The 2023-2024 Buffalo Bills
The Buffalo Bills for the fifth straight season end the season with a playoff loss, 27-24 in their third home playoff loss ever, and second in two years to the Kansas City Chiefs in the Divisional Round of the 2023 NFL playoffs. This is the third time in four years that the Kansas City Chiefs have eliminated the Buffalo Bills in the playoffs. This loss was not as dramatic as last year’s loss at home to the Cincinnati Bengals or that last 10-seconds in the divisional loss to Kansas City two years ago. When the Bills got on the field Sunday, January 21st, 2024 they really Billlieved they were gonna win. The media had already been talking about how this was the Buffalo Bills year they would overcome Kansas City. However, the Chiefs had other plans. It is a disappointing loss, which makes for a disappointing season. The BillsMafia balled out this year. Not just during the season, but all the lead up to the playoffs. Hordes of fans waiting in lines, in freezing cold to help shovel snow out of the stadium. The wild card game verse Pittsburgh had to be postponed for a day due to the poor weather.
This review of the 2023 Buffalo Bills season is not going to be a splatter of throwing our people under the bus. We had a hell of a lot of adversity this year from injuries, ‘again…’ Even more so than the 2022 season. Our guys battled all year, but at the end of the day we lost. We didn’t get the pants beaten off us this time. We could have won this game and most feel we should have won this game. I felt like even if we did win that we probably would not have been able to beat Baltimore due to our defense being so rough against the run and the Ravens being a run-dominant team. However, after watching the AFC Championship game, I don’t know, maybe Allen and company might have sailed right past Baltimore. This will be another honest review based on what I saw with my own eyes and over thirty years of watching, playing, understanding the game of football.
With all that out of the way.
Let’s Begin…
Tough for the Buffalo Bills to die out the way we did. Josh Allen, ‘the Alien,’ showed up. Our beat up defense, not so much. Sliced apart like warm butter most of the game. I am sure there are many that are blaming the kicking. Well our kicker should be paying better attention which direction the wind is blowing in the same area you live in but I guess that is what false hope looks like in pro football.
Our Defense was shaky most of the season due to another case of the injury-bug. However, unlike last year, the Bills were able to adapt much better with Coach McDermott calling the defense this year after Leslie Frazier announced he would not be back with the team for the 2023 season. Not fired, just that he would not coach in 2023. At this point he is no longer under contract with the Buffalo Bills. So if he does decide to coach again, it won’t be with Buffalo. The Buffalo Bills for 2024 definitely got some things to fix. We were exposed on defense in crucial situations due to these injuries. A play here, a play there. With the right people on the field, those plays never happen. However, Coach McDermott always had a fix in the game this year. This year the Bills stepped up there ‘situational football’ alertness. Injuries are not an excuse. Every team goes through them. We have been weak against the run for the past three seasons, but we showed a lot more mustard this season than we did in the past, and if it wasn’t for injuries we do not give up nearly as much as we did. We made adjustments in the 2023 offseason to beef up the defensive line and we started out well enough till the injuries began to pile up.
The Buffalo Bills have some free agency challenges heading into the 2024 season. We have 19 unrestricted free agents. It will be unlikely we will resign them all. Some of these guys were key to the Bills success and have earned a chance to either play to start or go somewhere else for more money.
• WR’s Gabe Davis, Trent Sherfield.
• RB’s Latavius Murray, Damien Harris.
• DE’s A.J. Epenesa, Leonard Floyd, Shaq Lawson.
• DT’s DaQuan Jones, Linval Joseph, Tim Settle, Poona Ford, Jordan Phillips.
• LB’s Tyrel Dodson, Tyler Matakevich.
• CB’s Dane Jackson, Cam Lewis.
• S’s Micah Hyde, Taylor Rapp.
• QB Kyle Allen.
• TE Quinton Morris (restricted)
On this list I feel six guys we absolutely need to resign are Trent Sherfield, A.J. Epenesa, Leonard Floyd, Dane Jackson, Taylor Rapp, and Poona Ford. I’d like to resign Gabe Davis but with the emergence of Trent Sherfield, Khalil Shakir and Dalton Kincaid it is going to be difficult to sign Gabe Davis under the expectation of more money in a new contract. Is he worth more money? I say yes, but his performances do not really warrant that. We really needed him to step up the last two years and he really hasn’t shown us that. If he is willing to come back to Buffalo and play for less money, then sign him, absolutely. However, if he demands more than we can pay him then we have to allow him to go and test the market. He is a starter in this league and at times has shown all-pro quality play, but it has been too far and in between. Jordan Phillips and Micah Hyde have stated they may retire, but as of the writing of this blog we have not heard from them that this is what they are going to do. Just ‘likely’ that they will retire. Be nice if we could get DaQuan Jones back as well. Buffalo made strides in the offseason last year by beefing up the defensive line, only for those strides to be hindered by injuries and now free agency.
