Forget the Panic: Bills-Texans Showed Me Two Contenders
Going into Bills-Texans, I heard the phrase “panic game” thrown around a lot. Bill Simmons said it, a few other people said versions of it, and I totally understood the logic. You have two teams that came into the season with huge expectations, somebody was going to leave Houston 0-1, and because this is how we consume the NFL now, that means we immediately have to decide which team is fucked after one week.
Then I actually watched the game.
And maybe I’m crazy, but I came away thinking both fan bases should feel pretty damn good.
Obviously Buffalo feels better because they won. There is no substitute for actually winning the game, especially when you go on the road, score the go-ahead touchdown with 1:41 left and then have your defense close it out with Houston sitting nine yards away from stealing it back.
But if I’m a Texans fan, am I really panicking after that?
The biggest question I had about Houston wasn’t the defense as I think we all know that defense can be good. The question was the offense and whether C.J. Stroud and company could finally become something more than the part of the team everyone was constantly waiting on.
For one game, at least, it looked pretty damn good.
Houston scored 31 points and gained 381 yards. Stroud went 26-of-38 for 274 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions. The Texans had 26 first downs, converted seven third downs, ran 73 offensive plays and possessed the football for 36:17.
That’s not an offense being dragged around by its defense.
That’s an offense that gave Houston a chance to beat Buffalo.
And if I’m a Texans fan, it’s pretty easy to spin what happened on the other side of the ball as a bad day at the office. Josh Allen is Josh Allen. Sometimes great quarterbacks make really good defenses look like shit. It happens.
If Houston’s offense can play anywhere close to this consistently and the defense goes back to doing what everyone expects it to do, why wouldn’t you still feel good about that football team?
The Bills are almost the inverse.
Buffalo’s defense wasn’t particularly good for large stretches of the afternoon. They gave up 381 yards and 31 points, Houston moved the chains, controlled the clock and ran 21 more offensive plays.
And Buffalo still won.
That’s where I start getting really excited about what we saw from this offense.
The Bills possessed the football for only 23:43. They ran just 52 offensive plays.
They gained 409 yards and scored 36 points.
That’s fucking absurd.
Buffalo averaged 7.9 yards every time it snapped the football and 1.5 points every minute they had the ball. Houston averaged 5.2 yards per play and the Texans basically had another quarter’s worth of offensive plays and still finished with fewer yards and fewer points.
And Josh Allen looked like Josh Allen.
He went 20-of-29 for 334 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions while also running for two touchdowns. He averaged 11.5 yards per pass attempt, and Buffalo averaged 10.4 net yards per passing play.
But what I liked even more was how they did it.
This wasn’t just Allen completing a bunch of short passes and hoping somebody broke a tackle. Buffalo attacked down the field as Dalton Kincaid had five catches for 130 yards and DJ Moore had five for 100 and a touchdown. Those two combined for 230 yards on 10 receptions.
That’s 23 yards every time one of them caught the football.
There has been a lot of conversation over the years about Buffalo becoming too dependent on Allen making magic happen, and there have been games where the offense felt like Josh Allen running around until somebody got open. This didn’t feel like that. There were explosive plays built into what Buffalo was doing, and Allen was pushing the football downfield.
I want to see more before declaring that this is what the offense is going to look like every week, because it’s one game and we have a tendency to turn one NFL Sunday into a referendum on everything. But against a Houston defense that was supposed to make life difficult for Buffalo, I saw an offense that looked dangerous as hell.
And then there was Greg Rousseau….I’ve been waiting for this Greg Rousseau.
Not because I think Rousseau has been bad. He hasn’t. He’s been a good football player, he’s been good against the run, he’s generated pressure and we’ve seen him have big games before.
I’m talking about becoming the guy.
The defensive player where it’s late in the fourth quarter, everybody in the stadium knows the quarterback has to throw the football, and instead of hoping somebody makes a play, you’re expecting Rousseau to make it.
He did Sunday.
Rousseau finished with two sacks, two forced fumbles and five quarterback hits. The sacks weren’t meaningless stats he picked up while Buffalo was leading by 20 points. They basically bookended Houston’s game as Rousseau strip-sacked Stroud on Houston’s opening possession and Ed Oliver recovered it.
