Buffalo Bills vs. Houston Texans 🚨 TNF Instant Reaction 👀

Buffalo Bills vs. Houston Texans 🚨 TNF Instant Reaction 👀

Are we live? Let’s do it. Instant reaction. Houston Texans getting the win over the Buffalo Bills 23-9. We were just over on the couches with the full watch along with the members. Now we’re at the desk. And now at the desk for the instant reaction. Man, the Texans moved to 6 and5. Buffalo now 7 and3. Massive implications in this game. What a win for the Texans in their defense who made stop after stop after stop in this game. Yeah, they did. I mean, you’ve got this, it’s a strange combination because Houston’s defense played spectacularly. They made a bunch of incredible plays, you know, right down to the the end there with uh uh Will Anderson, you know, batting down a pass that could have gone for a significant game and maybe really set Buffalo up. But we have to at least start working on well, how much of that is how much weight do you give to the Houston defense versus how much weight 67 for Josh Allen? Stop it. stop for Josh Allen. I expect this from my kids. I don’t expect it from you. It was there with the thing. I couldn’t I couldn’t help it. Um Allen, you know, the turnovers were one thing, but also but Allen just not behaving well under pressure. His behavior in the pocket was erratic and bad for a lot of it. Like that’ll be really interesting to check, you know, when PFF does their grading. How many of those sacks are they going to charge directly to Allen? But I don’t think there’s I don’t think there’s many, but I think I mean there’s at least a couple. and how he was behaving in that pocket was pretty rough. It’s more so I think the um like uh Tim Settle wins right off the snap. Yeah, not that one, but like there was one still ran right into him. I Josh Allen’s I’m calling it his pocket compass is off in this game. The compass is off. He doesn’t know where North is. He’s turning left when he’s supposed to turn right. He’s not an ambi turner. Like everything’s off on Josh Allen right now in the pocket. And I think and I don’t know, listen, let’s just start with this. Full credit to the Houston Texans, their defense. What happens when you play a great defense and you have the ability to create pressure on any given snap like Houston does, it turns into what Josh Allen started doing, right? It’s like if the first read wasn’t there, and let’s face it, Josh Allen doesn’t have a whole lot of first read. It’s certainly not outside the numbers type of winners. Yeah. The way their receiving core is, especially not against this secondary when the first read wasn’t there, he’s dropping his eyes. He was dropping his eyes a lot. And look, Josh Allen’s gone away with that throughout his career. You could drop your eyes, you could scramble around, but this is an athletic defense. I don’t think there’s any trust in his receivers that if the first read isn’t there, who am I throwing it up to? Who am I given a chance to make a play? So Josh Allen says, “I’m going to make a play.” And he’s running around in circles taking an 18 yardd sack. And and that’s what Houston’s defense did to him. And then Allen, I think, just continued to get worse and worse. every time he was trying to maneuver around the pocket, he was just making it just not saving the quick pressure that was coming after him. I mean, I think this is kind of the problem of this receiving core that’s built with all these, you know, interior slot players. It’s like the problem with that is it takes way more time to sift through things reading over the middle of the field than it does to just go, I have a big receiver on the outside. I’m going to throw a one-on-one route. You know what I mean? You don’t have to think about that. You don’t have to take time to read the defense. you basically just have to verify that one defensive back is where you think he is and then you can let rip. Now, when you’ve got all these guys built to go over the middle, it’s like you need to sift through what you’re looking at after the play has started and the rush is bearing down on you. And I think he’s kind of he’s paralyzed with that. Like he’s not he was not willing to give these plays time. And you made the point at the end that big play they had in the final drive with the lateral, you know, the hook and ladder type of deal. And you were saying, well, the the line held up there. It did, but it’s also one of the few plays in the game where it was like a it’s a one-read play. Allen’s not reading anything out. He’s not waiting, you know, and sifting through and going through a progression. He’s just I know I need to hang on for a little bit to let this give it enough time for this guy to come underneath. But it’s he’s not, you know, this is a read here. I go one to two, three. He’s just like, I need to hang in for two and a half seconds so this guy can get far enough down the field, make his in cut, and then just let rip. That was the problem, I think, is that Allen was not willing to do that and read at the same time. He was only ever willing to do one or the other. Incredible overall performance by the Texans defense, though. And that the the hook and ladder, you know, that had a chance to be a legendary play for the Bills, saving their season, and it was a great play. Um it’s it’s so funny when you get into fourth and really long. 29 was it? when you get 27 like when you