I should have seen it coming. We all should have seen it coming. The Buffalo Bills were fool’s gold at 5-2, just as they were when they started that way before finishing 7-9 in 2008, and just as they were when they finished 6-10 despite a 5-2 start in 2011.
The Bills have lost back-to-back games by a combined score of 81-31 to fall back to 5-4. Their next three games come on the road against the tough Los Angeles Chargers, on the road again against the tougher Kansas City Chiefs and at home but against the even tougher New England Patriots. It’s probably fair to wonder if the Bills will even have a .500 record by the time the season is three-quarters complete following Week 13.
And I could have written all of that before Buffalo benched athletically marvelous, but inconsistent quarterback Tyrod Taylor for a rookie fifth-round pick who completed only 54.4 percent of his passes and posted a 75.6 passer rating in the preseason and has thrown just 10 regular-season passes in garbage time against a prevent defense.
Going to Nathan Peterman right now reeks of panic, but the Bills know they’re on the ropes. The Pats are again pulling away in the AFC East, and it’ll be extremely difficult for Buffalo to hold off the Baltimore Ravens and Oakland Raiders for that last wild-card spot.
The Bills might not be smart enough to realize Peterman won’t succeed, but they are smart enough to know their hot start wasn’t sustainable. They were paper tigers, with a record that was inflated by the fact they committed just three turnovers and generated 17 takeaways during the first seven weeks of their season.
No team can keep that up. You can’t rely on takeaways like that (they were on pace for 39, which would have been the highest mark in the NFL since 2012) and you can’t rely on that low a turnover rate (they were on pace for just seven, which would have been a record low).
Their turnover margin would have been the second-highest in NFL history.
So, of course, the Bills have come crashing back to earth. A team that was defying expectations and playing well above its head stopped getting bounces and got exposed in back-to-back weeks, and that exposure should only be exacerbated by the upcoming schedule.
We all wanted to believe this year was different from ’08 and ’11, and that the poor Bills were finally ready to break out of a playoff drought that has spanned the entirety of the 21st century. But we should have known better. We should have seen it coming.