Then came the final drive.
Houston got all the way to Buffalo’s 9-yard line with 30 seconds remaining. At that point I’m sure every Bills fan watching had the same feeling…We’ve all watched enough of these games to know exactly where your brain goes.
Here we fucking go.
Instead, Deone Walker sacked Stroud for a nine-yard loss, Stroud threw incomplete pass, and then Rousseau got there, stripped Stroud again and Terrel Bernard recovered it. Houston went from first-and-goal at the Buffalo 9 to turning the football over at the Buffalo 24 in 14 seconds of game clock.
Game over.
That’s the shit I want from Rousseau.
He entered this season with seven forced fumbles in his first five NFL seasons and produced two in one afternoon. For years we’ve talked about Buffalo needing somebody on the defensive line who can do that in January. Somebody who doesn’t need a blitz drawn up perfectly or the secondary to cover for five seconds. Just beat the guy in front of you and wreck the play.
Sunday, Rousseau did it.
Twice.
So now we’re back to the original question.
Who was supposed to panic after this game?
Houston?
I watched the part of its team I was most concerned about score 31 points against Buffalo. If the Texans get that offense every week and pair it with the defense we’ve seen before, I think they’re going to be pretty damn good.
Buffalo?
I watched the Bills run 21 fewer plays than Houston, possess the football for 12 minutes and 34 seconds less, get out-converted on third down, give up 31 points and still win because their offense was ridiculously explosive and their best pass rusher made the biggest defensive play of the afternoon. If anything, I think this game reinforced how stupid it can be to decide after Week 1 that somebody needs to panic.
The Texans are 0-1.
The Bills are 1-0. One fan base gets to celebrate and the other has to spend a week hearing about everything that’s supposedly wrong with its football team. But after watching all four quarters, I came away thinking something completely different. These might just be two really good football teams.
And if this was supposed to be a panic game, I’m not sure I saw much worth panicking about.
STATHEAD OF THE WEEK: 24-8
Years ago, I used to have this running bit with Aaron Quinn from Cover 1 about 300-yard passing games. I was always the guy who thought they mattered and Aaron would tell me they really didn’t mean as much as I thought they did, and then he’d throw some toxic differential stat at me that I didn’t really understand. We’d go back and forth about it, mostly just busting each other’s balls, and it became one of those stupid football arguments that never actually gets settled.
Then Josh Allen started throwing for 300 yards.
Now I had ammunition.
Whenever Allen would go over 300 and the Bills won, I’d immediately remind Aaron what Buffalo’s record was when Josh threw for 300 yards. Sometimes I’d send him a meme of me trolling him. I don’t even remember how many different versions of the joke we went through, but it became a thing.
So when Allen threw for 334 yards against Houston, naturally my brain went right back there. What is Josh Allen’s record in 300-yard games now? And where does he actually rank compared with everybody else?
I crunched the numbers.
And holy shit.
Since 2020, Josh Allen has 24 wins when throwing for at least 300 yards.
Only Patrick Mahomes has more with 29. Then you have to go all the way down to Jared Goff and Justin Herbert at 17.
That’s a pretty significant gap.
Since 2020, Buffalo is 24-8 when Josh Allen throws for 300 yards.
That’s a .750 winning percentage.
Now this is where Aaron can jump in and yell about toxic differential or EPA or whatever statistic he’s going to use to ruin my fun. And, yes, obviously throwing for 300 yards doesn’t automatically mean you played a great game or that your team is going to win.
The numbers actually prove that.
Justin Herbert has 31 games of 300-plus yards since 2020 in the wins-and-losses data I pulled. He’s 17-14.
Joe Burrow is 15-12.
Jared Goff is 17-12.
Kirk Cousins is 11-11.
And then there’s Patrick Mahomes, who apparently exists solely to ruin every fun Josh Allen statistical argument I ever want to make…He’s 29-4.
Fine.
Whatever.
But here’s where this got even more interesting to me. I decided to expand the search all the way back to 1990. Allen’s 24 wins in 300-yard passing games already put him tied for 17th among NFL quarterbacks since 1990.
Think about that for a second.