get into those situations it’s you’re almost in a bind as a defense because you know you got to play the sticks but you don’t want to give if you give up something short you know like 20 yards or whatever it’s like well you got to tackle you got nine yards to tackle them sometimes you don’t have enough people and there’s space and the Bills drew up just a beautiful play for that for that conversion looked like it may have saved the game for them put them yeah put them into scoring range they still had a couple timeouts it did temporarily it did and then the Will Anderson play that you mentioned It was like the Bills, their best play in this game was the swing screen. Swing screens to Ty Johnson and to Khal Shakir and then they faked it to Ty Johnson. They came back, they had a well set up screen to James Cook. They had a good play setup and Will Anderson jumps up, bats the pass and maybe saves the game for Houston. And again, that was the story of the game for me is like how many Texans defensive players made massive plays. Denil Hunter, Will Anderson made a bunch. uh secondary uh the um the almost picked six by Kaylin Bullock which you know bad read by Josh Allen right there threw it to El Shier and then Bulock catches the tip so the Texans defense just made a ton of huge plays but that Will Anderson batted pass really stands out to me that was huge I mean that’s a massive game that’s potentially a game-saving play for them I mean Buffalo you know for the third straight drive was driving needing a touchdown and this was the one where they couldn’t do anything but go for it every town. That was a play that at least was going to get significant positive yardage and maybe be a, you know, a complete uh scoring play. And Anderson, he got close to picking it off as well. Got up there, got his hands on it, stopped it being complete, and almost picked it off. I mean, look, Will Anderson was amazing in the game. Dell Hunter was amazing in the game. Um Tim Settle had a really good game. Some players on the back end as well. The Buffalo offensive line got really banged up over the course of this game. Spencer Brown looked like he was being held together by duct tape, eventually got taken out of the game. Uh Deion Dawkins went out of the game for a period, came back, they uh swapped around on the interior as well. I mean, this was the offensive line was in bits and Allen was not trusting anything that was happening around him and Houston’s defense took advantage of that. I mean, there were plays where Allen is like, I’m going to do what Josh Allen does. I’m gonna escape. I’m gonna run around. I’m gonna make a play. It’s like, you can’t outrun those guys. Dell Hunter and Will Anderson at a minimum are as fast as you are and they’re probably faster. You don’t you can’t do that against them. You might be able to do it against some other teams. You’re not going to get that done against Houston. There was um Buffalo’s defense actually did a really nice job, too. Um they were put in some awful situations. They had several three and outs four. Their red zone defense must have been pretty spectacular. Uh they were able to keep this close. And don’t forget, Bills scored a touchdown on a kickoff return for a touchdown. So, the offense really did not do well at all. You held a Josh Allen offense and and I bring up number of possessions a lot because if when you’re watching this game, it’s like, man, the Bills have another chance. Like, the the Texans had like a one minute drive in the fourth quarter after the Texans defense makes a big stop. Texans offense goes three and out and then the defense is right back out there again. And so, the Bills had 11 possessions and scored 12 points offensively. And that is an incredible defensive outing. It’s a lot like what Houston did against Seattle on Monday Night Football where they just kept giving their offense more opportunities and CJ Strad that night was unable to capitalize throwing picks and missing uh missing receivers down the field, but the Texans continued to give them opportunities. U this this Texans offense I I thought they did some nice things early. Um Davis Mills was okay. I they they just they were unable to get anything going in the second half. So there was just continuous pressure on their defense to keep making stops and you know they really did they kicked what just one field goal in the second half and that was it. But the defense was the story I think for Houston. The offense was good enough. Like it’s okay under Davis Mills. I don’t think it’s better than with CJ Stout under center. But I think Davis Mills has held it down well enough, you know, given the situations here. Yeah, their offense was okay. Um the the Buffalo’s defense between the 20s is pretty terrible, but in the red zone it was genuinely good. Um they were helped out a little bit by uh you know Higgins had a couple of plays where he couldn’t get his feet in on the sideline where he should have. One of them would have been a touchdown, right? One of them was just a good sideline play where he should have got both feet down. Um so that’s a couple of plays left on the table there. The uh the Texans offense was able to keep a couple of drives alive by Woody Marks just individually picking up first downs. Such great runs by him. blown up in the bank field twice on short yardage stuff and just powered through the contact for