There is not a lot left to say. Every publication is allotted one story with the headline “God Just Hates the Buffalo Bills,” and we used ours last year. We have already established in these pages, a few times, that the modern NFL has one fundamental truth: Most teams do not have Patrick Mahomes, but one team does, and that team will never be out of the rest of our hair. No narrative analysis of what it all means that the Kansas City Chiefs have gotten another one over on the Bills will add much that is new.
Indeed, the Chiefs have Mahomes, and a lot can go wrong in a small sample-size sport for all of the teams that don’t have him. That’s pretty much it. Was Kansas City’s 32–29 win over Buffalo in Sunday’s AFC Championship the most demoralizing yet of this run of four in a row in the playoffs, painfully interspersed among four straight regular-season wins in the series? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether stacking more of these on the pile hurts more or at some point gives way to numbness.
It’s tempting and wrong to at some point declare that Josh Allen will never beat Mahomes. Perhaps that is the main cruelty of Sunday night toward Bills fans. The fact is that the Bills had every chance to beat the Chiefs on this night, and they will have every chance in future meetings. The fact is that this thing could still happen, which stinks, because Bills fans cannot know the sweet release of giving up. They will have to hang around in case Mahomes retires or variance finally breaks in their favor. Maybe it will. Maybe not.
“They all come down to the wire,” Mahomes was telling Jim Nantz from the champions’ podium after the game. “Luckily we were on the winning side this time.” The beat when Mahomes said “this time” without bursting into laughter was the moment that, if I were a Bills fan, would have caused me psychological damage. The Bills are professional football’s stock image for near-misses in the playoffs, the franchise that lost four Super Bowls in a row 31 years ago and is plausibly credited with deepening the misery of a superfan named Timothy McVeigh. It’s now worth asking the somehow reasonable question of whether Mahomes’ playoff domination of Allen’s teams constitutes at least an equal level of fan torture.
At least three of the four playoff losses the Bills have taken at K.C.’s hands since 2020 have a fair case as being the worst knife to the heart. After a pretty normal two-touchdown loss in the ’20 COVID season’s AFC championship, the Bills have found themselves in ever more painful circumstances. Their 42–36 overtime loss in the 2021 season’s divisional round stands as one of the best games in football history, the kind of game that gets its own Wikipedia page. Last season’s loss was arguably worse because the Bills were playing at home, where they hoped to flip the script as the higher seed. This season’s defeat derives its torturous power from being the latest in such a long line and from where it went wrong.
Every entry in this anthology of losses has a long list of debatable tipping points that could make it “the worst.” A compelling one in this game was a fourth down-and-1 for the Bills with 13 minutes left at the Chiefs’ 41-yard line. Allen is the size of a moose but had been stymied for much of the night on short-yardage runs, with the Chiefs (and future Hall of Fame tackle Chris Jones) wise to Allen’s preference to run to his left on QB keepers. Allen had failed on his first three attempts in those situations, but he’d just converted one a few plays earlier. The Bills led by a point and would’ve expanded that lead in all likelihood with another first down. Allen got it, video replay made clear, but the camera angle didn’t make it clear enough to overturn a difficult short spot on the field. The Chiefs went the other way and got 8 points out of their possession.
Allen had more heroics in him though, and he led a game-tying touchdown drive after that. He threw a fourth-down touchdown pass to Curtis Samuel on the ensuing drive to tie the game. After Mahomes led a field goal drive to go back ahead with three minutes left, Allen continued to hang in there. On yet another fourth down, the Bills opted not to protect Allen with a tight end or a running back, calling a play out of an empty formation. The Chiefs sent the house, and Allen had no chance—until he created one with a stunning heave to a stunningly open Dalton Kincaid. The tight end dropped the ball as he came back to it near the edge of field goal range. Mahomes and Andy Reid then toyed with the Bills a little bit more to ice the game, closing it out on a clever pass to the flat for a clinching first down.
Here is where this really sucks: The Chiefs didn’t even benefit from much Chiefsiness in this game. Watching along, it did not feel like the football gods had ordained another Kansas City triumph.
Allen was Mahomes’ equal, as he has so often been in his playoff losses. Travis Kelce has ruined the Bills a few times, but Buffalo kept him to two catches for 19 yards. (The very much-slowing-down vet contributed more than that as a decoy and route-runner, but still: 19 yards.) The Bills fumbled a whopping four times but got every one of them back, while the one time the Chiefs put the ball on the ground, the Bills came up with it. After key cornerback Christian Benford went out with an early injury, the Bills still scrapped and clawed nicely on defense, limiting the Chiefs’ passing game to two big JuJu Smith-Schuster catch-and-runs and 85 yards on seven targets to the absurdly fast rookie, Xavier Worthy. There was one long field goal try in this game, and it was the Bills’ Tyler Bass drilling one from 53 yards.
But the margins always, always have scorched the Bills some way or another. They missed a pair of 2-point conversions, one of them after a penalty on the Chiefs prompted them to forego a kick and try to get the additional point from a yard closer. The fourth-down call went against them, not because the fix is in for the Chiefs (a weird theory, frankly) but because the NFL insists that a call on the field can only be overturned if a jury of the players’ peers deliberates for hours and then renders a verdict of “bad spot.” Worthy turned a certain Bills interception into a ridiculous catch that led to a Chiefs touchdown.
I imagine it is one thing to lose a few times to the same opponent because Mahomes and Kelce do what they always do. I imagine it is way worse to lose for a fourth time to the same opponent, even on a night when Mahomes is not fully weaponized, Kelce doesn’t do much, and all five fumbles in the game break in your direction. The Bills-Chiefs series has become the biggest thing the NFL has, a special football product that doesn’t even require the artificial glitz that is pumped into the actual Super Bowl. There is a real case that, for lots of fans, Bills-Chiefs is now this league’s true meat and potatoes. Multiple generations of today’s Bills fans were not alive to feel what it was like the last time their team had an unprecedented multiyear run of elite play and late-postseason futility. At least they have now felt the closest replica.
This article was originally published by a slate.com . Read the Original article here. .