Now I keep hearing people say that Bell and Clark are undersized, and can just be rammed over by heavy linemen. But I found myself wondering…….why didn’t the Eagles do it if that was the case? Eagles have the best offensive line in the NFL. Anything the Bills O-Line can do, I’m pretty sure the Eagles can do as well. Bell and Clark played linebacker vs the Eagles too.
Now I’m in agreeance with the majority that they ran right at Bell and Clark the whole game. Thinking if their O-Line put against our small linebackers, they’ll win that matchup. But why didn’t the other teams do that if the Bills did it? I don’t it’s as simple as power. The Eagles have as much power as the Bills probably more, but they always play the Bills well. The Eagles seem to always struggle against the Cowboys. Conversely, Seattle isn’t a team we associate with power but they own the Eagles. But the Cowboys in the last 2 contests against the Seahawks have scored on 70% of their possessions. So we play Seattle and the Eagles well, and seem to always struggle against the Bills. Eagles play the Bills well (won their last 2 against them), but don’t play well against the Cowboys and Seahawks. What gives here?? Ultimate randomness?
2. Donovan Wilson
Film also showed Donovan Wilson didn’t do his job many times. Many times Cooks was his responsibility, but he was not in position to make the tackle. It looked like he was caught inside much of the time while Cooks ran outside. Was his mind thinking Allen instead? I think Dan Quinn needs to really put him in the corner this week, because you can’t let Cooks get outside so easily, untouched. These are plays that can be made if he sets his mind straight on what he needed to do.
But either way, their safety Rapp did a far better job on Pollard than Wilson did on Cooks. I don’t think it’s a physical thing. He was just on top of the play. We didn’t account for his late rotation on that 2nd and 1 screw up near the 11 yard line. That was a lowkey huge play in the game.
3. Penalties
I think we helped them tremendously by shooting ourselves in the foot with those 3 personal foul penalties. Every TD they scored to get to their first 21 points were off of personal foul penalties. Every personal foul penalty we commit, we have to defend the run for an additional 10 more plays. That plays into what we don’t wanna do, and what Buffalo wants to do. What Buffalo doesn’t wanna do is have to pass because they fear our pass rush. They know all about the great Parsons. Parsons was involved in 6 out of 49 of Buffalo’s run plays. So we helped make the game way easier for them. Not to mention, that carries over to the 2nd half. Buffalo is gonna call more run plays if the score is 21-3, so that’s even more plays to defend in the 2nd half. You can’t just reset in the 2nd half.
4. Final synopsis
I think it’s a different game without the personal fouls. Without those personal fouls, their drives are shorter. Our offense gets more chances in the first half. It’s possible they get an additional drive that they might have scored on without those fouls, but our offense was also moving on 2 out of 3 of our first drives. Stalled on the holding call on Tyler Smith, Steele giving up the inside to Rousseau, and Rapp’s late rotation stop on Pollard on 2nd and 1. But I thought both our offenses were moving. Just theirs got 2nd life while ours got stopped by a couple of bad plays in succession.
Anyways, I’m ready to move on to Miami now. I don’t think Buffalo is clearly superior to the Cowboys. They just did their homework better, and the Buffalo team we saw all year sure didn’t look like the Buffalo team of last Sunday. I saw nearly every game they played. I’ve never seen them look like this. They’re not gonna get away with Josh Allen passing for 94 yards and winning by 3 TDs again. That’s not a sustainable recipe. They just wanted to get this win to stay alive, call it a day, and go from there. James Cook will go back down to Allen’s left stool pretty soon. He’s not Barry Sanders.
They are 6-1 at home, and 2-4 on the road. We are the same team. We both play better at home. We both play worse on the road. No surprise at the final outcome. At home with our huge Jumbotron we challenge that fumble. And with our huge crowd advantage, we dominate 3rd down on defense and weaken their ability to call themselves out of their original plays. Because I feel like Dak could’ve called himself out of that play on 2nd and 1 easily at home – even Orlovsky said as much.
