FOXBOROUGH, MA. — As the Buffalo Bills watched Josh Allen kneel the ball three times to run out the clock on the hosting New England Patriots, the team casually trotted back to their locker room, 35-31 victors, to extend their winning streak to three.
But make no mistake, there was nothing casual about their victory.
The stakes heading in were massive, with the Patriots having the chance to clinch the AFC East with a victory and force the Bills into, at best, a road playoff game to begin the postseason festivities. And a Bills’ loss would have sent them that much closer to the hungry playoff hopeful piranhas just below the surface, nipping at the top.
Even beyond that was just how the Bills arrived at the game’s conclusion.
“Yeah, down 21,” center Connor McGovern joked, “that’s exactly where you want ’em, you know?”
The Bills somehow erased that very 21-point deficit, played nearly a perfect second half and put away the red-hot Patriots down the stretch en route to the Bills’ 10th victory of the 2025 season.
But to get to the very good, the suffocating, suck-the-life-out-of-Bills-fans first half must be recognized.
And there’s no need to sugarcoat it. The bad, well, it was very bad.
The Bills saw the worst of themselves in every way through the first half. The run defense was getting gashed, ignoring all the prior progress it had made over the last month-plus of the season. The pass defense allowed one too many clutch plays to Drake Maye. Even when the Bills had things covered down the field, they didn’t keep to their rush lanes, allowing Maye to get out of the pocket and off he scampered for a pair of rushing touchdowns. In total, they were allowing 8.6 yards per play.
The offense brought back some of its stale overtones. Allen could only connect on the short stuff, finishing the first half with only 35 passing yards. Their usual mighty ground game had only 41 yards from their running backs. The Patriots were averaging five more yards per play than the Bills (3.6) in the first half. If it weren’t for one shortened-field touchdown drive in the first half, thanks to a good Ray Davis kickoff return plus a Patriots facemask penalty, the Bills might not have put any points on the board in the first 30 minutes.
There they sat, down 24-7 to the 10-win-in-a-row-Patriots, staring their 2025 AFC East mortality in the face.
The natural thought is that, down that much and looking as poorly as they did, Bills head coach SeanMcDermott would head into the locker room and go fire and brimstone on the players to try and wake them up. Instead, he did the exact opposite. And in a way, it empowered the veteran-heavy, ‘been there, done that’ group.
“I mean, being down 24-7 at half, that’s gotta rile you up,” fullback Reggie Gilliam supposed. “But he stayed calm and cool and collected the whole time.”
“Yeah, there was no description, no, like, we’re doing this wrong, we’re doing this wrong, whatever. There was none of that,” defensive end A.J. Epenesa recalled. “It was pure him saying ‘That’s not us. I don’t know what that was, but that’s not us.’ That’s a credit to the guys in the locker room to receive that message and just realize, like, he’s right. That’s not our game, that’s not our ball.”
“We know how to play better than that,” Gilliam said. “Let’s go show everybody we can.”
McDermott calmly coming to his team and putting the onus on them, while also making some strategic changes down the stretch, led to the team going fire and brimstone on the Patriots.
The Bills knew they needed close to perfection to outscore the Patriots by at least 18 points in 30 minutes, and it began with the Bills playing a perfect third quarter. They completely flipped the script on the Patriots over the next 20 minutes of football.
The offense scooted their way for a quick score to make it 24-14. The previously indefensible defense forced a three-and-out with a sack of Maye on third down. Moving more methodically, the Bills turned in an 11-play, 70-yard touchdown drive to pull within three points at 24-21. The Bills’ defense then withstood a pair of 15-plus yard plays, shook it off, and forced an interception to give the Bills the ball late in the third with a chance to take the lead.
They even extended their third-quarter perfection five minutes into the fourth, this time, with a 13-play 91-yard touchdown drive. That included Allen’s firehose of a touchdown throw to tight end Dawson Knox on a third-and-goal from the 14-yard line, which, for context, was moved back there after a holding call on what looked like the go-ahead touchdown play on the original third-down try.
“Nothing fazes — we’re like, ‘Welp, hold, let’s move back,’” McGovern said. “We’re fine. Good.”
And turning the unlikely into reality, there the Bills sat with the 28-24 lead with only 10 minutes to play. But just to add another degree of difficulty, they let the Patriots get ahead one more time.
On a running play that looked bottled up at the start, the Bills failed to lock up the backside pursuit, which allowed TreVeyon Henderson to break out, reverse field and sprint past everyone for a 65-yard touchdown. It was the defense’s lone hiccup on an otherwise perfect second half — albeit a rather large hiccup that turned into a bit of an Allen-style boot and rally.
But there the Bills were, again, to fire down the field for another touchdown and another lead, this time, to the game’s final resting place at 35-31.
“We know as long as there’s time left on the clock on offense that we can put points on the board,” McGovern said.
A pair of putaway Patriots possessions for the Bills defense later, and they were, in victory formation, as if that 21-point deficit never happened.
