Buffalo went to Houston and won a track meet, and our model now calls the Bills a coin flip rather than a lost cause
Updated
The list of departed defenders has not changed. Tre'Davious White, Taron Johnson, Jordan Poyer, Joey Bosa, A.J. Epenesa, Matt Milano, Shaq Thompson, DaQuan Jones and Cam Lewis are still gone, and that is still the story of this roster. What changed is that Buffalo went to Houston in Week 1, gave up 31 points, and won anyway, 36-31, because Josh Allen did exactly the thing we said he might. When we re-ran the season with that game in the books, the Bills climbed from five wins to eight, from a 5-12 finish to 8-9, and from a one percent playoff chance to better than one in three. That is the largest move any team made in the league, and it deserves an explanation.
Part of the move is arithmetic. A win over a team we still project to reach the playoffs is worth more than a normal win, and Buffalo now owns one against a division-caliber opponent on the road. Part of it is the offense, which was never in question and now grades even better. Allen went 20 of 29 for 334 yards and two scores in Houston without an interception, Dalton Kincaid caught five for 130, DJ Moore five for 100 and a touchdown, and the whole thing looked like the summer preview promised. Our model projects 393 points, tenth in the league, with Allen at 3,836 passing yards, 24 touchdowns and just eight interceptions behind a passer rating above 101, plus another 579 yards and a dozen scores on the ground. DJ Moore climbs to 94 catches for 1,292 yards and eight touchdowns, up from the 89 and 1,124 we had in July. Dalton Kincaid moves up to 53 grabs and 764 yards. James Cook sits at 916 rushing yards behind a line our model trusts. This is a deep, balanced, dangerous group, and it just scored 36 in Houston to prove it.
The bigger part of the move is the defense, and here we have to be careful about what the model is and is not saying. In July our projection had Buffalo allowing 500 points, dead last in the league by a wide margin. After Week 1 that figure drops to 416, which is still 29th. Read that again. The defense went from catastrophic to merely bad, and the difference between those two words is worth three wins when the offense is this good. Greg Rousseau is the reason the front looks better. He had two sacks and forced two fumbles in Houston, and his projection climbed from under twelve sacks to nearly sixteen, with Bradley Chubb still projecting for nine on the other side. When the edges get home, a green secondary does not have to hold up as long.
The secondary is still the problem, and nothing about one game in Houston changes that. Our model has the Bills allowing the 31st-most yards in the league, and the coverage grades that dragged the July projection down are largely the same grades. C.J. Stroud threw for plenty against this group. The Bills won because they scored more, not because they got stops, and a team that has to win 36-31 every week is a team that is going to lose a few of those games to the better quarterbacks on the schedule. That schedule still includes Denver, Detroit, the Rams and Green Bay, and it still projects as one of the harder draws in the conference.
The division looks different than it did in July too. New England lost a low-scoring game in Seattle and our model trimmed the Patriots to 8-9. The Jets beat Tennessee and hold at 9-8. Miami lost in Las Vegas and slid to 6-11. The AFC East that looked like a four-way scrap now looks like three teams bunched between eight and nine wins with Buffalo right in the middle of it. When we ran the rest of the season, the Bills won the division in a meaningful share of simulated years, which is a long way from the formality it used to be and a long way from the afterthought we projected in the summer.
The market opened Buffalo at ten and a half wins, and we were more than five under it in July. Now we are a little more than two under, and the direction of the disagreement is the same. The market is paying for Allen and the brand. Our model is paying for a defense that still ranks near the bottom of the league and a schedule that will test it every week. The gap narrowed because the offense proved it can carry a bad defense to a win against a good team. It did not close because one win in a shootout does not make a secondary.
The path to the market being right is the same path it always was. Allen refuses to lose, the offense scores 30 a week, Rousseau and Chubb make the coverage problems academic, and Buffalo drags itself to ten wins on sheer firepower. He has done it before, and after Week 1 our model gives that version of the season a real probability rather than a footnote. The path to the July projection reasserting itself is the secondary getting picked apart by Bo Nix, Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford in consecutive weeks, and it is just as live.
So the read is a team that changed our mind by a lot in one week without changing what it is. Buffalo is an elite offense bolted onto a bottom-four defense, and in July our model thought that combination lost far more than it won. After watching it win a 67-point game on the road, the model thinks it is a coin flip, and a coin flip with Josh Allen on one side is not a team anyone should write off. Eight wins is the honest number now. It is three more than we had in the summer, and the defense is still the reason it is not ten.
