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Absent the sort of background he has, now in his 23rd NFL season and seventh as Bills head coach, last week might have seemed like a lot to Sean McDermott.
The loss to the Jets on Monday night was only the beginning, and the resulting questions on Josh Allen, as if he were coming out of Wyoming all over again, would be the easy stuff. The mid-week lawsuit filed by former NFL Network reporter Jim Trotter put team ownership in the crosshairs on a sensitive topic that’d resonate in any locker room. The viral video that showed up on social media would make star receiver Stefon Diggs a topic of conversation again.
Were the Bills coming apart at the seams?
McDermott was confident they weren’t.
“You’ve been around the NFL,” the Buffalo coach said, unwinding late Sunday afternoon. “The short weeks are tricky, especially after a loss. You want to put a lot of time in, but you can’t, because the players need to be fresh. Your work on the field isn’t as much as you’d like it to be in order to make some adjustments, and it’s already the season. That makes it to where you’re trying to develop more fundamentals. It makes it hard.”
But, on the flip side, it also would give McDermott a window into where his team was.
“I thought the guys really did a great job from a leadership standpoint,” he continues. “And that’s always good to see.”
McDermott didn’t want to get granular on all the week’s happenings in Orchard Park, but what he said there, doing so subtly, was simple: His Bills kept their eyes on the prize.
It was apparent, as he saw it, in how his scout team battled Thursday with the starters, through the little on-field work the players got coming out of the loss in New Jersey. And it was obvious Sunday, as Buffalo methodically dismantled the visiting Raiders, who came in riding high after opening the season with a win in Denver.
The 38–10 win wasn’t some sort of confirmation that the Bills are about to win their fourth-straight AFC East title, much less fulfill the locker room’s Super Bowl aspirations of the last couple years. But it’s fair to say that it did give McDermott some affirmation.
For starters, his quarterback served up plenty for the coach. After falling on the sword for all that went wrong in the ugly loss to the Jets—and most notably, his four turnovers—Allen showed that his willingness to accept culpability wasn’t just lip service. And that came to life right away, both in the week of preparation for the Raiders, and the game itself.
“He prepared,” McDermott says. “He went right back to the drawing board from a preparation standpoint. And he was humble in his approach. He checked the ball down early in the game and played very disciplined.”
In other words, a week after playing like the wild bronco of a quarterback he was coming into the league, he used the guardrails of his offense to morph back into the thoroughbred he’s become. There were some throws Sunday—his 11-yard, sidearm touchdown dart to Khalil Shakir was one—but more so there was what McDermott called a mature game from Allen, who picked apart a Raiders defense that forced him to work the ball down the field with a death-by-1,000-paper-cuts approach.
Allen piloted touchdown drives of 7, 11, 8, 15 and 11 plays, and finished with a workmanlike 274 yards and three touchdowns on 31-of-37 passing.
Then, there was the guy he went to, as he usually does, when it mattered most. Diggs, caught up in drama leading into a game again (and, this time, it wasn’t drama of his own making), responded with an afternoon that almost seemed drawn up to send a message on who he is and where he stands.
His seven catches for 66 yards weren’t flashy. No one will remember this as a signature Diggs performance. But they did show where he stands now—as the guy Allen will go to when it matters most, and one who’ll deliver in those spots, as he did with three of those seven catches converting third downs on touchdown drives as the Bills started to pull away from the Raiders.
“The guy loves football,” McDermott says, on what centered Diggs during the week. “He’s got a really unselfish approach. That could have, if he didn’t handle it the right way, become a distraction. It was to begin with. But it could have become a bigger one.”
It wasn’t, because, as McDermott said, Diggs wasn’t gonna let it get in the way of football.
And then, there was the other part of what he and GM Brandon Beane have built over the last seven years, something that showed up with a play that turned the game.