Tom Brady is No. 1 with 91, Drew Brees has 81, Peyton Manning has 61, Aaron Rodgers has 48, Mahomes already has 42, and Brett Favre and Matthew Stafford have 41 apiece.
Those are massive career numbers accumulated over a lot of football.
Josh Allen has 24 and he just hit the age of 30. He’s tied with Derek Carr and is one behind Drew Bledsoe and Joe Flacco. He’s three behind Kirk Cousins, five behind Tony Romo and seven behind Jared Goff. And Allen didn’t even have his first 300-yard passing game until 2020.
Maybe this doesn’t seem remarkable if you didn’t live through the Bills quarterback years before Allen. I did. I remember when 300 passing yards felt like a goddamn solar eclipse.
You’d hear about Peyton Manning throwing for 350 yards or Drew Brees throwing for 400 and then watch the Bills finish a game with 176 passing yards and convince yourself that this was somehow a perfectly acceptable way to play NFL football.
Now Josh Allen throws for 334 yards, the Bills win, and it’s almost just another Sunday. That’s probably the biggest compliment I can give him. He’s normalized something that used to feel completely abnormal around here.
And, yes, Aaron’s original point was probably technically correct. A quarterback throwing for 300 yards doesn’t automatically mean his team is good or it doesn’t automatically mean he played great. Sometimes you’re throwing for 350 because you’re losing by 17 points and desperately trying to come back.
But here’s my counterargument all these years later: When Josh Allen throws for 300 yards, the Bills usually win.
Not sometimes.
Three out of every four times since 2020.
So Aaron, after all these years, I’m afraid the bit isn’t dead. The Buffalo Bills are now 24-8 when Josh Allen throws for at least 300 yards since 2020.
I’ll have the meme ready. :P
BUFFALO VIRAL MOMENT OF THE WEEK
I was a little shocked by how many people were annoyed with Maxwell Hairston calling himself “The Chosen One.”
Why?
For years, people have complained that Bills players are boring interviews. If you’re one of those people who can’t stand Sean McDermott because you think he’s muzzled everyone and turned every press conference into the same collection of clichés, shouldn’t you be happy when a young player actually shows some personality? Now, if you don’t think Hairston is good, fine. The jury is still out, but I’m totally fine with athletes being confident before they’ve completely proven themselves. You almost need that level of irrational confidence to survive in the NFL.
The only annoying part is obvious: if Hairston struggles, every hater on social media is going to throw “The Chosen One” back in his face approximately 14 seconds later.
This actually reminds me of Nate Clements around 2004. I want to say somebody put “playmaker” over his locker with duct tape, and Clements embraced the whole persona. Jerry Sullivan absolutely hated it and any time Clements talked confidently or did something wrong in a game which was rare, it seemed to rub him the wrong way.
I never understood that.
Give me personalities, give me characters and give me guys who actually say something. Maybe Maxwell Hairston becomes a great player. Maybe “The Chosen One” ages horribly. Who knows? But if we’re going to celebrate the Bills bringing in a personality like C.J. Gardner-Johnson because he’s a character and actually says what’s on his mind, then we can’t immediately get mad when a young player does the same thing.
Let these guys be themselves.
DAD SHOTS
—WGR revealed its new lineup, and I think it’s a pretty interesting move, even if it’s one we all probably saw coming. Brad Riter moves into the 10 a.m.–2 p.m. slot, with Tim Graham joining him for the first couple of hours and Owen Parker coming in afterward. Then Schopp and the Bulldog move up and go from 2–6 p.m. It is crazy to me that Riter, who was a mainstay in Buffalo radio in the 90s and 2000s, is returning for 4 hours! It’s like the Ted Nolan return of radio.
The Riter/Graham portion is probably the most interesting part to me because it now goes directly against One Bills Live. So you’re putting WGR’s local conversation up against the Bills’ own daily show, which gives people a pretty distinct choice in terms of how they want their Bills coverage.
I haven’t listened to Brad and Tim in about a month, mostly because I have no life and two kids, but the times I have checked them out, I’ve really enjoyed their banter. It feels less like two guys doing capital-R Radio and more like you’re sitting at a bar listening to two people have a conversation. It doesn’t feel forced or overly produced. They clearly know each other, they know how to bust each other’s balls, and there’s an actual chemistry there.
