Unless something is supremely obvious, I try not to label something “the greatest” right when it happens. We tend to be prisoners of the moment and overrate something when it happens because greatness is something that needs to be examined both in the moment and in the context of where whatever we’re talking about fits in the greater history of the sport. While I do care more about greatness, I am not yet prepared to say that the Bills and Chiefs played the greatest non-Super Bowl playoff game in NFL history- that is something that will both require time and a real examination in comparing the stakes and effect of that game against the "Immaculate Reception” and “The Catch” games. That being said, I am fully prepared to say that from a pure pound-for-pound quality of game, Sunday’s Bills-Chiefs game was the best in NFL playoff history.
What made the last two minutes of Sunday’s game so thrilling was that none of the scoring felt fluky. The 25 points in the last two minutes of regulation were the second-most in the regular season or postseason in the Super Bowl era. The game with the most, a matchup between the Ravens and Vikings in 2013 with which I am intimately familiar, was exciting, but also fairly fluky. Of the four touchdowns scored in the last 2 minutes of that game, the first three came on weird plays- a 40-yard TD run during a two-minute drill, a kickoff return for a touchdown, and a screen pass taken 78 yards to the house. Only the final Ravens drive to win the game felt like a true two-minute drill. This? Everything felt organic and forced us to reimagine the way we felt about the end of games. When the Bills scored with 1:54 left to go up three, everyone knew that Mahomes had much time, including the Bills. That drive contained some curious play-calling that seemed more intent on draining the clock than actually scoring a touchdown because they were so scared of giving it back to Mahomes. Josh Allen and Gabriel Davis bailed the Bills out on a couple of fourth downs, but conventional wisdom suggests that the Chiefs getting the ball with 1:54 left means that when they inevitably score (again a fun concept) it will be with little time left on the clock. But it turned out things may have turned out perfectly for the Bills because the Chiefs are so damn good. Nothing felt weird about Mahomes hitting Tyreek Hill in stride with Hill doing the rest to run in for a touchdown- in fact, it made complete sense that the Chiefs offense would be too good for themselves, leaving too much time for Allen, which of course was the first thought everyone had when the Chiefs scored- which is incredible in itself. Remember, the Bills needed a touchdown, not a field goal. Going down the field for a touchdown in a minute is really hard, but there was never a doubt that there were no flukes required in order for them to do it- and boy did they ever do it. Allen methodically marched Buffalo down the field, and sure enough, hit Davis once again in stride for a touchdown to put the Bills up with 13 seconds left.
For the entirety of NFL history that Davis touchdown would have meant game over barring a fluke. And yet- I didn’t think Mahomes was out of it. Many of you who have been reading me throughout the year know that I am a clock-management geek, and I love playing out the scenarios in my head and then getting mad at teams for screwing it up. Rather than thinking the Chiefs needed a prayer, I was doing the math in my head and *genuinely* thought they had a shot. I was thinking that if the Bills kicked it through the end zone (they should have squibbed) the Chiefs would get the ball back on their own 25-yard line with 13 seconds left. Harrison Butker has a cannon, meaning that in order to get in range in that weather they probably needed to get to around the Bills' 40-yard line, meaning they needed 35 yards- about 17 or 18 per play. The average play should take no more than five or six seconds- and with all three timeouts, they had the ability to stop the clock immediately after every play. This meant that they had a genuine chance to get into field goal range with around 1-3 seconds left on the clock. This is not the first time that a team has been in that situation, but it is certainly the first time that I thought about them getting into range through the prism of an actual drive as a real possibility. Getting back-to-back 15-20 yard plays is really hard, but the Chiefs simply change the way we think about football. Sure enough, they not only got into range but got ten yards further than they actually needed to attempt a kick, with each play only taking up five seconds. And while it seemed incredible, it did not seem unreasonable. No one fact check me on this, but that is the least amount of time I can remember being left for a team to successfully convert a two-minute drill in the context of actually moving the ball downfield within the provided time frame rather than needing some freak play.
What was so incredible about Sunday’s game was that none of it was by accident- it was the culmination of a revolution that has been undertaken at the Quarterback position. Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen are two football demigods who have actually been allowed to use their talents. Rather than being boxed into conventional, vanilla, under-center offenses that rely on three-step drops and the run game, the Chiefs and Bills fit their team to the talent of their Quarterbacks, rather than trying to get their Quarterbacks to fit into some preconceived notion of what football should look like. The result was the highest level of Quarterbacking we have ever seen from two players in the same playoff game. Allen and Mahomes not only have the license to launch it whenever they saw fit, but they also have the license to take off. Rather than being the engineer of an offense, the two were used the same way that a basketball team uses its best player- their respective teams simply put the ball in their best players’ hands as much as possible. And while it may seem simple in theory, we have never seen that idea executed with two players of Mahomes and Allen’s physical tools. And the result was exhilarating.