Just like that, the Bills were 10-4, and only a game behind the 11-3 Patriots, and rescued themselves from surrendering the division. Although the Bills still need a helping hand from the Jets or Dolphins in Week 17 or 18, a home playoff game to begin the tournament tripled in probability and now sits at 24 percent.
“No game is bigger than another, but we did catch wind that this was their hat and T-shirt game,” Gilliam admitted. “So everybody kinda knew that in the back of their mind.”
While the win is a big one and they all but punched their ticket to the playoffs in 2025, the victory might be a bit more meaningful from a big-picture perspective. The Bills have been trying to determine who the 2025 version of their team will be — their core identity.
“We’re getting there,” McDermott said Wednesday about finding that identity. “I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
And with the victory, in the style that it happened, brought a zoomed-out image into clear view.
“It goes to just the personality of this team. Yeah, we may be down but we’re never out, and that’s a mentality. It’s hard to teach that,” Epenesa said. “People have to have that in them, that ability to not get down and to stay positive and to really believe, ‘We’re down 21-0 right now,’ to really believe that we’re gonna win this game. It may take a little naivete, or whatever you want to call it, to really believe, but that’s what it takes.”
“I feel like this team is battle-tested tough and has been in so many scenarios where you have to stay steady,” left guard David Edwards said. “If you ride the highs and the lows, the mentality, you know, that will affect you. I feel like it served us well today.”
“I just think that’s the Buffalo Bills in general. We all have the same mindset, and it’s just like no one gets down, no one gets up,” McGovern said. “We’ve done a good job just riding the wave, just staying neutral the entire time and I feel like that’s the best way to play football.”
Linebacker Matt Milano stepped up with two sacks against the Patriots. (Brian Fluharty / Imagn Images)
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the ImprobaBills.
Save your groans, because defying all the improbabilities of their season is the very identity they’ve been trying so hard to nail down.
It’s actually kind of perfect, if you think about it.
Of all the recent Bills teams that have been vying for the Super Bowl, this one is, without question, their most flawed. The offense is far from perfect and unable to provide any semblance of consistency one game, or even one half, to the next. The defense has taken strides in the second half of the year, but is prone to some real clunkers of first halves, single quarters or plays within a game.
Injuries have played a significant role in their entire structure, too. They’ve encountered one setback after another, many of which unexpectedly and dejectedly hit them during the practice week.
Take this week, for example. If it weren’t for Dawson Knox being away for the birth of his daughter on Wednesday, or backup quarterback Mitchell Trubisky not being sick on Thursday, the Bills would have conducted the first practice of the 2025 season with every single member of their 53-man roster participating.
Knox and Trubisky were back by Friday, only for top cornerback Christian Benford’s toe injury from Thursday’s practice to keep the Bills from their lone day of perfect attendance. The Bills have used just one shy of the maximum amount of practice squad elevations this season, using two almost every week of their 14 games, with only their Week 4 contest against the Saints being the game that required just one.
The improbability of them sustaining success with all of these different setbacks is a big piece of who they are, and what they’ve been able to overcome.
Then there’s also the in-game improbabilities. On three separate occasions this season, the Bills have faced a pretty deep hole against an impressive AFC foe, and have fired back against the odds to win all three of them.
In this Patriots game alone, the Bills had to break two longstanding coaching streaks. The first was to break Patriots coach Mike Vrabel’s undefeated post-bye record. The second, McDermott had yet to beat a team coming off its bye week in his Bills career.
But for these ImprobaBills, the AFC improbabilities are aligning along with them. If someone had told you before the season began that, still with three weeks to go, both the Chiefs and Bengals would already be eliminated, and that the Ravens would be fighting for their playoff lives, you’d likely laugh in their face.
Last week, we asked a simple question — with everything going on around them, why not the Bills in 2025?
And all this additional week of information has provided is further evidence of that theory. With the Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow roadblocks out of the way, the Bills will not encounter a single quarterback in this year’s postseason who has eliminated them previously.
Allen has seemingly donned his usual December and January cape, and along with it, the entire locker room has channeled the ghosts of their past eliminations into something a lot healthier. When things start to go awry, they remain subdued — not to the point that they don’t feel the successes, but that they minimize their failures to be nothing more than what’s happening in that moment.
It’s part of why they’re, somehow, making the improbable seem possible in spectacular fashion, and pretty regularly. Although it certainly isn’t sustainable every week, knowing they have that in their back pocket is a potentially special trait of a team trying to finally get over the hump and get to the Super Bowl.
Even without a perfect roster or runout, perhaps the ideal situation and mentality of the locker room is truly what matters to a playoff push. And as they get healthier with time, perhaps the need for those improbable bailouts becomes less.
Suddenly, the Bills have a Super Bowl contender on their hands, the type of team that no one else in the AFC likely wants to see on their playoff schedule. Perhaps, as the Chiefs and Bengals were to the Bills, the Bills are now the final boss for this unproven gaggle of AFC contenders.
And, should this run continue, maybe the Bills could become that team that finally reaches their organizational goals.
As improbable as that may have seemed just one month ago.