I wish I could be more critical and yell about how much I hate it, because that would probably make for better content, but I can’t. I think it makes sense. We’ll see how it works when everybody settles into the new time slots.
WGR also announced some of the Bills players who will be doing weekly appearances, including Dion Dawkins and DJ Moore. Hopefully Jeremy White doesn’t drool all over DJ Moore too much just because the Bills finally have a wide receiver with a pulse.
I kid.
Mostly.
—I don’t mean to be a dick, but there was a little too much ball-washing over Sean McDermott saying he wants the Bills to win the Super Bowl. What the hell else is he going to say publicly?
“Actually, I hope they lose. I hate those guys. Go to hell, Buffalo.”
Of course he’s going to say he wants them to win. That’s what you’re supposed to say on the media rounds after leaving a place where you spent nearly a decade. I remember when Chan Gailey got fired and he had that emotional goodbye press conference and basically told everyone, “I’ll be rooting for you guys all the way.” Everyone loved it. Class act. Wonderful. Then he went and coached the Jets and then the Dolphins. I’m going to take a wild guess that when he was calling plays against Buffalo, Chan wasn’t secretly hoping the Bills picked him off and took it 90 yards the other way. Look, I like McDermott. I respect what he did here. But this is also part of the game.
And hear me out: if I were Sean McDermott, after getting fired, I’d probably be rooting against the Bills.
Just don’t tell anyone I said that.
One more thing on the Sean McDermott/Rich Eisen interview, McDermott said that after getting fired he went back and talked to people inside the Bills organization he respected, basically conducting his own little postmortem to find out what he didn’t know while he was head coach.
OK. Who?
Did he talk to Brandon Beane? Because that conversation would fascinate me. Their relationship certainly seemed a little more complicated by the end, and then after McDermott was fired we got the whole public mess over who really wanted Keon Coleman. Did he talk to scouts? Assistant coaches? Trainers? People in personnel? Agents? Players? Josh Allen? The Jumbotron maker? The obstructed seat designer? The Pegula kid with the bad hat designs?
And who told him that he needed to show more of himself and be more relatable?
McDermott basically admitted that he conducted his own exit interview with the Bills organization, except he was interviewing them. I’d love for somebody in the Buffalo media to start making some calls and find out exactly who was on the other end of those conversations and what else they told him.
—I despise captain conversations in football. Twenty years ago, did anyone even know who the captains were? Then the NFL decided, “You know what this sport needs? A gigantic magical C on somebody’s jersey so everyone knows which grown man is allowed to talk to the referee.” But in the interest of having something to write about, I’ll bite.
Bradley Chubb surprised me. The guy has basically just unpacked his boxes. He’s a veteran and obviously has a reputation around the league, but naming a first-year free-agent addition captain immediately feels a little unusual when you’ve got guys like Ed Oliver, Greg Rousseau and Cole Bishop who have actually been inside this program.
My first reaction was basically: Bradley Chubb? Already?
But that’s also why captain debates are stupid.
I’m not in the locker room and maybe Chubb showed up on Day 1, took over the room and everybody immediately gravitated toward him. Maybe he’s giving Braveheart speeches before practice. I have no freaking idea.
None of us do.
Especially with the Bills, where 90 percent of the players who talk to the media have been trained to say some variation of, “We just have to execute, take it one day at a time and continue to get better.” If we’re choosing captains based entirely on public entertainment value, give me C.J. Gardner-Johnson because he’s nuts and makes me laugh. Or Dalton Kincaid because he dances to stupid Killer songs.
There….Captain analysis completed.
—Did you know the last time all 3 NY and NJ teams won in week 1 was 2008?
—Aaron Rodgers is still a dick. Even if a clock is right twice a day with some of his thoughts, the amount of gas lighting when it comes to Covid and the vaccine is astounding. I wish Dr Rodgers would tell us what he would have done when everyone was dying.