like significant yardage. I mean, the second one must have gained five yards after getting hit. The first one would have been, you know, three, four as well. So, those drives were kept alive by by individual players as much as anything. And I know, you know, just summing up this game, I know this is like the this is what like the hardcore fan generally comes away with. It’s like, why didn’t we run the ball? But uh and I’m usually not that guy, but even throughout the watch along, there was I think there was a rhythm that the Bills wanted to get should have tried to get back into which was getting under center, trying to play power football. And it’s not even that the Texans can’t stop that, right? They had that fourth and one they but they they just ran right up the gut and it got blown up. It’s not like their defensive tackles are bad, but if you’re choosing between let’s have Josh Allen who’s already feeling the rush, right? He’s not handling the rush well. The game’s getting out of hand for what we want it to be if you’re the Bills as far as the way Josh Allen’s reacting to pressure to drop back like 45 times. James Cook finishes with 17 carries. The first big one was a 45 yarder on third and one that he takes to the house. It just felt like they could have slowed things down a little bit and done a little I usually don’t I’m not an advocate for, you know, running on first and second down more often. But in the Bills case, I felt like they could have gotten back under center, get the big boys out there and tried to play a little bit more power football because the speed of the Texans was killing them. And I also think that’s the way instead of letting Josh Allen try and be Superman in the pass game where he’s trying he’s pressing too much and things are melting down in this game, use him in the run game. If you want to keep him like if you want to keep Josh Allen being the reason that this offense is working, start running some zone read stuff with James Cook and Josh Allen. Go, you know, hand it off to James Cook most of the time, but if they’re if they’re not respecting it at all, let Josh Allen scamper around the corner for 15 yards on his own before they respect that part of the game. tap into that. I mean, even with getting stuffed a few times, James Cook still averaged almost seven yards per attempt on in this game and he he was averaging 10 at one point. Like, yeah, I agree. But plus, we were sort of searching around for like who are the outside threats for this team that’s been constructed out of slot receivers and slot receivers only. And then right at the end, it’s like, oh, look, actually, yeah, they’ve got Gabe Davis who they drag back into the on the roster, inches away from making like a really important deep catch. and also Shavers who’s been on the like maybe if you’re panicking with all these slot guys and not being able to, you know, make the right reads and stuff and can’t get can’t let anybody uncover. I mean, maybe just take a shot to a Shavers one-on-one in the outside. Man, what a massive game with playoff implications. You know, we we talked through a lot with our members on the watch along, but when you look at the Chiefs at five and five and the Ravens at five and five, the Steelers at six and four, this means a lot to those teams, right? the Steelers or Ravens. Whoever wins the North, the other team’s fighting for the wild card now. Uh Kansas City is going to play the Texans on Christmas night and they’re battling for wild card spots now. And so the fact that the Texans are kind of back in the race, the Bills come back down and I don’t know what happens to the Patriots chances of winning the division, but they must they must go through the roof now with just one more loss from Buffalo. Yeah. Two games back and they have half of the tiebreaker over them with the second game to come. So, this is a huge game for just the wild card implications, not just for the Bills and the Texans, but teams like the Chiefs, Steelers, Ravens, and everyone else who was in the hunt. Yeah. Right. Chargers, Jaguars. Like, it’s a it’s a big one. Like, the Texans are back. They’re back in this mix here at six and five. And they’ve done it these last few weeks without their starting quarterback. Yeah. I mean, the two biggest winners, um, Houston and New England from this week, like this game, uh, two biggest losers, Buffalo and maybe Kansas City in terms of what it does to them. Um, Baltimore, I think, still have the easiest route in terms of they can just win the division. Uh, but Kansas City, we’ve already talked about, they need some help from where they are. We still like their chances because they’re still the Chiefs and they can still go on a run and beat pretty much anybody. But you’re now a game back from Houston in that wild card spot who was themselves half a game back from Jacksonville. You know, it got tougher for Kansas City based off this result. People are asking if Harry took uh Kansas uh Houston. No, he did not. We all took Buffalo. I was the one who talked myself out of Houston last second. You, the Houston believer, bailed on it. All 0 and one. All right. Um, for fear of being too reactionary and shouty showy, um, I did talk a little bit on the on the broadcast tonight, I said, “Look, if if Allen’s down a little bit and Mahomes is down a little bit and Lamar’s down a little bit, and we don’t even know if