Chiefs remain an unsolvable roadblock for Bills

Kansas City – As a season on its own, 2024 was a remarkable success for the Buffalo Bills.

After an off-season in which they purged veterans and ate dead cap money in moves made for the future, many had described Buffalo as being in a “soft rebuild.”

So, to get to the AFC Championship Game, to be leading it on the road after three quarters, to be down three with 3:33 to play and the ball on their own 30-yard line? Well, there’s no shame in that.

But teams don’t play to expectations set for a single season. There’s always a larger story and a broader context. That’s why Sunday night’s 32-29 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs earned its place high on the list of heartbreaking Buffalo defeats.

These Bills threaded the needle in becoming a team that far exceeded expectations and yet still left behind the taste of bitter disappointment.

For the second year in a row, the Bills suffered a three-point playoff loss to the Chiefs. Last year it was a missed field goal. This year it was a dropped pass.

Same margin of victory, same feeling afterward of believing it could and should have been different.

A field goal on their final drive probably gets them to overtime. A touchdown probably wins the game.

Instead, the Bills managed one first down on a drive that consisted of five pass attempts and a Josh Allen scramble. Running back James Cook, Buffalo’s best offensive weapon of the night with two touchdowns on 85 yards rushing and 49 receiving, never touched the ball.

Buffalo’s season ended on a fourth-and-five blitz where Allen heaved the ball desperately towards tight end Dalton Kincaid, who misjudged his dive for the ball and couldn’t hang onto it.

Game over. Another chapter in Buffalo Bills heartache.

There is plenty of salt in the wounds around this one. Like the fact that this is the second year in a row the Bills beat the Chiefs in the regular season but not in the playoffs. Or that Sunday night was the first time all season the Chiefs hit the 30-point mark. Or that Kansas City’s leading receiver, Xavier Worthy, was a player the Bills passed on in the draft, choosing to trade their pick to Kansas City and move back to take Keon Coleman, who had just one catch for 12 yards in the title game. Or that the greatest offensive football season in Bills history passed without them reaching the Super Bowl, a drought that’s now gone 31 years.

There are all kinds of ways to slice this one up, but there will be two lasting memories form this game for Bills fans.

One is Kincaid’s failed dive at Allen’s throw on their final possession. The other is a fourth-and-one sneak at the Chiefs 41-yard line at the start of the fourth quarter with the Bills driving towards building on their 22-21 lead that produced a turnover on downs.

Two officials appeared to disagree on whether Allen, sandwiched in the middle of a pile, had reached the first-down marker. There was certainly an argument that he had, but not one that could be won in the replay booth, apparently.

Less than three minutes later, the Chiefs were in the end zone.

Sometimes a gut-wrenching loss has one signature moment. This one had two.

Though Allen played decently in going 22-of-34 for 237 yards and two touchdown throws, the dynamic he brings with his legs – so often the difference in a game as it was when the Chiefs defeated the Bills in November – was absent from the game.

Until his 13-yard run on the final drive of the night, he had just 26 yards on 10 carries. And it wasn’t just the big Allen runs that that Chiefs managed to shut down, they made those usually automatic situations in short yardage a challenge as well.

Instead, it was Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes who was the bigger running threat, something the Bills were obviously unprepared for. Mahomes repeatedly bit off chunks of yards without being touched, rushing 11 times, more carries than he’d had in a game all season, for 43 yards and two touchdowns.

Defensively, the Bills had their moments – including forcing two punts to begin the second half as Buffalo took back the lead. But overall, the dynamic looked very much like it did 12 months ago, with the Bills unable to disrupt Mahomes at the line of scrimmage, instead left scrambling to deal with the speed at which he triggers the football.

The one turnover by the Chiefs wasn’t forced by the Bills’ defence. It was simply a bad exchange between Mahomes and Isiah Pacheco.

The Bills defence has lived this season not so much on its overall metrics but on its ability to make plays a key moments – a big-play defence with an emphasis on creating turnovers.

That was exactly what they Bills needed after turning the ball over on their fourth-down gamble midway through the fourth quarter. Or once they’d tied  the game 29-29 with 6:15 to play, when the allowed the Chiefs to go ahead with a field goal that proved to be the difference.

It’s a crushing loss for a group of fans and players who have spent the past few months convincing itself that this time the result would be different.

But you could feel that certainty slipping away early, when Allen’s first two throws of the game were near interceptions, arguably two of the worst decisions he’d made with the football in months.

The Bills’ off-season will be a careful dance between not wanting to deconstruct what worked so well in 2024, but still needing to find that element that can interrupt the pattern of how things once again ended in January.

It’s a problem that must be solved before this great era of the Bills, like the last one more than 30 years ago, turns into another historic chapter of what might have been