Inglewood, Calif. — No one does wild and crazy football like the Buffalo Bills.
Games that often result in wins defy explanation.
On Monday night at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles they authored another doozie.
It was a game in which the Bills completed 12 passes and the Rams 40. Buffalo completed a total of four passes to receivers, while the Rams had 23.
The Bills gave up 17 catches to one player on the Rams, Puka Nacua, for whom their defence had had no answer all night.
Buffalo’s leading rusher was quarterback Josh Allen. Their No. 1 receiver, D.J. Moore, and complimentary deep threat Joshua Palmer were both out with injuries.
Receiving tight end Dalton Kincaid, who set the NFL on fire the first two weeks of the season, had just one catch for seven yards.
They missed an extra point. And running back James Cook fumbled twice, including in overtime with the Bills in Rams’ territory.
It all somehow added up to a Buffalo win and a move to 4-1 on the season.
Crazy Bills wins invariably revolve around the crazy talent of Allen, who seems to accomplish something every single week that no one at his position has done before.
Monday night was no exception, with Bills PR posting his latest feat on X after the game.
And then there was this one from OptaStats:
Just another week of Allen turning the football world on its ear.
As exhilarating as Monday night was from a Bills perspective, it was a game that demonstrates how Buffalo has fallen far short of achieving an offence where Allen can just be great, without all the acrobatics and desperation maneuvers that often bring out the best of him but carry a higher degree of risk.
For the third week in a row, Allen made playing quarterback look like work.
With Moore and Palmer out of the lineup, and Skyler Bell in his rookie debut, Allen had trouble finding targets down the field for most of the night.
So, if the objective of this offence is to make it so that Allen doesn’t have to be Superman in order for the Bills to win, Monday night was a failure.
Maybe it was one of those two or three games a season where you’d expect Allen’s talent to be the difference. But 10 carries for 121 yards can’t be the game plan, and it wasn’t. Allen is doing that by necessity.
The Bills are going to have to find ways to keep the offence on schedule without Allen carrying so much of the load and absorbing so much risk in the process.
Yes, he’s been doing it his whole career, but life in football changes on the other side of 30.
Part of the offence’s problem right now is the absence of Kincaid in a primary role. It’s a riddle that makes little sense.
Kincaid is in his fourth season in Buffalo, with his development having been slowed only by injuries and availability in previous years.
During the first two weeks of this season, it appeared he’d blossomed into the player the Bills envisioned when they made him a first-round pick in 2023, amassing a total of 12 catches for 225 yards, whetting appetites about what this season might represent for him.
Since then, it’s been four catches in three games for a total of 52 yards. After a week of answering questions about Kincaid’s lack of targets in the New England game, Bills head coach Joe Brady replied by saying “that can’t happen” and put it on himself to make Kincaid a bigger part of the offence.
And then against the Rams, with no Moore to absorb a high percentage of targets, Allen completed one of two throws to Kincaid, for a second week in a row.
The jubilation of Monday’s win will soon give way to the sober vision that the Bills have serious issues on defence that their offence can’t be expected to continually outperform.
Buffalo has given up more points than any team in the AFC. They’ve won games in which they’ve allowed 31, 31 and 34 points. Presumably, someone on X is searching to find when the last time was that happened.
Meanwhile, the search for a sustainable way to win football games continues.