Buffalo Rumblings
It’s not just the defense that can nickel and dime an opponent
When looking at the season in totality, the Buffalo Bills have been split pretty much evenly between passing (265 attempts) and rushing (245 attempts). Against the Miami Dolphins in Week 9, the Bills didn’t follow that script, opting for 39 passes to 19 rushes.
It sounds like Buffalo aired it out, doesn’t it? That’s not exactly true. Let’s take a look at how the short passing game was the key to success.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so this next thing is going to save me a lot of typing.
Alright, alright, I should expend some words about the graphic. There are six passes that traveled 10 yards or more. There were nine at or behind the line of scrimmage. It’s notable that there is an incredibly even distribution between left, center, and right side of the field.
Sure, the graphic makes this pretty obvious for the most recent game, but that doesn’t mean this is unusual. To do that, we’d need to compare this performance to others — which is something we can easily do.
Against the Dolphins in Week 9, Josh Allen had 6.02 yards per attempt, and 9.4 yards per completion. Turning to Next Gen Stats, Allen had 3.7 intended air yards — which was tied for lowest in the league for Week 9. Allen also had 2.2 average completed air yards, which was solo for lowest in the league for the week.
Allen’s numbers for the years provide some contrast as well. In 2024, Allen is averaging 7.6 yards per attempt and 11.9 yard per completion, both drastically higher than his Week 9 performance. For intended air yards or IAY, the difference is even more stark with Allen averaging 7.7 IAY for the season. That’s middle of the pack for the league. His completed air yards (CAY) for the year sit at 4.9, which is low-average.
Let’s circle back to intended air yards, as this measures the vertical distance of a pass downfield on all attempts and then averaged out. Against the Dolphins in Week 9, Allen was less than half of his season average. Even crazier is that the season average I keep mentioning includes the same Miami game.
There’s always a lot of consternation amongst fans believing that coaches can’t adjust and change things up. Against the Dolphins in Week 2, Allen was good for 7.6 IAY and 4 CAY, which suggests that the plan was to air it out but incompletions skewed hard toward the longer passes. That tracks.
You also may notice that Allen only attempted 19 passes, less than half his Week 9 total. The more lopsided score in that contest likely played a part but was not the only reason for this difference. Just for fun, let’s take a look at the pass-distribution chart from last year’s game against the...
