Four games, four wins and the Bills are sitting all alone atop the AFC East after the Patriots predictably fell to the Chiefs last night, thanks in large part to the stellar play of Josh Allen.
The Good: As is becoming the trend in 2020, there is a lot of good to unpack here. Let’s start with one of the best throws of the season by any quarterback, the absolute laser to John Brown that should have been a touchdown. NFL officiating awfulness reared its ugly head again, but either way, it was a superior throw and an amazing catch by Brown. You could not have handed the ball to him in a better position than Allen delivered it. And that’s just one of many great throws on the day. He was on fire early, hitting first downs like nothing, making great use of his eyes to open up holes in zone defense, and throwing his receivers open. And the best thing about Allen is he knows he’s not playing perfect ball, regardless of how gaudy his stats are. One of the first things he said was a self-criticism of what may have been the biggest offensive play of the night, his 49 yard bomb to Stefon Diggs. He knows he could have put a little more under it and Diggs would have had an easy catch for a touchdown. He was similarly critical of his slightly high TD pass to Beasley, he knows the Beas made a great play to bring that down and he knows he could have made it easier. It bears mentioning that Allen is only 32 games into his career and he was incredibly raw coming out of a small school. While the leap he has made is nothing short of unprecedented, he still has room to grow and he knows it. Given his work ethic and obvious ability to learn, NFL defenses should be very afraid that this isn’t even the best version of Josh Allen yet.
The Bad: On one hand, the fact that Josh Allen completed that little flip pass (which went like 13 yards in the air while he was falling and had a guy draped on his legs, holy crap) to Stefon Diggs is pretty amazing, but the injury scare just about killed me. Fortunately, it appears to be minor, but it was one of two instances in this game (more on the second in a minute) where Josh would have been better off throwing it away and living to fight another day.
The Ugly: Throw the damn ball away, Josh! He had plenty of time to launch that ball out of the endzone if he wanted to, but instead he took a sack that took the team out of field goal range. There’s just no excuse for that, especially not when a 17 point lead would have effectively iced the game. Allen’s ability to pull off the seemingly impossible on a regular basis gives him his incredible confidence and is part of what makes him so much fun to watch, but it continues to bite him on the ass occasionally, albeit far less frequently than before. We’ll just have to live with it and as long as the eye-popping plays continue to outweigh the facepalm plays, I’m fine with it.
On an Unrelated Note:
Singletary is still really good. The new look Bills offense with 10 personnel like half the time doesn’t feature him as much as I expected this year, but he’s so damn elusive and fun to watch.
Finally some signs of life on defense. After four straight scoring drives allowed, the Bills D responded with a forced fumble, a fourth down stand, a forced fumble, and punt before allowing a meaningless garbage time touchdown with 1:29 left. Keep that rolling into next week.
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