Could Sean McDermott’s game management cost the Bills a title shot?

Players win games. Coaches lose them. That’s the saying in the NFL.

And Bills coach Sean McDermott just lost another one.

With about a minute and a half left in Sunday’s game, the Bills still had a long way to go to take the lead, but quarterback Josh Allen was playing so well that a comeback seemed possible. Imminent, perhaps. When the Bills entered the low red zone with about 75 seconds left, FOX’s lead NFL analyst Tom Brady went so far as to say Buffalo was “in a great position.” The Bills were down nine points with a touchdown on the way. And they still had the three timeouts.

Brady, the greatest situational player in the history of the game, charted his path to victory: throw for a touchdown, complete the PAT, kick, stop the Rams for a three-and-out with a timeout after each play and then take the lead. ball within field goal range to win.

Brady warned: Whatever the Bills do, they can’t run the ball to the goal line.

But that’s exactly what they did.

At the 1-yard line, with one minute and six seconds left, Allen ran the ball on a QB attempt. The Rams stuffed Allen and the Bills had to call a timeout. His chances of winning plummeted.

“Now you have to do an onside kick. We have a 3% chance of an onside kick… That changes the whole complexity of the last minute and two seconds of the game,” Brady said. “Even if they score, what’s the problem? You’re going to have to take an onside kick. I didn’t like that one bit. That could have cost them the game right there.”

He did it.

Allen had six touchdowns (three passing, three rushing), but the Bills still couldn’t achieve victory.

“They’re going to break his back,” former Bills running back and FOX Sports analyst LeSean McCoy said of Allen on “The Facility.” “He’s carrying the entire stadium, the owners, the coaches, the athletic trainers. He’s carrying Buffalo. He’s carrying everyone.”

The Bills also shot themselves in the foot in the final seven seconds of the game when they called for a blocked punt attempt and only had nine men on the field due to a brutal substitution error. It was Buffalo coaches kicking their players while they were on the ground.

But let’s get back to the goal line. It’s not that McDermott made a decision that some might consider debatable, or that you would say is simply the product of hindsight. It’s pretty empirical that the Bills shouldn’t have run the ball. Because? For the cost of failure. Even offensive coordinator Joe Brady seemed to understand that Monday.

“If you look at us at the 1-yard line this year, we haven’t been stopped by a sneak QB outside of this game. The only thing that didn’t work before this game was an illegal formation… At that time “In terms of percentages, the The highest play percentage was the QB sneak pass, but at the same time, the cost of not getting it essentially cost us the game,” Brady said. “So I’ve got to do a better job in that situation. And it’s something we continue to evaluate… We have to be better. “I have to be better.”

It’s nice of Brady to take the blame. But that’s what head coaches are for. McDermott, who isn’t the play-caller, has to step in to override his coordinators when they can’t see the big picture. McDermott let the mistake happen.

This is not the first time this has happened.

Too often under McDermott, the Bills lose sight of the forest for the trees. They worry so much about what they need in a single play that they forget to manage the game as a whole.

Let’s just go back to the Bills’ loss to the Houston Texans in Week 5. Late in the game, the Bills threw the ball, repeatedly, when they should have run it.

The Bills were backed up at their 3-yard line with 32 seconds left and the score tied 20-20. The Texans had three timeouts. And Buffalo threw three consecutive incomplete passes to run out just 16 seconds on the clock before kicking the ball back to Houston, which needed just five yards to get into field goal position and kick the winning goal. After the game, McDermott noted that the Bills needed a first down no matter what because of the timeouts. But every yard counted and so did every timeout. The Bills’ three failed passes put the Texans in perfect position to make field goals.

The Bills are the only team in the last 45 years to be tied or leading in the final minute of the game, inside their own 5-yard line, and throw three passes in a row. according to ESPN research.

Did McDermott agree with Brady or communicate with him during the sequence?

