There would have been genuine surprise had it been known at the start of this National Football League season that the Jacksonville Jaguars would be the Buffalo Bills’ first-round playoff opponent.
Even more so that the Bills would be the road team for their AFC wild-card matchup with the Jags this weekend.
But Jacksonville has been the counter-narrative this season to the dominant storylines regarding the fall of the Kansas City Chiefs, Detroit Lions, and Baltimore Ravens. The Jags are the team few saw coming, going from 4-13 to 13-4 with essentially the same roster they had before Liam Coen took over as head coach after last season.
The Jags’ middling 5-4 start has been followed by eight straight wins, all during a time when most of the attention in the AFC South was on the Indianapolis Colts and Houston Texans.
With a roster low on playoff experience but high on young, emerging talent, these Jaguars will present a far tougher challenge than the Jacksonville team Buffalo last encountered on Sept. 23, 2024, when the Bills scored touchdowns on every one of their first-half possessions en route to a 47-10 laugher.
Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence was as cold at that point of his career as he is hot today. He has flourished under Coen’s guidance of the Jags’ offence, throwing for 4,000 yards for the third time in his career and setting career highs for touchdown passes (29) and rushing yards (359).
And in an age where more and more quarterbacks are targeting a high percentage of their throws close to the line of scrimmage, Lawrence has taken his deep-ball touch he displayed in college at Clemson and made it work in the NFL.
The mid-season addition of veteran receiver Jakobi Meyers in a trade from the Raiders seemed to be just what the offence needed, providing Lawrence with a new top target and helping make Jacksonville the sixth highest-scoring offence in the NFL.
Defensively, the Jags have few weaknesses against either the pass or the run, which will test the Bills each time James Cook carries the ball or Josh Allen drops back to throw it.
A lot has been made of the opportunity the Bills have this playoff season with their perennial playoff nemesis – the Chiefs – sitting this one out, along with the challengers from Baltimore and Cincinnati as well.
But does this Bills team have what it takes to get past Jacksonville, much less run the table in the playoffs to reach the first Super Bowl of the Allen era? The public isn’t sure, giving the Bills just a slight edge in the betting markets as a road favourite.
There’s no secret about what it will take from Buffalo’s perspective.
When you combine experience and talent at the quarterback position, no team in these playoffs can match what the Bills have in Allen. That is the biggest advantage the Bills have heading into this game, even with the understanding that Lawrence is absolutely capable of outplaying Allen on Sunday.
With an offence that’s been reinventing itself all season out of necessity, Allen will have to be at his best against the Jaguars. Multiply that times 10 if the Bills can’t get James Cook going along the ground, which is no given when you’re facing a team that didn’t allow a 75-yard rusher this season.
Buffalo’s pass defence has been superb the second half of this season, despite not getting consistent pressure up front. Against a quarterback as talented and hot as Lawrence, a little disruption off the edges from the likes of Greg Rousseau and Joey Bosa would go a long way, especially when you consider the Bills’ failure to disrupt at the line of scrimmage has been their Achilles’ heel in those playoff exits to the Chiefs.
Rousseau got paid, and Bosa was added via free agency, for games like this.
This isn’t likely to be the kind of matchup Buffalo can just win by simply executing its game plan.
As has been the case in most Bills victories this season, there will be stuff to withstand, errors to overcome and desperate moments. It’s just in their DNA.
That is where the battle-tested nature of this Bills team could be the difference.
This is reasonably the most limited version of the Buffalo Bills in the past six seasons, but the AFC playoff field would appear to present a clearer path to the Super Bowl on paper than in any of those postseasons.
It’s also the first time over that span that they’ve had to open the playoff on the road, a place the Bills are lifetime 0-4 under head coach Sean McDermott, including a loss at Jacksonville in 2017, the year the Bills ended their 17-year playoff drought and just a few months before they drafted Allen.
The Jags have been to the playoffs just once since that game, while Buffalo is making its seventh consecutive postseason appearance. They are the team with the greater overall expectations, the team that shouldn’t flinch in critical moments, and the team that has lived on the edge so many times it’s become the norm.
But they may need all of that and more to beat a Jacksonville team that has nothing to lose and is ready to assert itself in a wide-open AFC playoff field.
