The Buffalo Bills are the betting favourites to win the Super Bowl this season, but there is one reason for caution about the Buffalo Bills: They are the Buffalo Bills.
This should not normally be a factor. Given all the empirical data we have about NFL teams, it’s like expressing concern about the colour of their uniforms or their astrological signs. The Bills: too many Pisces?
And yet, this is the team that had done the seemingly impossible last season, out-duelling the Kansas City Chiefs in a playoff shootout at Arrowhead Stadium, only to discover that Patrick Mahomes had one last bullet in his cylinder. Actually, that analogy is not quite correct. Mahomes was all out of bullets, and the Bills walked across the duelling ground and gave him a fresh box. Please, shoot us with these.
That loss, forever to be known as 13 Seconds, named for the time left in the game when Josh Allen threw what should have been the winning touchdown pass, joins the lengthy list of Bills’ painful losses that are unique enough to have names. The Music City Miracle. Hail Murray. The Three-Pass Game. The Willie Parker Game. And, of course: Wide Right. When a franchise has this much-accumulated trauma, set against the backdrop of four consecutive Super Bowl losses and of a non-playoff run that lasted two decades and several truly inept quarterback/coach/GM combinations, one can be forgiven for imagining that no matter how good the Bills are, some tragedy is out there ready to befall them at the worst possible time.
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The trick for Bills fans, and those betting on them, is to push all that aside for now. The reasons for optimism are evident. Allen’s regular-season numbers last year weren’t quite as good as his breakout 2020, when he managed to transform himself from a flawed passer to an Avenger-grade weapon, but he was unbelievable in the 2021 playoffs, throwing for nine touchdowns in just two games, with no interceptions. Where he once was a jittery, big-armed galloot, the kind of quarterback who would scramble too soon and end upheaving a hopeless bomb to his fullback, now he was poised and sensible and still possessed of the rocket arm and good wheels for a big fella. Elsewhere, there is talent at all the offensive skill positions, most notably with the receiving duo of Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis, and head coach Sean McDermott’s defence should again be one of the best in the league. Why wouldn’t they be early favourites, even if it’s kind of surreal for this particular team?
Adding to the sense of bewilderment for Bills fans is that their transformation from laughingstock to respected contender has happened as the New England Patriots, their chief tormentors, have undergone a reversal in the opposite direction. As recently as last year, the Pats were capable of haunting the Bills. Their season hit a low point when crusty old Bill Belichick came to Buffalo in a hurricane, refused to throw the ball, and still won. (The Three-Pass Game.) But the Bills won the rematch in Foxboro and, miraculously, crushed the Patriots in the playoffs, with Allen pitching football’s version of a perfect game. In the Tom Brady years, when he won more games in Buffalo than any actual Bills quarterback, such a result was unthinkable, like pigs taking flight or Donald Trump exhibiting self-doubt. Things have only become weirder since. Belichick made some strange draft-day calls, then proceeded to replace Josh McDaniels, his departed offensive coordinator, with no one. Matt Patricia, formerly a Belichick defensive assistant, is said to be calling the plays for a new offensive system and the pre-season results have been disastrous. Reports out of New England have consistently said the offence is a mess under second-year quarterback Mac Jones, who has less offensive talent around him now than in his college days at Alabama. The expectations for the Pats are so low that Bills fans could reasonably suspect that the whole thing is a lark, that Belichick, bored by his constant success and with no room on his mantle for another Lombardi trophy, is just screwing about, seeing how many coaching jobs he can give to old pals and family members, raising the degree of difficulty so high that it will be all the sweeter when he breaks Buffalo hearts in December or January.
That’s the suspicion, anyway. Or, more accurately, the fear. Perhaps it is unfounded. Being the Super Bowl favourite is somewhat meaningless in a league where so much must go right to win the final game of the season. The Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes have still just done it once. Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, the same deal. But what is significant for the Bills is that it no longer seems crazy to imagine them actually winning the damn thing. It has taken 30 years, and the scars of Chan Gailey and Rex Ryan, of J.P. Losman and E.J. Manuel, to get back to the place where the Bills are soberly considered contenders, but they are there now.
Just don’t ask a Bills fan what could go wrong. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands.
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