some of those guys are going to be in the playoffs now, the way things are going.” Yeah. Wide open in the AFC. The Texans defense playing as well as any defense in the league. And we’ve got some of these the Broncos, the the Seahawks, the Rams playing some high-end defense. Could the Texans, this a year where teams like the Texans or the Broncos could go on a run to the Super Bowl in the AFC? Especially if the Texans get a little bit better on offense, get a little bit better play from Straoud, a little bit closer to his best from sophomore year and his, you know, best rookie season from his rookie season. Texans defense is fierce, man. Can they go on a little run here? I think it’s wide open. I think I I think any team pretty much now is I mean any team, you know, with in the running can go on a run and the Super Bowl is absolutely wide open to me this year. Uh according to PFF and team Orisa, the Texans jump up to a 55% chance of making the playoffs with this win. So huge. Yeah. And and this is where we are. I think there’s no teams running away with it. Certainly not in the AFC. Um the teams that are I mean New England might have a cakewalk to the number one seed. Yeah. Um Denver’s in a really strong position to win their division. So I don’t want to say nobody’s great. It’s just the teams that you don’t expect. Well, but the point is that are up there or they don’t have like the Patriots don’t necessarily have an elite defense. The Broncos don’t necessarily have an elite offense. So you see flaws even in the 8-2 teams or the nine and two teams at the top. Yeah. The point is the what these teams are going to be separated by fairly significant uh margins in terms of record by the end of the season. But like we’re looking at games even now where you know Kansas City is playing the 8-2 Colts and they’re favor that’s the thing like Denver I mean Kansas City was favored against Denver last week and Denver were eight and two are now nine and two. Right. Buffalo went into Denver for a playoff game. Is Buffalo favored? New England if they march the the end of their season, if they sweep all in front of them and they go into the playoffs with, you know, two losses or whatever and they end up having to go to whoever, like a Baltimore team with Lamar playing red-hot on a run or whatever, are they going to be favorites in that game? Like, this is the thing. There there are going to be teams with really good records and teams with not so good records, but a lot of the teams with not so good records have the legacy elite quarterbacks. And I think that’s why it’s wide open to me is that I think those are going to be picks. So, Houston right now in that 55% chance. They’re at Indie coming off their mini buy and then uh I keep saying they’re facing Kansas City on Christmas night. I don’t know why I’m saying that. It’s December 7th. Christmas night’s the Broncos for uh Kansas City. Uh Texans have Colts and Chiefs over these next couple weeks. Probably with CJ Strad back. So, they’re they have not faced Indie yet, by the way. Right. And so, the division’s not over either by in in the South, right? Colts have to play the Chiefs. They got the Texans twice. Houston has an opportunity to even come back in the AFC South. So, yeah, it’s uh it’s wide open here heading into Thanksgiving, right? They’re they have a I mean, they’re a little bit further back, but they have a similar task on their hands as Baltimore, which is, you know, you have two games against the team that’s ahead of you. So, probably have to sweep them at this point, but you have the opportunity. Sweep them and maybe like you also probably unlike uh well, I guess Cincinnati won one of those games, but you the third team can take a game off as well. Jacksonville is a part of this as well. So, Houston can beat Indianapolis twice and Jacksonville’s in the mix as well. So, yeah, it’s it it looks like it should have been a comfortable cruise to the division for the Colts, but actually because of the number of games they still have to play, it’s yeah, it’s still possible. Uh and then Buffalo, they’re going to Pittsburgh next week, man. Not an easy game going to Pittsburgh coming off their mini buy. Um and then Cincinnati and then that game at New England where they need to try to get back in it and get back at their division rival, New England Patriots. Well, they’ve already done this. They needed this was like um their Carolina game, right? Remember when they need they they lost back-to-back games from the the Patriots. They’re like, “Okay, that was a little weird, right? You turn the ball over a bunch. New England was kind of flawless in that game. May, you know, that just happens, right?” And then the next game, Atlanta showed up and absolutely throttled them. Yeah. I mean, that’s basically that’s what we’ve just seen here, except there was a win in the middle. Like, you lost to Miami, it was a weirdass game, and now here the Houston defense just murders you. Like, the third game is you need to show that this is not a terminal problem. Like, they they then went and destroyed the Panthers and it’s like, okay, fine. It was a twoame blip for whatever reason. I mean, they need to show up against Pittsburgh and are like, Josh Allen can’t take five sacks again. Like you need to go out there and show you’re not this critically flawed mess of a team. Eight sacks tonight. Eight with the Houston