Quote:
Originally Posted by kccrow
Serious question. Do you think the Bills are going to let KC control the middle of the field and gouge them in the running game again by keeping those safeties deep for 60 minutes? If the Bills don't change what they did last time, it's going to be the same game all over again. They almost have to gamble on taking away the short stuff at the risk of Hill and Hardman torching them deep. And if they do that, it's a difficult task. What is Buffalo's play here?
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I'm not sure. McDermott said as much they allowed the Chiefs to run because they didn't think they would allow 245 yards rushing and they felt they had to 'pick their poison' because you can't stop everything. To a degree it worked decently well...the Bills held them to 26 points and were in a 1 score game in the middle of the 4th quarter, even though it never really felt the Bills were in the game.
I think they
may start out that way again because they have been a lot better against the run(and on defense in general) in the 2nd half of the season, and even in the playoffs. The numbers look bad against the Colts, but they held Indy to under 3 YPC through 3 quarters until they went up 14 in the 4th and figured the Colts would abandon the run and start throwing every play. They didn't and they allowed 3 big runs that boosted their average. Against the Ravens, their back up QB had 3 runs for 32 yards that really boosted their average in what amounted to garbage time, otherwise the Bills held the Ravens to 118 yards and around a 4.0 or 4.1 YPC average which is outstanding against them. The Bills allow far too much when they are up by 2 scores late on defense and play much too soft for my liking.
I felt the Bills played too passively and gave Mahomes way too much respect by almost never blitzing until late in the game and that actually started working a little bit, especially against the run. In fact after that game the Bills became a much more aggressive team the rest of the year, blitzing far more than they ever did under Frazier.
My preference would be for the Bills to come after Mahomes up the middle and try and contain his escape lanes to the outside like they did against Jackson. Maybe show a lot of simulated pressures and have guys drop out. Bills are a very good pressure team in that they force the ball to come out quick a lot of times even tho they don't get a ton of sacks(15th in sacks with 38) and they can scheme up free runners by setting up overload blitzes where the team won't have enough people on 1 side to block everyone coming, even tho they only might be rushing 4 or 5. Ideally with the Bills, what they want to do is to use simulated pressure to confuse or overload the protection schemes and force the ball out quickly so the D can then keep everything in front of them and rally to the ball to keep it to a short gain.
If we are going to go down, then go down trying to make something happen instead of sitting back passively. That isn't going to work. It also isn't going to work if you come after him every time either, they need to really mix things up from series to series and even from down to down on the same series.
It is a really tough challenge no doubt. I think the Bills probably see if they shored up their run defense enough to play the way the wanted to in the first game more effectively and if not they probably switch to something else pretty early, maybe after the first 2 drives or so.