It was the fourth quarter of the Bills’ wild-card playoff game against the Dolphins, and the stakes couldn’t have been much higher. Miami had cut the Bills’ lead to 34–31, there were seven minutes left, and Josh Allen and his offense were facing third-and-1 at their own 19-yard line.
Offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey called a levels concept, giving Allen options underneath to take easy money and move the sticks. The problem, after the snap, was that the Miami defense was playing low, leaving extra defenders closer to the line to blanket Stefon Diggs, Dawson Knox and Devin Singletary, while compromising the deeper parts of the field (with no safety help) to try to influence Allen to make a tougher throw.
Allen, indeed, let one rip.
But the story here isn’t that Allen put the ball downfield. It’s the situation in which he chose to pull the trigger, and where he was going with the ball—to rookie fifth-rounder Khalil Shakir. With all that was on the line, both personally, and for his team, Allen threw it maybe 50 yards in the air, just over Miami corner Kader Kohou and into Shakir’s outstretched hands.
The 31-yard hookup put the ball at midfield and, ultimately, gave the Dolphins worse field position and less time for their final drive, which would die out back around midfield. And it showed something bigger and broader, too—something proven earlier in the game with a 54-yard bomb to Shakir just before the half that wound up being overturned and even a 12-yard throw to undrafted tight end Quintin Morris to spark a third-quarter scoring drive.
Allen trusts these guys, and he trusts them because all of the little things he does to make sure they’ll be ready—stuff like identifying the new players in training camp and making sure they get reps with him, even if they aren’t first-teamers yet, so he can learn their body movements and how they react to a defense, and build chemistry with them. He also works to trust them because, well, he knows he’s going to have to.
This is a new phase of the Allen era in Buffalo, one marked over the last couple of weeks by calculated inactivity in a marketplace the Bills have made their playground in recent years.
That the Bills have been so quiet isn’t, by the way, any indictment of where they are. It’s an endorsement, in fact, of the core they’ve now paid and are invested in. No one more so than Allen, who’ll have to shoulder a heavier load with the team’s financial ledger setting up the way it does and, more often, rely on a guy he’s helping to bring along, like Shakir, rather than the kind he could lean on, and the Bills could afford, in the past.
“Josh welcomes that,” Bills GM Brandon Beane said Friday afternoon. “He’s going to be able to help make those guys better and teach them the way to go and how to be a pro, and then what he’s going to demand out of each one of them, like you would expect a veteran quarterback to do. That just naturally happens over time. … Those guys are kids coming in, and they’re looking up to Josh Allen. .
“If he says, , that’s what they’re gonna do. That naturally is happening.”
And for the Bills to win a championship, or championships, in the coming years, it’ll have to.
This is the challenge the Chiefs surmounted last year, in trading Tyreek Hill and having nine of their 10 draft picks active for all three of their playoff games (four started in the Super Bowl). It’s the challenge that’ll soon be facing the Bengals, Chargers and Eagles, too.
It’s where, as an organization, you want to be five years after drafting a quarterback.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
