How popular is Bills QB Josh Allen? Check this out
The crowd roars as Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen runs down the field and hands out high-fives at the end of the Bills’ training camp at St. John Fisher University. Today was the last day of training camp in Pittsford.
ORCHARD PARK – If there’s one thing Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott can’t tolerate more than anything else, it’s a loss at the line of scrimmage.
There are so many aspects that can determine who wins games in the NFL, and sometimes it’s as simple as asking which team has the best quarterback.
But there is one thing that almost always leads to lost games: dominance at the line of scrimmage, especially when it happens on both sides of the ball, as was the case with the Bills on Saturday when they suffered a nasty 33-6 loss to the Chicago Bears in their first preseason game at Highmark Stadium.
Sign up for the Bills Blast newsletter Delivered straight to your inbox: additional Bills analysis, insights, stats, quotes and team history from Sal Maiorana
“There’s not much more to say other than we didn’t control the line of scrimmage from the beginning, all the way down to one of our last offensive series when we tried to get a first down on third-and-1, fourth-and-1 or whatever it was and didn’t get a yard,” McDermott said succinctly.
“So that’s the challenge. We have to accept that challenge. We have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ll obviously look at the film and it will show us right in front of us what we didn’t do well and that was a big problem. If you don’t control the line of scrimmage, it’s hard to win.”
As McDermott said, it started the moment the ball entered play. The Bears took possession first as their shiny new quarterback, No. 1 draft pick Caleb Williams, made his NFL debut.
The rookie led his team 58 yards in eight plays before Buffalo’s defense tightened up in the red zone and forced a field goal. On his second possession, Williams went on a 12-play, 84-yard run, rushing for 33 yards on six rushing attempts.
In between, the Bills’ first offensive attack ended after three plays, two of which were nullified runs by James Cook because the offensive starting line was overwhelmed.
It never got better. At the end of the day, the Bears had 141 rushing yards on 30 attempts, while the Bills managed just 77 yards on 26 attempts. But if you exclude the QB scrambles, running backs Cook, Ray Davis, Darrynton Evans and Frank Gore Jr. had just 36 yards on 17 attempts.
Josh Allen and Connor McGovern are not worried about their performance in the running game against the Bears
“We only managed three or four runs and had no plan at all for their defense,” Josh Allen said. “So we just tried some of the runs we’ve been working on and practicing.”
The Bills might need to work on it a little more because nothing has been working.
“You learn from everything,” center Connor McGovern said. “Sometimes you just get punched in the face. But at least we’re all in the same communication, we’ve all been on the same page. We know what we did as soon as we get off the sidelines. We’ve talked it through.”
Buffalo’s offensive line has been a topic of conversation since the decision to release center Mitch Morse under a salary cap deal. While Morse was set to bring in about $8 million, he was Allen’s center for five years and the anchor of a line that played well last season while enjoying unusual continuity by starting the same five games every time.
When Morse was released, the Bills were forced to move McGovern from the left guard position to center and brought in a 2023 backup, David Edwards, at left guard. One preseason game is certainly not enough to say the experiment went wrong, but it was not a great start.
Here too, Allen, like McGovern, did not seem the least bit concerned.
“It was great,” he said of the communication between him and the linemen. “I thought the guys went out there and we talked really well, especially Connor and I, on the few plays we had. We just made sure Mike’s spots were where they needed to be.”
It’s good to know that the mike points (which tell who and where the middle linebacker is) were on point. But the blocking was not, as the Bills had six runs of 1, 0 or minus yards when the first O-line was on the field.
“We’re going to watch that film, like I said, and we’ve got good guys in that locker room,” McDermott said. “That means something to them. I think some of the younger guys that haven’t been in our locker room yet, and some new guys that haven’t been in our locker room yet, who are veterans, are starting to understand that the standard is the standard.
“We have to learn from this. We have to be honest about what we saw out there. Actually, it started with us inflicting a fair amount of pre-snap penalties on ourselves. So let’s just start with that, shall we? Self-inflicted wounds are hard to overcome, and then you have to play against an opponent on the other side. We can learn a lot from this, and I’m confident we can do that.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades, including 35 years as a full-time reporter for D&C, and has written numerous books on the team’s history. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @salmaiorana. https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast
