Sean McDermott was a defensive quality control coach on Andy Reid's staff in Philadelphia in 2003, when the Eagles opened the season with back-to-back losses to Tampa Bay and New England, then boarded a turbulent flight to Buffalo, where they turned their season around.
The Eagles defeated the Bills and won 12 of their final 14 regular season games to clinch the NFC East title, the No. 1 seed in the conference and advanced to the NFC championship game.
The fulcrum on which their fortunes turned was clear.
“We were struggling earlier in the year then and we came and took this flight,” McDermott said. “It got pretty touch and go. But I felt like we came up here and won that game and we had a bit of a different course of the year from there. So it’s just things that I think bring us closer together, they’re shared experiences really that can do that, that can galvanize the team and just bring it that much closer together. It just comes in different forms, probably every season.”
These moments are often apparent in retrospect.
In 2020, after the Bills lost on the last-second “Hail Murray” in Arizona, they won their final six games of the regular season to clinch the AFC East title and advanced to the AFC championship game.
This season, after back-to-back losses to New England and Tampa Bay, coincidentally, the Bills won their final four games against Carolina, New England, Atlanta and the New York Jets to repeat as division champions and set up a first-round playoff game against the Patriots on Saturday night in Orchard Park.
The Bills’ fortunes turned on Dec. 12 in Tampa.
After a strange and embarrassing 14-10 home loss to New England the previous week on "Monday Night Football," in which the Patriots attempted only three passes because of intense wind, the Bills tried to flip the script a week later on the road and didn’t hand the ball off to a running back in the first half against the Buccaneers. Buffalo trailed the defending Super Bowl champions by 21 points at halftime. But the Bills incorporated a more balanced attack in the second half and rallied to tie the score before losing 33-27 in overtime, dropping their record to 7-6.
“They beat us at home, we beat them at [their] home. It's a playoff game, Buffalo, New York, on Saturday night,” Bills safety Jordan Poyer said. “I mean, it's just really everything you asked for in a football game, football season, this type of game right here.”
“We had a good talk at halftime. Guys responded well. I know the score is what the score was,” quarterback Josh Allen said before hobbling out of the stadium with a walking boot on his sprained left foot. “But I'm (darn) proud of our team and how we fought in that second half and that's who we are. That's the team I've grown to love and to know really. Guys that are just resilient guys that want to fight for each other.”
Bills center Mitch Morse was emboldened by the performance.
“Every loss is tough, but the resiliency of this team is pretty amazing,” Morse said after the game. “We also know that there's a sense of urgency, like every week, but we're really in crunch time here. We know what we got but we have to put something together if we want to keep taking steps to achieve our ultimate goal.”
Bills safety Jordan Poyer echoed those comments.
“There are no moral victories in this league,” Poyer said that day in Tampa. “A loss is a loss and it's tough. But the resilience we had to stay in the game and continue to take one play at a time and fight back, it says a lot about guys in the locker room. Yeah, tough loss. But we can build some momentum off of how we played in the second half and carry it over into next week.”
McDermott said his players showed “an incredible amount of heart and guts” and suggested that fans watching at home could feel the passion through their TVs.
“I know we could feel it on the sideline,” McDermott said. “It was really fun to watch. And that’s how the Buffalo Bills play.”
The coach changed the following Wednesday’s practice to a walkthrough, going lighter on his group, at least physically.
Mentally, they locked in.
“The time is now …” left tackle Dion Dawkins said. “We understand that it’s time to punch that ticket. And we have our game faces on.”
Wide receiver Gabriel Davis was in the midst of catching four touchdowns in three games.
“You have to understand what you did right, and then you have to know that now that’s your standard,” Davis said. “To come out in the second half and do what we did was special, and I’m proud of all the guys for stepping up to the plate and taking on the adversity.”
The Bills snapped their two-game skid – their first back-to-back losses since Weeks 5 and 6 of last season – with a 31-14 home victory in a “get-right game” against Carolina.
“Confidence is one (heck) of a drug in the NFL,” safety Micah Hyde said after thumping the Panthers.
Then the Bills upended the Patriots, 33-21, taking control of the division in the rematch in New England.
Buffalo clinched its second consecutive AFC East title – a feat it hadn’t accomplished since the 1990 and ’91 seasons – with decisive home victories against the Falcons and Jets.
Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen talks with reporters about the Bills' AFC East-clinching victory over the New York Jets.
“I feel like that Tampa Bay game kind of got us back to where we needed to go, as far as having confidence, playing free, and playing like we know what we can play,” wide receiver Stefon Diggs said in late December. “Having confidence out there, and when things don’t go right, let’s make it right. Let’s figure it out. Good things are gonna happen, bad things are gonna happen. Don’t dwell on the bad, let’s keep rolling, keep rolling with the punches. And I feel like that’s the kind of team we had last year.”
Diggs said this season’s resurgence coincided with the Bills “letting the players play, putting the ball in your playmakers’ hands, all of us, and you just let us make it happen. Take the pressure off the coaches. It’s the Joes, not the Xs and Os.”
The Bills have put greater pressure on opposing quarterbacks while taking some off their own as Allen has not been sacked in the last three games and the running game has blossomed.
Buffalo’s defense ranked 26th in the NFL with 23 sacks after the loss in Tampa, and McDermott bemoaned the lack of pressure, especially from the front four, heading into the next week’s game against Carolina.
The Bills finished with 42 sacks, which ranked 11th in the league.
That’s 19 sacks in four games, including the nine-sack outburst against the Jets, the most in a game in McDermott’s five seasons as coach.
Defensive tackle Ed Oliver has been a big part of the resurgence. The ninth overall pick in 2019 has 3½ sacks in the last three games.
Oliver and fellow defensive tackle Harrison Phillips celebrated at the podium after the Jets game after learning the Bills’ defense finished the season No. 1 in total yards, passing yards and points allowed.
The Bills also pressured opposing quarterbacks on 29.1% of dropbacks this season, which ranks No. 1 in the NFL. The statistic takes hurries, knockdowns and sacks into account.
“We wanted to finish off this season and try to earn that No. 1 defense in the NFL,” Phillips said “So all of the guys, we trust one another, all 11 of us out there. We’ll defend a blade of grass.”
While Allen didn’t miss a game because of his sprained foot, the Bills also appear to have changed their offensive approach over the last month, lightening the load on their franchise quarterback by relying more on Devin Singletary and a traditional running game down the stretch.
Singletary had 547 rushing yards and two touchdowns on 112 carries through the first 13 games of the season, an average of 8.6 carries and 42 rushing yards per game.
In the last four games, his workload more than doubled and his production soared.
Singletary has 323 rushing yards and five touchdowns on 76 carries, as well as a receiving score, during the Bills’ four-game winning streak. He has averaged 19 carries and 81 rushing yards per game.
“For me, it was just, 'Make something happen when I get an opportunity – whatever it may be,’” Singletary said of turning a short catch into an 11-yard gain on the Bills’ second play from scrimmage in New England.
Singletary carried Patriots safety Kyle Dugger 8 yards for a first down, knocking linebacker Dont’a Hightower on his backside along the way.
The Bills’ running back, like his teammates, wasn’t going down without a fight.
Just like in their season-defining second-half comeback in Tampa.
“There’s many teams that would have folded in that position,” Allen said after rallying the Bills from 21 points down but losing in overtime to the Bucs. “We’ve got guys that want to win. We want to be great. And with how we responded that second half, that’s the team that we’ve got to be going forward. We understand that. And we know that. And I don’t expect anything else.”
