Relative to the home crowd at Highmark Stadium, which frothed over at each inflection point as the snow fell on Sunday night, Buffalo Bills players were calm after winning the biggest game of the season 27-25 against the Baltimore Ravens in the divisional round of the playoffs. They didn’t make snow angels on the field or linger in the locker room to celebrate. Sean McDermott’s postgame speech was about fundamentals. It would have been easy to mistake the scene for regular-season fare, not the aftermath of a down-to-the-wire victory against a top AFC opponent.
“That’s what we’ve worked for, is the opportunity to play another week,” quarterback Josh Allen said simply after the game.
Of course, we know that this is not just any other week. On Sunday, the Bills will play the Chiefs in Kansas City in the AFC championship game, a matchup that Buffalo players like Allen have been imagining ever since Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, and Co. knocked them out of last year’s playoffs. The Chiefs are the hurdle the Bills can’t seem to get over—since Allen and Mahomes have played quarterback for those two teams, Buffalo has never beaten Kansas City in the postseason, despite establishing itself as a top AFC contender. In three of the past four seasons, Kansas City ended Buffalo’s playoff run. So while the win against the Ravens was impressive and meaningful, it set up Bills-Chiefs, and Buffalo knows that any celebration can be premature.
“We know what they are. They’re the perennial of what you want to be in the NFL,” Allen said. “You’ve got to beat them to get past them.”
Mahomes and Allen were drafted a year apart, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Since then, they’ve become two of the best quarterbacks in the NFL while playing in the same conference. But Mahomes has all the playoff success, and he’s blocked Allen from making a Super Bowl in his first six seasons. In this era of the Chiefs dynasty, the Bills have stood for the perennial second best.
Is it really a rivalry? Allen is 4-1 against Mahomes in the regular season, but Mahomes is 3-0 in the playoffs. You could argue that the Bengals and Joe Burrow have a better claim for the rivalry title since they’ve had regular-season and postseason success against the Chiefs. Burrow is 2-1 against Mahomes in the regular season and 1-1 in the playoffs, though that win was three years ago. (As a good example of how hard it’s been to disrupt the chalk in the AFC playoffs, Burrow is the only quarterback from that conference not named Mahomes, Tom Brady, or Peyton Manning to play in a Super Bowl in over a decade, since Joe Flacco for the Ravens in 2013.)
The Ravens, obviously, have been a good team with an elite young quarterback in Lamar Jackson, who has won two MVPs and is a favorite (along with Allen) to win another this year. But they’ve never had much success against Kansas City, either. Jackson is 1-4 against Mahomes in the regular season and 0-1 in the playoffs, the lone meeting coming in the AFC championship game last year.
But of the top AFC teams in this era of great young quarterbacks, the Bills have been by far the most consistent threat to the Chiefs’ supremacy. Baltimore and Cincinnati have had up-and-down years, but Buffalo has now won five straight AFC East titles. The Bills have proved they’re good enough to beat the Chiefs in the regular season, at least. They’ve played close, hard games against them in the playoffs, losing when Tyler Bass’s game-tying field goal attempt sailed wide last year, and after Mahomes’s 13-second game-tying drive two years before that.
It all leaves the impression that the one thing between this Bills team and true greatness is the Chiefs.
Still, McDermott said that those devastating losses wouldn’t psych his team out when it heads back to Kansas City.
“The mindset is what it’s all about,” McDermott said Sunday night. “These guys believe. You play to win, and you find a way. Every year is different.”
The Chiefs’ inevitability has taken on a different dimension this season; their offense has scored 30 points in a game just twice—once against the lowly Panthers and once in overtime against the Bucs. They don’t seem to be raising their game to new heights, yet they’re two wins away from a historic three-peat. It would be the first three-peat in NFL history, yet the Chiefs still seem like underdogs.
Allen and the Bills gave the Chiefs starters their first (and only) loss of the season, 30-21 in Buffalo in November. The Bills put away that game with Allen’s 26-yard fourth-down touchdown scramble. (The Chiefs’ backups got blown out by Denver in Week 18 as Mahomes’s unit rested for the playoffs.) But even then, that November matchup seemed like a preview of what was to come in January. On the field after the game, Mahomes congratulated Allen and said, “We’ll do it again, baby.”
On Sunday, Allen shrugged off the idea that the regular-season win proved something. The Bills have beaten the Chiefs in the regular season before. If anything, he said, it’ll be hard to beat a team twice.
“The regular season is what the regular season is, and it doesn’t matter how well you perform when you get to the playoffs,” Allen said.
It’s worth remembering that these are both still young teams. Mahomes vs. Allen is not yet Brady vs. Manning—Brady had three Super Bowl wins by the time Manning got his first, in the 2006 season. Manning won the postseason battle head-to-head, 3-2—but it’s instructive to remember that that first win over the Patriots came nine years into Manning’s career, and two of those playoff victories came once he was in Denver. Allen and the Bills seemingly have time. The success they’ve had this season, which was predicted to be a down year after roster shuffling, particularly at wide receiver, shows that they should expect to have many more chances.
But still, the gut-wrenching losses have piled up. A win on Sunday would mean relief from that pain and the chance to cement this Bills era as special and historic in the Super Bowl. A fourth postseason loss to Kansas City would unfortunately recall heartbreaking Bills playoff history from the 1990s.
It’s easy to narrativize the Bills, with their intense fans and small-market quirks. They sure do play a good David to the Chiefs’ Goliath. And they have played Kansas City so well in their regular-season wins and in some of those epic postseason games that ended in losses. Let’s not forget that Bills-Chiefs is already a playoff matchup that has forced an NFL rule change.
But so far, they’ve never been able to get the win that would allow them to define this era of Bills football on its own terms, not just relative to the team that’s been able to do just slightly more. On Sunday, the Chiefs will be playing for a chance to make NFL history; the Bills will be playing for a chance to finally get Kansas City off their backs. Why does that feel like a bigger deal?