Beyond the pure lunacy of the game itself, Sunday's epic provides a fascinating insight into the style of team-building necessary to beat the Chiefs. What this game showed is that as weird as it may seem, the Chiefs actually neutralize the importance of roster talent. The Bills made no secret about the fact that everything they did was designed to beat the Chiefs. They made a concerted effort to upgrade their defense over the offseason, by drafting and signing an incredibly deep group of pass-rushers that could be rotated in and out-and it worked to the tune of the number one defense in football. Beyond this past offseason, the Bills are truly coming off of one of the best three or four-year stretches of team building in football history. The way the Bills methodically established a culture, identified talent, built around that talent, and figured out how to coach that talent should be the first thing taught in Team Building 101 at Football University. And yet, most of it wound up being irrelevant. While it is true that the Bills put up a great defensive performance to beat the Chiefs during the regular season, I would actually argue that this was the game that we learned that the Bills actually did successfully build a team to beat the Chiefs. That Week 5 game was a weird game in the rain where the Chiefs were sloppy and dropped a few passes, one of which fell right into Micah Hyde’s arms for a pick-six. While you may get the occasional Chiefs stinker in the regular season, that simply doesn’t happen in the playoffs. No matter what the Bills did to try to neutralize Mahomes, it simply didn’t work. Mahomes has literally been an A+ in every single non-Super Bowl playoff game. It took an entirely injured offensive line to slow that offense down in last year’s Super Bowl, which is not something you can count on when building a roster, and perhaps the most successful team in neutralizing a healthy Chiefs in a big game- the 49ers in Super Bowl 54- still gave up 31 points. While the Chiefs aren’t inevitable because of their defense, Mahomes, Hill, and Kelce essentially are.
So if we learned on Sunday that rosters don’t beat the Chiefs the question then becomes what does? Well, that’s also something that we learned, even in a Chiefs win. And as simple as it sounds, you have to hope to keep up with them and get lucky. No one is going to thoroughly outscore the Chiefs in a shootout, but you can hope to be relatively close. You need to essentially match them to the point that it becomes a 50-50 or 60-40 proposition, and hope that the uncontrollable factors go in your favor. The Bills did everything right (except for not squibbing it)- but both literally and figuratively, things came to a flip of the coin and they came on the wrong side. What the Bills have shown is that just like any other sport, the best way to be in a position to compete is to build the best roster. But the best way to beat these Chiefs is to have an elite Quarterback who matches Mahomes in an individual game. This should be a comforting notion for some teams, and an alarming one for others. In my mind, the only AFC teams that I could see beating the Chiefs in a playoff game are the Bills, Raven, Chargers, and Bengals, because of their Quarterbacks. I would pick the Chiefs against any of those teams because Mahomes is guaranteed to show up while the rest of those teams have guys who have the ability to match Mahomes, but aren’t guaranteed to. Remember, as incredible as he was this year, Josh Allen had playoff games in which he has played poorly. Lamar Jackson has certainly struggled at times in the playoffs. Joe Burrow was just OK against the Titans and certainly didn’t play well enough to match Mahomes. Herbert has never played in a playoff game, but he has had some bad games. None of this is to criticize any of these Quarterbacks, but rather to point out how absurd the consistency of Mahomes’ greatness is.
While there are fairly big gaps in terms of the quality of the teams who can beat the Chiefs, I think those teams are actually similar in terms of their capacity to beat the Chiefs. If the Chiefs neutralize everything else about a roster, it really just comes down to hoping you get the best version of your Quarterback, something we have seen from every one of these teams. If we count this game as a win for the Bills in terms of doing what is necessary to beat a normal version of the Chiefs, which I think we should, then every one of those teams has had games this year where their Quarterback matched Mahomes. Of course, someone could luck into a bad Mahomes game in the playoffs- the laws of nature say that it will eventually happen- but if that were to happen, I am thoroughly convinced that it would be a fluky poor showing from Mahomes rather than a team doing anything to stop him. In terms of what teams can control, they can only hope to outscore him.
While the path to beating the Chiefs seems simple it actually becomes incredibly difficult, because of the crapshoot that is drafting Quarterbacks. An incredibly smart GM can build an incredible roster, but an incredibly dumb GM can luck his way into a superstar Quarterback. So while much of this comes down to luck, there are still certain lessons we can learn. The first and biggest one is to prioritize tools over intangibles. For all of NFL history, the prevailing wisdom at the Quarterback position has been to play it safe, to look for the “prototype.” The smart, precise Quarterback who doesn’t make mistakes and is in control of everything, and then hope you can develop some elite tools. But what teams like the Chiefs, Bills, and Ravens have shown is that the inverse is now true. In a conference where the Chiefs exist, you are going to need Allen to throw a ball 60 yards in the air to Gabriel Davis or Lamar Jackson to make a jump pass to Marquise Brown to keep up with them. Of course, not every one of those Quarterbacks with those tools then develops the intangibles necessary to hang around in the NFL. But the most important thing for teams- particularly those in the AFC- is to take swings. And there will be some misses, but there comes a point where there is not much of a distinction between mediocrity and cellar-dwelling. The 2018 draft is perhaps the most extreme example of this. That was a draft of three safe prospects (Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold and Josh Rosen) and two “toolsy” prospects (Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson). The Ravens and Bills went for the tools with the plan to cater their team to the abilities of their Quarterback and then hoped that they would develop into truly elite NFL-caliber Quarterbacks. The Cardinals quickly moved on from Rosen and went the opposite direction with Kyler Murray which is certainly working out, while the Jets have at least taken a swing with Zach Wilson (although I still would have gone with Fields). This is not to say that these guys are all guaranteed to become Patrick Mahomes, or Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson. They are just as likely to become Johnny Manziel or Jamarcus Russell. But taking a swing and doing everything you can to support that Quarterback is the best thing an AFC team can do to compete. This does not make the rest of the roster irrelevant- teams that compete with the Chiefs are there because they have incredible rosters- but it's ultimately not enough. Just like any other time in NFL history, building a top-tier roster is the most important thing in being a competitive team. But to beat the Chiefs at Arrowhead in the playoffs? You need a decent roster, and an elite game-changing Quarterback. Then you hope he shows up as the best version of himself. And then you pray.
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