By the time the Buffalo Bills received the opening kickoff on Thursday night, the debuting $2.1 billion show home had faded into the background.
This was all about the Bills and Josh Allen, and whether the offensive display the team put on against the Houston Texans one week earlier could be sustained against the Detroit Lions.
Logic said it would, as the Lions’ depleted secondary had been torched for 410 yards the previous week by the New Orleans Saints and Tyler Shough. So how would they stand up to Allen?
Not very well, it turned out. The Bills scored touchdowns on their first four drives in their new stadium en route to a 41-31 win over the Lions.
Not that this was all about an Allen aerial show. The Bills won in large part because of the rushing of James Cook, who had 130 yards on 21 carries, keeping the offence on schedule during the first half and helping elongate drives and chew up clock in the second.
The one-cut-and-gone Cook was held in check in the season opener in Houston, but his game was on full display at the new Highmark Stadium.
Allen also did damage against the Lions with his legs, rushing 14 times for 69 yards and two touchdowns, all of it perfectly timed and without absorbing the unnecessary hits a younger version of himself might have taken.
Allen took what the defence was giving him as he welcomed opportunities to run into open field wherever he could find it, which was often.
There were the big strikes – to tight end Dalton Kincaid and Canadian receiver Josh Palmer during the first half– and times where Allen managed the game more conservatively, engineering longer drives to kill clock and rest the Bills’ defence.
Kincaid looked like Allen’s favourite target for the second week in a row, a reliable option the quarterback kept returning to at critical points of the game, hitting him on seven of eight targets for 95 yards and a touchdown.
If this Bills’ offence is going to reach its potential, a healthy Kincaid is going to be a necessary ingredient. It’s all that’s been missing during the Utah product’s first three seasons in the league and these past two weeks have been confirmation of that.
Right now, this Bills’ offence looks as though it can’t be stopped. In putting up 36 and 41 points over the first two weeks of the season, there’s a feeling of inevitability that this offence will find the end zone more often than not.
And all of the gawdy Allen statistics from the first two weeks of the season simply validate that this is the best player in the National Football League. And it may not be particularly close.
There’s not even a Patrick Mahomes-versus-Allen debate anymore. This is Josh Allen’s NFL right now.
That’s good news for Buffalo because he may be the only quarterback capable of engineering an offence that can outscore what the Bills’ defence is giving up.
For the second week in a row, the Bills surrendered 31 points. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that, for the second week in a row, the defence made key plays at junctures of the game that affected the outcome. The biggest of those came with roughly eight minutes to play and the Bills holding on to a 10-point lead at 34-24.
With a chance to make it a one-score game and leave plenty of time on the clock, the Lions went three-and-out on a drive that started at their 10-yard line thanks to two balls batted at the line of scrimmage by Bills defensive lineman Deone Walker.
The second-year player blossomed during camp and has carried that into the season, registering a key sack a week ago as the Texans were driving towards a score and shining again against the Lions.
Outside linebacker Greg Rousseau had two sacks for the second week in a row, suggesting he may be reaching another level.
Most importantly, the Bills defence did the one thing most teams can’t do when they face the Lions: they kept running back Jahmyr Gibbs bottled up all night. The explosive Gibbs gained just 52 yards on 16 carries on a night where Detroit never stopped running the ball.
That’s a lot of good wrapped up inside surrendering 31 points, 24 of which came after Thursday night’s contest became a three-score game.
There are enough elements to like about the Bills’ defence to believe that with more time together under this new coaching staff the unit can get to where it needs to be by season’s end.
In the meantime, Allen and the offence may just keep putting up 40.