While the NFL Salary cap is increasing for teams this offseason by about $16 million, the Buffalo Bills still find themselves in a tough spot, projected to be around $45 million over the cap. Stefon Diggs is set to carry around $28 million and Von Miller’s comes in close to $24 million. When we made Ken Dorsey our offensive coordinator we immediately signed some bigger bodied WR/TEs which led me to believe we would see a more run balanced offense using our same offensive package of three, four and five wide receivers, but now with two or three tight ends on the field at all times. Much like how our offensive game plan was for the divisional playoff loss to Kansas City two years ago. Run out of these bigger more spread out packages and push the ball down the field with deep throws and crossing patterns. We didn’t do that and the woes with Ken Dorsey as a play caller came to a halt after the week 10 home loss to the Denver Broncos. With the official signing of Joe Brady as the team’s offensive coordinator I would think Buffalo will return to this style of play or closer to the style of play Brady was calling with Joe Burrow at quarterback when LSU won the National Championship in the 2020 College Football Season. We only saw glimpses of what the offense could be during the final stretch of the regular season. Granted, this offense had problems hooking up with Diggs for nearly two thirds of the season, but I would think the Bills will see this on film and make adjustments going into 2024. Diggs is virtually open on every play but defenses did a better job of taking him out the game plan. Buffalo did adapt to this and spread the ball around, but you cannot just not throw to Diggs. We saw earlier in the year that man is so hard to get a solid hit on that he winds up breaking tackles for more yards. The man can still ball out…
The Bills sign longtime assistant coach Bobby Babich as their new Defensive Coordinator. Babich has been with the Bills and Coach McDermott since 2017 and even before that with McDermott when he was in Carolina. He started as the secondary coach, excelled there and moved up to linebacker coach where the line backing core were standouts and has now been officially hired as the Bills defensive coordinator. It is too early to tell whether he will be the play caller on defense as of yet, but even if he is or isn’t he will be working with Coach McDermott on the defense as a whole. This will take pressure off Coach McDermott, which at times during the season we needed someone to help in a more official capacity on defensive adjustments in game and even call plays when Coach McDermott needs to have attention in other areas during the game. One of the main points here is that this is an extension to what the Bills have already been doing. This just makes it official. Coordinators work directly with the head coach, but it always felt the Coach MeDermott would say something and the coordinators would say something else. With Dorsey and before that, Frazier on defense, were not seeing eye-to-eye with Coach McDermott. I always felt Coach McDermott would say something in a press conference and it would just go over both those guy’s heads. I felt like Frazier should have been fired after the 10-second meltdown in Kansas City, but it took another year for him to leave the Bills. Coach McDermott likes to promote from within. The team spends just as much time, energy on their coaching staff as they do their young players, building them up and making them work for us.
Babich was getting interviewed for defensive coordinator positions from the Green Bay Packers, the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins. We sure as hell were not going to let him go to Miami, where we play the Dolphins twice a year and this year playing them in week 18 for the divisional title. On paper this is more of a big deal than it is on the field as Babich is already a huge part of our defense and now he has the title to go with it. The one thing that we can build on is depth. That when we are at full strength we know our backup guys can do the job and they can. Sure there are/were holes, but we did a great job of hiding those holes most of the time. Granted, not all of the time, which is why we are not playing the 49ers in the Super Bowl and the Chiefs are. At full strength we will now have a better understanding of depth at those positions, but we did not adjust well to these injuries. Instead of doubling down with our strategy we needed to make better adjustments with matchups on the field, on both sides of the ball. You do not run nickel/dime/zone packages and never blitz when your defense is that beat up, both on the line and secondary. Once you lose the threat of a pass rush from the front four; running a zone will kill your defense. I have seen it time and time again. Zone can work, but your front four has to get pressure on the quarterback or they will find holes in the zone and just dink and dunk you to death. The defense cannot recover fast enough under that sort of pressure and they didn’t. We just kept doing it over and over again. When Coach McDermott mentions making adjustments this is what I feel he means. Not just on the defensive side of the ball, but the offensive as well. Coach mentioned making adjustments as a priority in the press conference after last year’s loss to the Bengals and I billlieve that is what we did much better at this year. Our offensive coaching needs to fully understanding the weapons we have on a given situation with the players we have on the field. We saw this in the Kansas City game with plays specifically for Shakir. I think we will see more of this in 2024. At least, I really hope we do anyway.
Coach McDermott was far less patient and lenient this season with defending his coaches as we parted ways with Frazier, thank the football Gods for that one, and the firing of Ken Dorsey two thirds into the season. The writing was on the wall, but coach is super loyal to his people. However, this year the leash was far tighter. I do not billieve that will be a problem in 2024. The coaching staff is set, mostly all guys promoted from within. We cannot be too cute anymore. It is time on third and three to run the ball with efficient play calls that favor us and do not rely on some scatter-garbage-junk-play that picks up the first down. We should get the first down not because we are bigger and can push the defense back, but more based on the strategy. However, our offensive line this year did push around a lot of good quality defensive lines. We did struggle here/there against really good defenses like Kansas City. I think next year we will have that in mind more and we will see some stuff that makes more sense. Almost like basketball where you have isolation plays. We still have match up nightmares when defenses try to play us. Sure, they were able to slowdown Diggs this year, but other guys stepped up and showed they can also make big plays. I am not saying its ok to not target Diggs. He is still the best player on the field catching/running with the football, but if you double him you still got to deal with Cook, Shakir, Kincaid, Knox, Sherfield. These guys made plays this year that Diggs would usually make. However, I see the Allen/Diggs show making a big comeback in stats in 2024.
