The Bills are battle-tested and better for it AlbertBreer on a Week 4 win that felt like a playoff game
The Bills had weathered a keyed-up M&T Bank Stadium crowd, another virtuoso effort from Lamar Jackson, a Ravens defense that showed signs of coming alive and monsoon conditions. The ball sat on the Baltimore 11, with John Harbaugh having burned his second timeout, first-and-10 coming and Josh Allen convening with Sean McDermott.
Yet, through the whole thing, Allen kept his head about him, so much so that he was taking the lead on clock management at the wire. And McDermott was happy to cede it to him. We’ve got four weeks under our belts , and a lot to chew on after a fourth straight Sunday of wildly entertaining football. Inside the MMQB column, you’ll find …• More news on the Tua Tagovailoa/concussion front to top the Ten Takeaways.But we’re starting with the Bills, who looked like world beaters through two weeks, then had six quarters of uneven football to fight past Sunday.
And all that’s probably why Allen was unshaken under some challenging psychological circumstances that faced the Bills on Sunday afternoon in soggy Baltimore. “If I knew the exact reason [for it], I’d be paid a lot more money to coach,” McDermott said with a laugh. “If I knew it’d happen, I would’ve addressed it ahead of time. I thought we were ready, that we had gotten back. I just think Baltimore’s a good football team. They were being aggressive, and we weren’t executing. We weren’t playing our style of football. We probably just needed to settle down more than anything.
A field goal would have given his team the lead. But a field goal, he figured, might not be good enough with Allen on the other side. “I felt like [going for it] gave us the best chance to win the game,” Harbaugh reported afterward. And that Harbaugh thought that, of course, didn’t surprise McDermott much, with the two having spent nine years together as assistants in Philadelphia. “John’s an aggressive head coach, and he has a lot of confidence in his players,” McDermott said.
From there, there was the calculated third-down, downfield gamble to Knox, and the great escape and fastball down the sideline to Shakir and, finally, just as important, this more mature version of Allen’s game-managing the Bills to a win as the clock ticked down.
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