DETROIT – There was a moment late in the second quarter when it felt like the Buffalo Bills made the type of mistake that you simply can’t afford in a game against the team with the NFL’s best record, the Detroit Lions.
The Bills had played a flawless first half on offense, reminiscent of their perfect game in the 2021 playoffs against the Patriots, as they had cruised to three consecutive touchdowns in building a 21-14 lead.
Now they were under the shadow of the goal post on possession No. 4 thanks to a 64-yard Josh Allen howitzer to Keon Coleman which put the ball at the 3. But then, the offense finally stubbed its toe and failed to punch it in, and Tyler Bass somehow missed a 24-yard field goal. Yeah, 24 yards.
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Before anyone could get over that stunning development, the Lions were on the move and seemed destined to tie the game before the end of two wild and crazy quarters.
Instead they also stalled, and their kicker, Jake Bates, missed a 52-yard field goal, so the Bills breathed a sigh of relief, took their seven-point lead to the locker room, then resumed their flogging of a baffled Lions defense and ran off with a superb, frenetic 48-42 victory, one of the best in Sean McDermott’s career.
“Credit that team,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “They were ready to go. We knew they would be, we knew they would have a sense of urgency coming off of that tough loss out there on the West Coast. We just couldn’t quite match it. They did a good job. Ultimately, it’s like I told the team, I didn’t have our guys ready to go, not like that. Not when you’re playing a team like that.”
It was quite a concession for a hard-boiled manly man coach like Campbell, but he was right. The Bills played with an unbridled passion and rose to every moment in beating a team that had won 11 games in a row and had outscored its opposition by a league-high 189 points.
The Bills conduced just one full practice during the week due to the snowstorm in Orchard Park, were down three starters in their secondary, and were confronted with the No. 1 scoring offense in the NFL. While it was far from a great day for the defense as it certainly got torched, it really didn’t matter because Allen and company could not be stopped.
“It’s the best I’ve seen him play and I’m not surprised,” McDermott said when asked broadly about the season Allen is authoring, one that should end with him being named league MVP. “When he sets a goal for himself, for the team, he’s hard to stop. People have tried, they’ll keep trying, that’s what we do in this league, but I mean just incredible. An incredible performance week after week and what more can you say? Every week we’re watching an incredible player play incredibly consistent, and I’ll let you guys fill in the rest of the sentence.”
Buffalo rolled up 559 yards of total offense, and by topping 30 points for the eighth straight game, it became just the fifth team in NFL history to do that within a season, and the first since the Peyton Manning Denver Broncos in 2013. And this was also just the third time in team history (1990 and 2021) that the Bills have surpassed 40 in back-to-back games.
There was never a doubt that this was going to be a track meet, and that’s what it was as the team combined for 1,080 yards of offense and 90 points, the highest in both categories in any game in the NFL this season. This just one week after the Bills played the previous highest-scoring game, their 44-42 Bills loss to the Rams.
“The mindset we had this week was win every play,” Allen said. “Whatever the play was, find a way to execute it at the highest level. We were just focused on the next one and guys made really good plays in there.”
Yeah, ya think?
The Bills had nine plays of at least 20 yards and averaged 8.2 yards per play, they racked up 28 first downs and scored on eight possessions while punting just once. It was a master class performance up and down the offensive unit, drawn up brilliantly by coordinator Joe Brady and executed to near perfection by Allen and his comrades.
Buffalo scored touchdowns on its first three possessions, driving 73, 78 and 70 yards with Allen ending the first two with QB keepers and handing off to James Cook for a six-yard TD run on the last that put the Bills up 21-7.
That gave the Bills three rushing TDs for the fourth straight game, just the sixth team in NFL history to do. The only teams with a longer streak are the 1950 Chicago Bears and 1954 San Francisco 49ers.
As for Allen, it was his fifth straight game with a rushing TD, tying the longest streak of his career. He is the only QB in NFL history to record multiple streaks of five or more consecutive games with a rushing TD.
Allen could do no wrong on those first three drives and by the end of the first half, he’d completed passes to seven different targets and was 14 of 19 for 254 yards. On the first drive he hit Ty Johnson for gains of 33 and 24 yards, he found Cook for 28 on the second and Cook also ran three times for 21 yards, and on the third scoring march, there was a 19-yard completion to Dawson Knox on first-and-20, and a gorgeous 31-yard floater to Johnson on a fourth-and-2.
Yet despite all that, it could have been even better had that fourth possession not gone awry.
In between the Bills marching up and down the field, the Lions enjoyed their own successes as Jared Goff put together back-to-back 70-yard scoring drives, the second of which was particularly rough for Buffalo’s defense because it had two golden opportunities to get off the field and failed on both.
First they allowed the Lions to convert a fourth-and-4 as Goff found Amon-Ra St. Brown for 21 yards, and then on a third-and-10, it looked like Goff was dead in the pocket but somehow the Bills failed to sack him and he ran out for 10 yards and the first down. That set up Goff’s nine-yard TD pass to offensive lineman Dan Skipper, another one of those Lions trick plays that always seem to work.
Detroit then appeared ready to make the Bills pay for that one failed possession as it quickly moved into Buffalo territory, but its own drive died, and Jake Bates missed from 52 yards. Still, it sure felt like the Bills not upping their lead to 28-14 when they were at the 1-yard-line felt huge, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter because the Bills were every bit as dynamic over the final 30 minutes.
They made an immediate statement by marching 70 yards in just four plays to get it to 28-14 as Allen hit Johnson for 19 yards, and then Cook blew through the middle, broke a couple tackles and raced 41 yards for a touchdown.
And then came a huge moment for the defense – a rarity in this game – later in the third when Christian Benford forced Amon-Ra St. Brown to fumble and Matt Milano recovered at the Lions 26, setting up Khalil Shakir’s three-yard TD where he took a little push pass from Allen as he came in motion and then scooted into the end zone.
The Lions eventually got within 38-28 as St. Brown caught a 66-yard TD and Jahmyr Gibbs a 12-yarder, but in a simply dumbfounding decision, they tried an onside kick after the Gibbs TD and Mack Hollins fielded it with a great leaping catch and raced 38 yards to the 5, from where Allen threw a TD pass to Ray Davis on the next play.
“Yeah, was able to tip it to myself,” Hollins said. “I started laughing because I was about to go house a kick, and that’s what happens when you start laughing and showboating and stuff, you get hawked, so unfortunately I don’t have a kickoff return for a touchdown. That’s Micah (Hyde’s) highlight. I didn’t want to steal from him.”
As for that decision, Campbell said, “I just thought we’d get the possession. I thought we were going to get that ball. Hollins made a heck of a play on it. And, you know, obviously, now sitting here hindsight after them taking it down to the three-yard line, yeah, I wish I wouldn’t have done that, but is what it is.”
The Davis TD made it 45-28, and it turned out be just enough.
“I would just say we came out with an attitude and it showed,” said Taron Johnson. “We learned from last week and tried to carry that chip on our shoulder. We need to do that every single week, just making sure we do that when it comes to the next games. Yeah, I feel like we took it personal last week and we showed it today.”
Added Greg Rousseau: “You’ve always got to respond in life. When you get knocked down, you’ve got to get back up. We were amped, we were ready to go. We were trying to come out here and get the W and that’s what we did.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, and he has written numerous books about the history of the team. He can be reached at [email protected], and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social. Sign up for his Bills Blast newsletter here: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast
