Technically, the call on the field was some condensed variation of a play called Mesh Follow or Mesh Traffic. In this iteration, there was a wide receiver, Khalil Shakir, lined up as a running back and a second running back ballooning into the flat. There were wide receivers and tight ends bunched at the line of scrimmage, with one wide receiver dragging to the left to follow Shakir toward one sideline, running a similar route, and two wide receivers from the right sprinting in the opposite direction.
The call on Josh Allen’s game-winning 26-yard touchdown run was brilliant because, to me, it picked up on the one thing that opponents of the Kansas City Chiefs have failed to realize time and time again. They have one of the smartest defenses on the planet and are one of the best tackle-in-space teams in the NFL. All of the legal traffic created by these conflicting routes peeled off valuable Chiefs defenders one after another and drew them into assignments that took their eyes off the quarterback. It prevented any of them from reading the play, reacting and making a move on the ball. Allen took the fourth-and-2 play to the house, giving the Buffalo Bills a 30–21 lead. That was the final score.
Leo Chenal inherited Dawson Knox. Justin Reid inherited Shakir. Drue Tranquill chased Amari Cooper. Nick Bolton was drawn to Mack Hollins, who was split out wide to begin with. All of the Chiefs’ defenders are so good and fundamentally sound that they did not slip and did not offer Allen any obvious windows into which he should throw a football.
The problem, of course, is that sorting out all this traffic moved Kansas City’s defenders and created a swath of land so large one could build a $3,000 a month condominium complex on. And by the time all of Kansas City’s defenders turned to realize that the quarterback had escaped the pocket, they had to decide how willing they were to perform the on-field equivalent of diving in front of a racehorse.
Of course, it’s bigger than Mesh Flow. This is about Bills coach Sean McDermott making the larger-scale decision not to kowtow to Patrick Mahomes and melt into human pudding like nearly everyone has done (including McDermott, famously, himself) when choosing between guaranteed points and removing the ball from Mahomes’s hands altogether. After a 10-play, 83-yard drive that took up 6:03 and was capped by another great call that carved open space into Kansas City’s secondary, McDermott sat at the Kansas City 26-yard line with about 2:30 to play. The Chiefs, in calling their first timeout, seemed to be trying to incept McDermott into some kind of unfounded conservatism.
Kansas City thrives when opponents are in this nail-biting position of endless calculations. Time and distance. Trying to recall all the ways Andy Reid can draw up something that will cause a problem but knowing full well that his recall dates back to the 1939 Cotton Bowl. Praying that his players won’t lay an errant hand on a Chiefs wide receiver in fear of drawing the gut-punching penalty flag.
And so, McDermott simply opted not to deal with it at all.
We tend to make bigger deals than called for out of singular moments in an NFL season. And while the Bills will never achieve a full exorcism of Kansas City until they blow past the Chiefs en route to a Super Bowl victory, Sunday’s win was a bar-clearing win in which a sometimes embattled head coach can show his players that you can develop a coolness under pressure. In which an offensive coordinator can find the right play call, which creates confidence in the next one. In which an MVP candidate can begin to run away with the damn thing, literally and figuratively (not to mention some of the cooler ancillary moments on the game-sealing touchdown run, like OT Dion Dawkins coming right back out of the injury tent and bodying Mike Danna, or O’Cyrus Torrence handling the game-wrecking Chris Jones on his own).
To this point, Buffalo’s season is, in part, defined by surrounding ineptitude elsewhere in the AFC East. The New York Jets’ owner and team have found new ways to debase the franchise. The Miami Dolphins have been whacked by injuries and failed to procure a backup quarterback for their injury-plagued starter. But just as Buffalo’s 47–17 pummeling of the New England Patriots in the wild-card round after the 2021 season seemed to signal the beginning of something significant, so, too, did Sunday’s win that broke up Kansas City’s undefeated season. We learned of the outer reaches of Kansas City’s ability to manufacture victories out of dust. We also learned of the outer reaches of Buffalo’s potential this season as they stand at 9–2.
This is what matters. McDermott made the call to untap that potential instead of the call to twist into a human pretzel and pray. The Bills won’t forget it and, for once, the Chiefs will try not to remember what it feels like.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Josh Allen’s Fourth-Down Touchdown Showed How You Have to Beat the Chiefs.
