Buffalo Bills crush Patriots in display of perfection
Players and teams spend lifetimes chasing perfection. On Saturday night, the Buffalo Bills found it against the New England Patriots.
Josh Allen had enough of the narratives.
Enough about the cold. Enough about the New England Patriots.
And on Saturday night, in front of a sold-out crowd in Buffalo, Allen and his Bills erased any and all doubt with a resounding 47-17 win over their hated AFC East rivals in the Wild Card round.
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On an evening where the temperature neared zero degrees, the Bills relentlessly poured it on, having eight drives and scoring seven touchdowns with a kneel-down session to finish the game off. Behind center, Allen was brilliant, going for 308 passing yards and another 66 yards on the ground, finishing 21-of-25 in the air with five touchdowns. At ESPN, Allen’s QBR — a metric of 1-100 with 100 being perfect — was an impossible 98.5, the highest mark for any quarterback this season.
It was a tour de force, leaving the rest of the AFC to wonder if that’s the Bills team it’ll be getting going forward. In the Divisional round, Buffalo will either travel to take on the Kansas City Chiefs in a rematch of its Week 5 win at Arrowhead Stadium, or it’ll host the Cincinnati Bengals.
Regardless of the who and where, Buffalo has to feel invincible after what was one of the more complete performances we’ve seen in some time. After the game, head coach Sean McDermott took time to reflect on the win, while spinning everything forward, per ESPN:
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“It’s not often in coaching you can enjoy the last six minutes of a game and kind of look up in the stands and see the fans enjoying it and at home. I’m happy for them more than anything. For us as a team this year, it’s one game. That’s a good football team and they’ve been at the top for so long. So, we have a lot of respect for them. We’ve just got to keep moving on.”
Considering Allen’s dominance and Buffalo’s top-ranked defense, the Bills may have their best shot to win the Super Bowl since the halcyon days of Jim Kelly, Bruce Smith, Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed in the early 1990s.
This week, an entire new set of narratives will arise, these almost certainly pumping up Buffalo. Based off Saturday, the Bills won’t bother with them either.
