Bills Find Their Offense But Can’t Conceal Defensive Woes

By Gregory Brown

Photos by Jerome Davis

The Buffalo Bills returned to the friendly confines of Highmark Stadium with a lot to prove. After the previous week’s debacle in Miami, the Bills standing as an elite, Super Bowl contending team laid tattered, if not, in ruins.

As far as the Bills were concerned, Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could not get here fast enough. In a 44 – 32, win over the Bucs, the Bills certainly got a lot of things right, such as finding their once explosive passing game. Indeed, Josh Allen looked like his old MVP self in exploiting Tampa Bay with another record setting performance in which he threw for three touchdown passes and ran for another three. Only Allen, who has now done it twice, and the late, great Cleveland QB Otto Graham, who did it in the NFL Championship game in 1954, have ever accomplished such a feat.

However, what the Bills did not get right was shoring up their leaky run defense.  The Bills have made a habit of making every opponent’s running back look like the second coming of the late Jim Brown, who, for my money, was the greatest running back of all-time. This time, it was Sean Tucker, the Bucs third string running back, who hails from just down the road at the University of Syracuse, that made like a superstar. Tucker, who wore Brown’s number 44 jersey that he made famous while at Syracuse back in the late fifties, had a career game against the Bills.  Tucker ran for a personal best 106 yards on 19 carries and scored on two long touchdown runs, where no one even laid a hand on him.

When the topic of Buffalo’s Super Bowl chances come up, the thing that makes a Super Bowl run seem highly unlikely is their suspect run defense, which was terrible even before they suffered all the key injuries up front, such as the ones to DT Ed Oliver and DE Michael Hoecht.

But even assuming that Allen and the Bills can stay on the right track offensively, they still lack the chops on defense to compete with the NFL’s best. Give the Bills an “A” for effort as they have tried valiantly to fix the problems on the D-line. Starting with the acquisitions of Hoecht, Joey Bosa, Larry Ogunjobi and high draft picks like TJ Sanders, Landon Jackson and Deone Walker, those new additions simply have not paid off. If we give Buffalo the benefit of the doubt, those moves were a good faith effort that may have paid some dividends this year. However, with the rash of injuries and young players not playing up to expectations, the Bills defense is what it is. That is, a mediocre group that gets pushed around and has more trouble getting out of its own way than getting in the way of opposing running backs. 

The formula for beating, the Bills is easy. Keep the ball out the hands of Josh Allen and bludgeon them with a strong run game that they are almost always powerless to stop. If the past is prologue, then teams like Philly, Indy, Detroit, and others that feature superstar running backs, will have no trouble at all with the Bills.

Next up, the Bills take on the Houston Texans at NRG Stadium on a short week.  Although Houston may not possess a running back of the kind that gives Buffalo trouble, the Bills have a way of making every team’s running back look like a superstar.

At this point in the season, the Bills will probably have to concede the divisional crown to the 9 – 2 New England Patriots, led by their surprising sophomore QB Drake Maye.  All of those early visions of a first-round bye are now in the rear-view mirror. Right now, the Bills are playing for a wild card berth and will need Josh to be at his best even to achieve that. Although it’s still too early for the Bills Mafia to be proclaiming “wait until next year,” the road ahead will not be easy.