The preseason doesn’t matter, but it mattered to Bills head coach Sean McDermott that his team lost 38-0 to the Bears on Sunday night.
McDermott said that the quality of the Bills’ play was “not even close” to what he expects, and even though the Bears played starters early in the game and the Bills did not, it was no excuse.
“Certainly not up to our standard, what we expect,” McDermott said. “Got a lot of work to do. That’s very clear. Doesn’t matter who’s out there, ones, twos, threes, fours, whoever it is, we expect them to perform and we expect our level of performance to be much better than that. Just break it down, line of scrimmage, we didn’t win the line of scrimmage, fundamentally we weren’t good enough, too many penalties. Get out there and playing against their ones, I expect — we expect — to compete with them. And that wasn’t the case early. And then our twos then who were out there against their twos, and our threes against their threes, it didn’t get much better. So we’ve got to look at it, figure some things out and evaluate some of the guys as well and see where we stand there. A lot of work to get done this week as we move forward.”
McDermott didn’t single out any individuals who played poorly but said the bad loss was a total team effort.
“I’m concerned about a lot of things coming off tonight,” McDermott said. “When you lose the way we did, it’s probably a little bit of everything.”
The Bills will obviously be a different team when Josh Allen and the rest of the starters are on the field in Week One. But McDermott wants to know he has good roster depth as well, and he wasn’t happy with what he saw from the players who are competing to provide that roster depth.
