player_id=none image=https://billswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]
[lawrence-related id=107031,107395,107390]