Just take one minute and go look at the AFC standings.
Fun, right?
Buffalo Bills fans will love seeing their team at the top of the AFC East. It never gets old to look.
Now look at the rest of it. Pondering the Bills and rematches with the Kansas City Chiefs and/or Pittsburgh Steelers, or even the Tennessee Titans, first round home games in January against the Indianapolis Colts … the Miami Dolphins (!) … the CLEVELAND BROWNS (!!!).
If you’re like me, the Pro-Football Reference standings these days are an open tab on your laptop at all times.
Right from the start this year, the Bills showed like a team capable of winning big. In my case though, their schedule held me back. They’ve kept it up, though, risen to 10-3 and within inches of the playoffs. They’ve won in prime-time, and they’ve won out west. They just beat a team that 10 days ago was 11-0 – decisively.
The earlier consensus Bills goals remain: win the division, win a postseason game (at home). But there’s more in play now. The Super Bowl window, such as it is, is open.
Let’s talk about windows.
The basic belief is that when your team starts to get good, it’s then too early to consider a championship. Those things take time, right?
Take Kansas City. One year (albeit with Patrick Mahomes on the bench), it’s an early playoff loss. The next, it’s a win but then a loss in the AFC Championship. Last year, the big prize.
This is how we tend to think of it.
But it’s not always right.
This Bills season has me flashing back to the 2005-06 Buffalo Sabres. They were nobody’s contender at the start, but then improved, dramatically and suddenly. The playoffs came around and it was common to gravitate to teams that had been good for longer – namely, the Ottawa Senators. As it happened the Senators were the better team – in the standings, on the ice – but goaltending and luck intervened (as ever), and Buffalo beat Ottawa in the series, 4-1.
What happened after that slips my memory (sorry). But, what was the Sabres’ window?
Turns out it was open only briefly – from about January 2006 to May 2007. Yes, they kind of slammed it shut on themselves, but that happens too.
Lots of things can happen.
Players and coaches leave for new opportunities. Some players get old. Sometimes, the magic formula that a sports team can have simply slips away, and then the moment’s gone.
That Sabres team rose to power without players already considered stars. Put it all together and poof – a deep, dangerous team.
This Bills team is a little bit like that. No reigning MVP like the Baltimore Ravens, no gifted savior like the Chiefs, no Canton-bound leaders like the Steelers. There are good players – even great, in the case of wide receiver Stefon Diggs – but nobody everyone talks up. Their team success isn’t easily explained.
Don’t let that undermine your view of their quality, and don’t either let relative inexperience in “big games” leave you to think the Bills can’t win them.
Their window is open right now.
Kansas City is excellent, and proven, and has beaten the Bills this year. The Chiefs led the way that night, but the Bills stayed within reach. It was the kind of game where a play or two, a bounce or two, would have swung the outcome. That is to say, it was like most games.
If the Chiefs are in their own “tier”, the Bills are in the next one down. Rarely in this sport does the considered top team roll through all its postseason work. Not the Chiefs last year, who trailed by double-digits in each playoff game. Not Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Not Jim Kelly’s Bills of the 1990s.
These Bills will get playoff work and are good enough to win there. The window is open.
As for how long it stays open … who really knows? I don’t look at them as necessarily set up for years of success. If that’s attainable at all, you need a transcendent quarterback, like Mahomes. The league is too fickle for most teams to sustain success.
The Philadelphia Eagles are a cautionary tale, for sure. Everybody (well, not everybody) loved its quarterback, Carson Wentz. A young and happening team with a Super Bowl ring – without much of that previous-years experience, by the way. Three years later, they’re a disaster, starting with the problem of that same quarterback darling. It’s not hard at all, or rare, that a team can swing this wildly the wrong way.
Josh Allen almost definitely will get a massive contract from the Bills, and the challenge from there will be to retain the kind of overall roster quality they enjoy now. Maybe Brian Daboll becomes a head coach somewhere else. Maybe their excellent but veteran receiving corps breaks down.
Windows close.
But for now, theirs is open.