The Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals squared off on a cold, snowy day in Orchard Park, NY. With both teams featuring some of the worst run defense the league has seen in 2025, naturally the game was run heavy on both sides of the ball. Well, not quite.<\/p>\n
The Bills held up to their end of the bargain, with 29 rushing attempts. That\u2019s one more rush than they had passing attempts. The Bengals on the other hand, were shut down in the run game overall. With the Bills\u2019 defense solid against the run, surely that meant it was a dominant effort by the D with their passing game typically toward the elite end\u2026<\/p>\n
On the day, Buffalo faced 19 rushing attempts by Cincinnati. Those rushing attempts went for 62 yards. That\u2019s 3.26 yards per attempt. The Denver Broncos currently have the best rush defense in the league in that metric and allow 3.7 yards per attempt on average.<\/p>\n
The Bills, even including this game, allow 5.1 rushing yards per attempt. That makes what they did to the Bengals an obvious anomaly. Let\u2019s take a quick peek at something.<\/p>\n
What makes things doubly odd with the Bills\u2019 performance is that they allowed no explosive runs. The second rush in the clip by running back Samaje Perine went for nine yards and was the longest of the day from Cincinnati. The first clip shows the shortest run, a tackle for a loss of three. There weren\u2019t many TFLs either, with this one and just one other.<\/p>\n
Why point these things out? The Bengals had only 19 carries, meaning a busted play or two could sway things in either direction. The 3.26 yards per carry was earned with a steady performance the entire game.<\/p>\n
When it comes to the passing game, the Bills allowed 7.89 yards per attempt against the Bengals. The second worst team in the league right now happens to be the Cincinnati Bengals who allow 7.65 yards per attempt. Or in other words, Buffalo\u2019s defense did not hold up remotely well against the pass.<\/p>\n
Which is very weird as even with that debacle on the books, Buffalo is the ninth-best team in the league with this metric. On average they allow 6.17 yards per pass.<\/p>\n
For our play selections here, the first is one I don\u2019t think needs much explanation. Or rather, I\u2019d prefer not to dwell on it. Seriously, what a ****ing catch by wide receiver Tee Higgins. I know I don\u2019t have the best angle on the catch, but if you\u2019re not convinced that\u2019s defensive pass interference, just note that Higgins wasn\u2019t showboating and only using one hand for funsies.<\/p>\n
I also had some good choices for the Christian Benford interception, but chose to frame it in \u201cJoe Burrow Vision.\u201d That\u2019s where you don\u2019t see the defensive back until they\u2019re catching the ball.<\/p>\n
Kidding aside, Benford came on a blitz for this play and Burrow had a VERY easy pitch-and-catch for the blitz beater. All he had to do was get it over Benford. Obviously that did not occur.<\/p>\n
This game is a good illustration of how head coach Sean McDermott has prioritized defense over the years. If you\u2019re going to be bad at one thing, let it be the run defense.<\/p>\n
The Bills have had one of the worst run defenses in the league this season along with some overall defensive struggles, but if you can believe it are still allowing 0.6 points per game LESS than the league average. That\u2019s 14th in the league. Not incredible by any means, but still fine. If you\u2019re curious, they allow 22.5 points per game.<\/p>\n
Buffalo kicked butt against the run but struggled against the pass. They allowed 34 points to the Bengals \u2014 the second-highest total they\u2019ve allowed all year. Now I want to be clear. This is a good philosophy if you HAVE to be bad at one thing. It\u2019s of course preferable to be good at both run and pass defense if you can. That\u2019s rarely played that way for the Bills this year, but perhaps they can catch lighting in a bottle down the stretch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals squared off on a cold, snowy day in Orchard Park, NY. With…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2053],"tags":[228,85590,227,256,2296,7,6,320],"class_list":{"0":"post-587595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cincinnati-bengals","8":"tag-bengals","9":"tag-buffalo-bills-analysis","10":"tag-cincinnati","11":"tag-cincinnati-bengals","12":"tag-cincinnatibengals","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115690801043580728","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}