When Josh Allen was asked to process his emotions Monday night — after a 24-22 home loss to the Denver Broncos that was a sprawling organizational debacle — he stared down at the microphone planted in front of him. After a long pause through a thousand-yard stare, the Buffalo Bills quarterback settled on a wounded assessment connecting him to many of his lowest places.
“It sucks,” he said.
It’s a phrase Allen uses a lot, efficiently encapsulating a multitude of deflating moments in his career. It sucked in September when he turned the ball over four times in a loss to the New York Jets. It sucked in 2019 after a late-December loss to the New England Patriots. It sucked when he got a false positive on a COVID-19 test in August of 2020. And it really sucked in 2018 when controversial tweets from his teenage years surfaced before the NFL Draft.
But there was something about Monday night’s embarrassing loss, which precipitated the firing of offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey on Tuesday, that felt familiar in Allen’s assessment. Maybe it was the shock of the moment or Allen’s brief, dead-air answers. Or perhaps it was the lingering feeling that something underneath the Bills, something hard to get at, remains broken.
It has been 661 days since the Bills suffered a 13-second collapse against the Kansas City Chiefs in the divisional round of the playoffs. It was an infamous moment in Buffalo history that saw Patrick Mahomes march the Chiefs to a game-tying field goal despite getting the ball with only 13 seconds left in regulation. Kansas City tied the game on that kick, then scored a game-ending touchdown in the first possession of overtime.
“It sucks the way it happened,” Allen said afterward.
More than 21 months later, on a night the Bills turned the ball over repeatedly and committed some costly penalties that should be laid at the feet of the coaching staff, it’s back to that square one assessment. But this recognizable valley comes with an even more…
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Publish date : 2023-11-15 01:04:32
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