—I’m probably in the minority here, but I don’t hate the NFL playing games all over the world. Is it a money grab? Of course it is. This is the NFL and everything is a money grab. But if you actually want to grow the sport internationally, you have to bring the sport internationally. Compare the NFL to the other major American sports. MLB, the NBA and NHL have players coming from all over the world. American football is still overwhelmingly made up of players from the United States. If the NFL wants that to eventually change—and wants to create actual football fans in other countries—playing meaningful games there is part of it.
Now, if you want to complain about the travel, the time-zone changes, the weird kickoff times and how much it screws with a team’s normal routine, fine. I get all of that. But there’s still going to be a winner and a loser. It’s not like the Bills are flying to London and playing the London Football Bills, who slept in their own beds the night before. Both NFL teams have to deal with the trip. And selfishly? I think it’s kind of cool. If I were younger, didn’t have kids, and you told me the Bills were playing a regular-season game in Australia? We’re fucking going to Australia. Bills game on the other side of the planet? That would’ve fucking ruled.
—Good for the Bills having both national anthems at home games. If roughly 20% of the crowd is coming from Canada, this is absolutely the way to go. Plus, I’ll say it: “O Canada” is a way better anthem.
—I’m not sure why Joe Brady took his shirt off to celebrate winning, but I guess I’m here for it. Bills fans taking their shirts off after wins? Fine. Whatever. Let’s have some fun. I just hope this doesn’t eventually lead to some sort of Bills influencer “shirts off” contest, because I think we all know exactly where this is headed, and nobody needs that.
—What happened last week with Zohran Mamdani and the reaction to the mayor going to a 9/11 ceremony was a disgrace. You can hate Mamdani’s politics, you can vote against him, you can criticize every decision he makes as mayor even though he’s been awesome. But when Rudy Giuliani starts connecting his Muslim faith to the people who attacked this city and Vickie Paladino is standing at City Hall demanding that the sitting mayor of New York not “show his face” at Ground Zero, what exactly are we doing here?
He’s Muslim. He didn’t fly the fucking plane.
Are Germans not allowed to eat at a kosher restaurant because of the Holocaust? Should Italians stay away too because Mussolini allied himself with Hitler? Should Korean people be banned from an American war memorial because of the Korean War? Vietnamese people because of Vietnam?
Of course not. Because that would be insane.
Muslim New Yorkers were New Yorkers on September 11, too. They lost friends, coworkers and neighbors and watched the towers fall. They breathed the same air. And afterward, many of them got the added bonus of being treated like they personally had something to do with it. I know…because I was here in 2002. I remember someone pranked a radio show after 9/11 and saying that some deli that muslims owned was celebrating the towers falling down on the 1st anniversary . You won’t believe it [insert sarcasm] but that was absolutely false as multiple people called back to say they knew the owners and it was bullshit.
Twenty-five years later, we’re still doing this?
Mamdani is the mayor of New York City and the mayor belongs at the city’s 9/11 remembrance ceremony regardless of whether you voted for him. In fact, the 9/11 Memorial itself has said political leaders from both parties have traditionally attended simply to bear witness, without giving remarks.
For a city that has spent 25 years saying “Never Forget,” maybe we should remember what happened after 9/11, too and stop the grifting of hating people who don’t look like us.
—Whatever happened to “stick to sports”? Because I remember an entire era where ESPN couldn’t even breathe near politics without people losing their minds, and if an athlete talked about an election it was stick to sports, or if an ESPN personality talked about the president it was stick to sports, or if a player talked about some social issue it was why does ESPN have to make EVERYTHING political. We heard over and over again that people watched ESPN because they wanted scores and highlights and football and wanted to get away from CNN or Fox News or MSNBC for a few hours. Fine. Then what the hell are we doing here?
Ted Cruz isn’t an athlete who happened to give a political opinion during an interview or a coach who got asked a question about something happening in the country. He’s a sitting United States senator getting nearly 10 minutes on College GameDay to promote federal legislation that he’s actively pushing, and I would say the exact same thing if it were Chuck Schumer or AOC or Bernie Sanders or any other politician. I don’t care what letter is next to their name. If you’re going to give politicians 10 minutes to sell legislation on a Saturday morning college football show, then I don’t want to hear later that ESPN needs to be an escape from politics.