“I’m not going to get into that. I don’t think it’s relevant right now,” McDermott said after the game. “Overall, again, that’s on me. We just have to do a better job. I have to do a better job in that situation.”

“We needed to wind the clock and move the chains and that’s on me. Overall, it’s on me. I have to do a better job in that situation.”

Go back further and you will find more problems.

There was the Bills’ mistake in the final 13 seconds against the Chiefs in the divisional round of the playoffs after the 2021 season. The Bills were celebrating on the sideline as if they had won the game while Patrick Mahomes was on the other bench planning his winning advance. The score was 36-33 and he had three timeouts; The match was far from over. The Bills played defense, allowing Mahomes and Tyreek Hill to gain 19 yards on an easy drop. On the next play, Buffalo stayed on preventive defense and made it easy for Mahomes to get 25 more yards from Travis Kelce. It was a surprisingly poor situational play. And Harrison Butker took the game to overtime, where Mahomes won.

The Bills finished that season and postseason 0-6 in one-score games.

There are plenty of other examples of McDermott’s problems, including one where the wrong decision seemed to work in 2017 during his first season as head coach. It was dumping snow, there was about six inches on the ground, and the Bills needed a win to stay in playoff contention. There were four minutes left in overtime (with a tie at stake) and McDermott decided to punt on fourth-and-1. The Bills were apparently playing for a tie when they needed a win to make the postseason. It was unfortunately conservative. But it worked. The Bills eventually got the ball back and scored a McCoy touchdown. But the victory came despite that decision to punt, not because of it.

After the Bills’ loss to the Rams, McDermott is 88-50 as the team’s head coach (including postseason), but is 35-31 (53%) in one-score games (including postseason). ).

For comparison, Andy Reid is 130-103-1 (56%) and Bill Belichick is 135-102 (57%) in one-score games. Those are the great contemporaries of game management. McDermott is not in the mix.

So let’s go back to the present.

Where do the Bills go from here?

Allen is the best football player on the planet. Buffalo can’t waste another postseason with poor game management. Because you know who’s lurking to exploit that? It’s Reid and Mahomes. They have won 15 games in a row by one score. The Bills beat the Chiefs this year, which was actually one of McDermott’s best examples of progress. He aggressively sought a fourth down in the fourth quarter, and Allen finished with a game-clinching touchdown and a nine-point lead that put the score out of Mahomes’ reach. (And yet, I was in the building for that last minute and felt absolutely no sense of relief until the clock struck zero. Because the Bills know what Mahomes was capable of: anything. They learned their lesson in 2021 about celebrating early ).

“Some things will come up from time to time that you want to not mention,” McDermott said Monday regarding game management. “But they have to be fixed. They have to be resolved. That’s what we tried to do in the days after.”

The Bills’ general philosophy has been to trust Allen in these situations, even when it doesn’t make sense. And maybe that’s where they should take a step back and rethink. as They are making the decisions. Because Buffalo’s decision-making scheme may not be working. Instead of plugging the leaks, the Bills need to figure out why the leaks are happening.

It’s not enough to look at their failures in the game and say: we won’t do that again. Every game is different. Each decision is different. McDermott might need better infrastructure to be able to control the quality of his coordinators.

The Bills were not forthcoming about how they handle their late-game situations, except to indicate that defensive coordinator Bobby Babich calls the defense and Brady calls the offense. It should be noted that Marc Lubick holds the title of game management coach. He’s been with the Bills as long as McDermott, but only took on the game manager role in 2020. However, it’s unclear exactly how involved Lubick is in these situations and decisions.

“Those are not easy situations in general. There is a lot of communication that has to take place… [We’ll] adjust our process a little bit and refine it a little bit more,” McDermott said.

That process is everything for the Bills. This is a Super Bowl caliber team. Your coach needs to be ready to make Super Bowl caliber decisions. And he doesn’t have a consistent track record of doing that.

Before joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna.

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