It was highly anticipated, and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be exceptionally highly rated. Two high-powered offensive juggernauts, each already well assured of the NFL post-season, coming face-to-face with a run that should they succeed will be historic. For teams that have a combined Super Bowl win total of zero–and a combined total of 126 seasons between even an old-school league title–this was more than just another late window late season game.
And the Buffalo Bills and homestanding Detroit Lions did not disappoint, as CBS SPORTS’ Bryan DeArdo observed yesterday evening:
In a game that was billed as a possible Super Bowl preview, the Buffalo Bills led from start to finish while receiving another MVP-caliber effort from quarterback Josh Allen. Allen tallied 430 yards and four total touchdowns in leading Buffalo to a 48-42 win in Motown.
Allen ran for two touchdowns in the first half as the Lions scored touchdowns on each of their first three possessions. Ahead 21-14 at halftime, the Bills offense continued to roll in the second half as the visiting team took a 38-21 lead early in the fourth quarter. But the Lions never quit, as Jared Goff led a late touchdown drive that briefly gave Detroit a glimmer of hope. That hope, however, was quickly extinguished after Buffalo recovered the ensuing onside kick.
Allen was the star, but he was aided all day by running backs James Cook, Ray Davis and Ty Johnson, who combined to amass a whopping 285 yards and three touchdowns. For the Lions, Goff led offense on six scoring drives during the game’s final three quarters. Goff threw for 494 yards and five touchdowns, but he received little help from a running game that gained just 48 yards that included just seven yards in the second half.
You did read correctly that Detroit indeed tried an onside kick after narrowing their deficit to within one score late in the game, something that Buffalo was forced to attempt themselves a week earlier by necessity in a similarly high-scoring shootout against the surging Rams in Los Angeles. Tom Brady, in arguably his strongest moment in his still brief career as a FOX NFL analyst, chided Buffalo for timeout mismanagement that effectively forced the Bills into that strategy, which thanks to the revised rules instituted this season now can no longer be a surprise to a receiving team. The success rate is down to below 10 per cent, and the Bills were part of that growing majority of failures. One can only imagine the renewed faith in karma that Sean McDermott must have felt on his sideline.
The ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE’s Sal Maiorana channeled the sense of disbelief that Bills Mafia were likely feeling when the ever aggressive Detroit coach Dan Campbell decided to roll the dice hoping for boxcars:
The Lions eventually got within 38-28 as (Amon-Ra) St. Brown caught a 66-yard TD and Jahmyr Gibbs a 12-yarder, but in a simply dumbfounding decision, they tried an onside kick after the Gibbs TD and Mack Hollins fielded it with a great leaping catch and raced 38 yards to the 5, from where Allen threw a TD pass to Ray Davis on the next play.
As for that decision, Campbell said, “I just thought we’d get the possession. I thought we were going to get that ball. Hollins made a heck of a play on it. And, you know, obviously, now sitting here hindsight after them taking it down to the three-yard line, yeah, I wish I wouldn’t have done that, but is what it is.”
But as the veteran Bills reporter Maiorana effused, what it is was also pretty darn special:
There was never a doubt that this was going to be a track meet, and that’s what it was as the team combined for 1,080 yards of offense and 90 points, the highest in both categories in any game in the NFL this season. This just one week after the Bills played the previous highest-scoring game, their 44-42 Bills loss to the Rams.
Buffalo rolled up 559 yards of total offense, and by topping 30 points for the eighth straight game, it became just the fifth team in NFL history to do that within a season, and the first since the Peyton Manning Denver Broncos in 2013. And this was also just the third time in team history (1990 and 2021) that the Bills have surpassed 40 in back-to-back games.
Even THE DETROIT FREE PRESS’ Marlowe Alter and a colleague chose to emphasize superlatives despite the end result:
“It’s a clinic right now,” CBS commentator Tony Romo said after Cook’s touchdown.
Allen was 14 of 19 for 254 passing yards in the first half.
Tim Patrick’s 12-yard touchdown after a Jared Goff scramble had brought the Lions within 14-7 at 13:36 of the second quarter.
The Lions then ran a trick play on their next possession with Goff tossing to offensive tackle Dan Skipper for a 9-yard catch-and-run touchdown to bring the Lions back within a touchdown, 21-14 at 3:01 left in the half.
That prompted Free Press longtime Lions beat writer Dave Birkett to tweet: “This is gonna make a hell of a Super Bowl.”
Of course, we’re still a long ways from Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans on Feb. 9.
Perhaps. And with defenses this porous, there’s ample reason to be skeptical that at least one of these teams might trip up at some point in January.
But boy oh boy, if they do manage to give us the first Super Bowl in a quarter-century to pit two combantants without a single prior Super Bowl win between team (that St. Louis Rams-Tennessee Titans matchup that ended the 1999 season actually turned out to pretty dramatic), and anything close to the octane we saw yesterday, I suspect Brady and his FOX Sports colleagues are already salivating at the possiblities of record viewership and engagement it could produce.
And if one of those coaches should somehow screw up again, you best believe he’ll let them and hundreds of millions of viewers know it.
Courage…