The Situational football got better after the Philadelphia loss. I feel like Buffalo really got a better clamp on this, understanding how to play in the fourth quarter. We started winning matchups and games at the end of the year where I thought we were going to lose after what had happened so often in the past with us. We hadn’t played what I thought was great football since the first Miami game and we still almost pushed through all this. I do not billieve any sort of different game plan would have changed things against the Chiefs. We were just too beat up on defense to outright stop Kansas City, but I feel like we are right there. We are literally plays away from going to the show. If one only passively watched Buffalo Bills football this year this may come as a shock. Things were unraveling and Coach McDermott was able to right the ship, make a pretty good run with limited resources. Are we disappointed? Sure, of course we are, but I feel a whole lot better going into the 2024 season than I did the 2023 season. 2022 should have been our year and it wasn’t. We ran into troubles again, but this time I feel like we learned. Coach McDermott and General Manager Brandon Bean have their work cut out for them, but I think the team is moving forward in a really nice direction. We have amazing talent at every position, but we have to stay healthy, which has been the biggest challenge the past two seasons.
Down the stretch between injuries and all the other adversity surrounding this team this year we did play better complimentary football and it showed. Still got to give this team credit. If Jim Kelly, Thruman Thomas, Andre Reed, Bruce Smith and Steve Tasker know anything about adversity in the game of football it is these men. They know… This team also has its own unique taste to add to the adversity this franchise has faced. All too well and it tastes like Bantha Poohdo… We still have gap problems down the board due to injuries, an undersized line backing core, and not being able to get a steady pass rush. It just exposes our zone too much. We must get better at third and longs. This killed us this year. At the beginning of the year we made tackles behind the line of scrimmage. The last ten weeks or so I saw guys straight-up miss because they got their head down or take bad angles and it’s the same guys over and over. One cannot tackle what they cannot see. I see us making more changes on Defense. I think we really need to add something at the linebacker positon. The depth just isn’t there yet, but the young guys did step up, and the unit as a whole looks promising.
We need to take a step back with our offense and look how we ran the ball in those last six games of the 2022 and the 2023 season. As stated above, we bulked up at the skill position and we should go back to that. We can run the spread with four and five wide outs, who says that must be wide receivers? Put two tight ends there instead and run out of it. Run quick hitters out of that. We can still run our pass attack in this formation and it will make defenses go mad trying to get the right matchups to stop it. Plus, you have more blocking for the Alien runs. I don’t know what we are going to do at running back to back up Cook, but we need a bruiser. Perhaps resign Harris or if Hines is coming back, implement more of him in the game plan. Cook is great but it would be great to have a solid second runner in there that can drop a shoulder and get three yards.
Josh Allen is a goddamn Alien, but he cannot do it all by himself, all of the time. He is over 90% of our total offense. We need to take some pressure off this guy with a running game. He will still get his 300 yards and multiple touchdowns, but we have to use him smarter. This will be year seven and we cannot have our #1 guy taking all those bumps all of the time. We cannot have Allen running around the field and play backyard hero-ball all of the time with the expectation that is how we have to play to win. Maybe year one, two and three, but now in year seven? I felt like we relied too much on junk plays this year, again, to sustain our offensive output.
Next Season we play another first place schedule, the NFC West, plus the Detroit Lions, likely to be another Thanksgiving game, I am guessing. It’s a decent schedule and someone has to go backward. I do not think it will be us. We have been in the mix five years in a row now. I think we have learned a thing or two, or five. We have grown up a lot from these past seasons. I am predicting Josh, ‘the Alien,’ Allen is going to be the NFL MVP next year. I am going to put a few dollars on that once I find a good bet. I think the Bills lose maybe three or four games and the road to the Super Bowl will go through Buffalo. Our road schedule could be a tough one in 2024 going by just what I see on the surface. Some teams will improve while others are in full rebuild, so we will have to see how the offseason plays out and the draft. The draft now is more important than it has ever been. Young guys are coming into the league and making more an impact than they have ever before. The Bills have the 28th overall pick in the first round, and nine total draft picks. We have no third round pick but have two fifth rounders and three sixth round draft picks. At a glance we need wide receivers, defensive linemen and help at the secondary positions. We play a lot of our tougher opponents at home, including the 49ers. Home field advantage is a real thing, but we were so flat in the divisional game it didn’t matter. If we do learn, grow, get healthy, adjust, and ad to what we already have then we’ll be back playing meaningful games in mid to late January again. Our defense has been and still is a bend but don’t break defense and they played like it most of this year except for this last game and a handful of others. The Buffalo Bills lost six games in the regular season this year. Josh Allen left the field leading or tied in four of them. Now you can say our whole team, surrounding area, people, and culture is bend but don’t break and this will not break us.