Texans. Eight sacks tonight. Um like Ben Solak had a stat halfway through the game which is now needs to be updated, but Allen had been sacked on 14% of his third down drop backs this year. Last year it was down at 4%. I mean the broadcast just kept finding more and more outlandish Josh Allen sack statistics as the game progressed. like first, you know, third time he’s been sacked five times, whatever. Like, ah, it’s seven sacked, now it’s eight. Like, eight, you don’t get sacked eight times unless the quarterback is a significant part of the problem. Um, the last thing I’ll say, I know somebody in the chat said this way earlier, and I feel like it it pops up in our chat a lot in games, and I don’t think about it that much, but they said, uh, Josh Allen got concussed early and just stayed in the game. Hit, but Well, he said concussed, right? But you know, so that’s the concussion has a specific meaning. It does. It does. But look, I mean, theoretically concussions could go undiagnosed. You can get hit. And this is like the play where he rolled his arm over. Yeah. But either way, he got banged up early. Yeah. And that’s the point. So you are playing banged up, but I think it was more It was the pocket navigation more than anything. It wasn’t I think he threw the ball fine. He had an awful misread for an interception. Awful misread. not the last one, the earlier one. And then I just think he wasn’t handling pressure right or he was misreading his own athleticism against the Texans. I think people like to I think people like to invoke the concussion because it’s now this thing that is, you know, a new discovery in relative terms back, you know, compared with like back in the day football. Um, I don’t think you need to make it that specific, but people have known this for years that if you can hit a quarterback early, if you can knock him, if you can make him start thinking about getting hit early in the game, it changes the way he plays. It does. So, forget the, “Oh, was he dealing with a secret concussion that we didn’t diagnose?” Like, forget that. Just say he took a really hard hit early in that game where he never felt Will Anderson coming um like he’d beaten his tackle. He stepped up in the pocket. He never knew there was a guy chasing him down and he got smacked from behind. Did amazing work to not fumble the football and then whatever way he hit the turf, you know, head hits the ground but like rolls over his own arm. He was in serious pain. Point is that guy took a massive smack early in the game and forget, you know, head injury, fake like missed a concussion or whatever. Like that’s just that’s the type of hit that coaches have said for a hundred years of football. You hit the quarterback like that early in the game, you’re going to start making him think about the rush. And maybe that’s all there is to it. They got Josh Allen hard early in the game with a significant painful hit. And maybe from that point on that changed the way he played. Yeah. I mean, it felt it felt different. I don’t think he’s been great maneuvering the pocket this year generally. This was the worst I’ve seen though. Yeah. Since like early in his career, Allen. So, credit to Houston. Unbelievable job by their defense. Good job by Davis Mills. If this is the end of his two plus game run of uh filling in for CJ Stout and Straoud’s going to come back, I still think I don’t think the Texans are better with Davis Mills versus CJ Stout. Is anybody saying that? People are asking who chat chat I mean I saw people say look he’s running the offense a little bit. You don’t have the unblock pressures. You don’t have some of the stuff that has popped up with Stout against better defenses. You haven’t had as much of that with Mills. I think he’s made a few big throws over the last few weeks, but down for down, I still want CJ Strad back there. And you just hope it’s Now, it’s fair to say there’s games this year CJ Strad’s looked way worse than Davis Mills has the last few weeks. But I think Stout’s the better quarterback. Yeah. Still want to see them unlock Higgins, Collins, and they and you know, keep running Woody Marks. And if they could be good enough on offense, that defense is championship caliber, and that’s where Houston is right now. All right, man. That was fun. Uh, watch along. appreciate all the new members that joined and hung out with the watch along. We’ll keep doing that. Um, don’t forget, join us Sunday right here on the YouTube channel. We’re just going to go live right around noon, maybe 12:30, and just have it running the whole time. It’ll just be like a blank screen basically. It’s a chat. We’re be hanging out. It’s just a vehicle to use the chat box so people can hang out as a second screen, watch the game, chat about it, but we’re not actually going to be showing you anything. Yeah. And then we’ll do our immediate reaction right after the four. So, you got about, you know, eight hours to uh talk to talk amongst yourselves before we go live at say 7:30 or so and we’ll dip in and ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll be in and out and uh interacting. So, appreciate everybody for being here and uh yeah, we’ll see you Sunday a little more. Check the mic.

Steve Palazzolo & Sam Monson react to the Thursday Night Football matchup between the Buffalo Bills vs. Houston Texans.

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