I’m also not going to sit here and pretend I’m an expert on the transfer portal or NIL or every single detail of the Protect College Sports Act because I’m not. The bill is bipartisan and there are parts of it dealing with NIL rights, so I’m not going to simplify this into Republicans trying to stop athletes from making money. But sometimes I look at this entire fight over college sports and it just feels like a bunch of older people looking around and seeing college athletes finally making serious money and deciding that everything suddenly needs to be brought under control.
Meanwhile, college football seems to be doing just fine. People are watching, stadiums are packed, television networks are paying billions of dollars for the product, and somehow the sport has survived the quarterback finally being able to get a piece of all that money.
And if ESPN believes this legislation is important enough that it deserves this much time on College GameDay, that’s completely fine with me. Cover the shit out of it. But then bring Cruz on and bring somebody who opposes the bill on too, bring an athlete who is actually going to be affected by it, bring an athletic director, bring someone who understands NIL and the transfer portal better than I do, and explain what the bill fixes and what it changes and what some of the unintended consequences could be. That’s actually covering the story. Giving one of the politicians pushing the legislation a giant national television platform to make his case without really presenting the other side starts looking a hell of a lot more like lobbying than journalism.
And this gets even stranger when Cruz has publicly talked about President Trump potentially signing this legislation ON COLLEGE GAMEDAY, and ESPN had already featured Nick Saban and Pat McAfee advocating for congressional action on college sports the previous week. So we’re getting beyond the argument that sometimes politics naturally intersects with sports, which of course it does. We’re potentially talking about one of ESPN’s signature sports shows becoming the backdrop for the President of the United States signing federal legislation.
That’s where the double standard really gets me. You can’t spend years hearing that sports television is supposed to be this great escape from politics and then suddenly decide that a United States senator getting 10 minutes to sell his bill is just part of the football coverage. Either politics has a legitimate place in sports when the two worlds intersect, and if that’s the position then everybody needs to stop screaming “stick to sports” whenever an athlete or broadcaster says something political they don’t like, or sports is supposed to be this magical politics free escape. You can’t have it both ways depending on who is talking and what they’re saying. If anything, what parts of this country really love college football the most? It is mid-America and the south. And where do those places on the map lean? You guessed it. I don’t think this product political placement was designed by accident by the leaders at the worldwide sports HA.
At least, maybe the funniest part of this entire thing is that ESPN brought Ted Cruz onto College GameDay IN TEXAS to talk about all of this and the fans still booed the shit out of him. Maybe those Texas fans were just trying to tell ESPN what we’ve been hearing for years…stick to sports.
—Andy started 3K last week.
Thank. God.
I cannot adequately describe how happy I am that this child is back in school. The previous three weeks may have been the longest three weeks of my life. Before I had kids, parents would say they couldn’t wait for summer vacation to end and their children to go back to school. I used to think that sounded horrible.
I understand now.
I understand profusely.
Over those three weeks Andy yelled at me, hit me a few times, and became obsessed with which jeans he was wearing. Then pajamas. We had a complete breakdown at the zoo because he wanted chicken fingers. By the end, I felt like I had spent three weeks negotiating with a tiny, irrational celebrity whose rider kept changing.
And I survived.
I love this kid more than anything in the world and I would take a bullet for him without hesitation. But apparently I draw the line at spending a fourth consecutive week with him. Have a great day at school, buddy. Daddy needs you to go learn shapes for eight hours.
—If you made it this far…I thank you. I was on the Chicken Finger and thirst trapper of the media stars Pat Moran’s podcast after the Bills game. Just fast forward his parts and get to mine. I’ll definitely have more pieces coming out in the coming days unless my wife or kids kill me. Enjoy the rest of the week and be sure to eat a bagel with chipotle cream cheese.
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It is idiotic they are singing O Canada before the game. Yes there are lots of Canadians who are season ticket holders and tons of Bills fans in southern Ontario. But this sort of pandering rings hollow when trips by Canadians to the US has dropped to nothing in response to the tariffs. Ironically, the Bare Naked Ladies who will be signing O Canada on Thursday will do so without their lead singer. He was kicked out of the band when he was caught by police doing blow in Syracuse. Most Canadians understood the drugs by why was Page in Syracuse???