KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Andy Reid had some advice for Patrick Mahomes on Sunday.
After the Buffalo Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in regulation, the Kansas City Chiefs’ coach knew things looked grim for his team. So Reid told his star quarterback what to do – be the Grim Reaper.
Mahomes certainly did that, bringing death to the Bills’ 2021 season in the divisional round of the AFC playoffs. It was déjà vu for the Bills, with their season ending on the same Arrowhead Stadium field that it did in the AFC championship game almost exactly a year earlier.
Mahomes connected with Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce to gain 44 yards in just 10 seconds to put the Chiefs in position for a tying, 49-yard field goal by Harrison Butker on the final play of regulation. Then, after Kansas City won the coin toss, Mahomes drove the Chiefs to the winning touchdown, engineering a surgical, eight-play, 75-yard touchdown drive that ended with the game-winning throw to Kelce on first-and-goal from the Bills’ 8-yard line.
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The Bills spent the 2021 offseason building a roster to take down the Chiefs. Sunday night showed that riddle is far from being solved. The road to the Super Bowl in the AFC still goes through Kansas City – a realization that stung like the January winds off Lake Erie. The Chiefs will host the AFC title game for the fourth consecutive season, an NFL record.
“That’s the reality of the situation, right?” Bills coach Sean McDermott said. “It is. It’s the reality of our situation and we’ve got to continue to work to beat him. Give him the credit. He made a couple plays down the stretch and he had a great game. That’s what great players do, they make big plays in big moments of big games and he made big plays.”
So, too, did Bills quarterback Josh Allen. A heavyweight battle between two of the top young quarterbacks in the NFL will forever be remembered outside Western New York as one of the best games in NFL history. For the Bills, though, it will serve as a painful reminder of what could have been. A victory would have given the Bills a home game with the AFC title on the line against the Bengals and a chance to claim their long-awaited first Super Bowl title. Opportunities like those are fleeting. While it’s reasonable to think that as long as Allen remains one of the best players on the planet, there will be more chances, it’s impossible to predict the future. It’s a safe bet, though, that with Mahomes on their side, the Chiefs will remain the standard in the conference.
“He's a great football player,” said Bills center Mitch Morse, a former teammate of Mahomes with the Chiefs. “From top to bottom, that organization is run well. We felt like we had the pieces to compete. For us, it's just about executing. He's a great player and I don't see him going anywhere anytime soon. We look forward to the next opportunity.”
There’s a reason Allen wasn’t doing any sort of celebrating after the Bills went up with 13 seconds left – a situation in which the game is all but over against almost any other quarterback.
“I’m thinking it’s Pat Mahomes on the other side,” Allen said. "They made some good plays there at the end, and unfortunately the coin toss went the way it went. Scoring with 13 seconds left, it was an unbelievable play by (Gabe Davis), our front five blocking the way they did, on fourth down, I believe.
“I’m super proud of our guys throughout the season, the ups and the downs. I know it’s disappointing right now, it hurts right now. You can say it's going to be better, we're going to learn from this, and it's very cliche, and nobody wants to hear that. But I truly believe that this unit will learn from this. We've got a pretty young squad, a lot of guys coming back next year. Again, we’ve just got to use this as fuel, fuel for the fire.”
The Bills will get another crack at the Chiefs in the 2022 regular season, but let’s be real – we’re not going to learn much from that game. The Bills won at Arrowhead Stadium during this regular season, and we saw Sunday that had no bearing on what happens in the postseason.
That’s the time that truly matters for these two franchises. The Chiefs are the measuring stick in the AFC, and the Bills came up just short.
It’s hard not to come away from Sunday’s game feeling like the Bills let a golden opportunity slip away. The Bills would have been touchdown favorites at home against the Bengals. Take care of business in that game, and they probably would have been favorites in the Super Bowl, too, against either the 49ers or Rams.
“I think everything that happens in life is a lesson,” safety Jordan Poyer said. “You either grow from it or you die from it.”
On Sunday, Mahomes – the Grim Reaper – brought death. It will be a long time before the Bills have the chance to resurrect themselves.
“We've got to all learn from it and you got to use that,” Poyer said. “I know we said that last year, ‘Use it going into the offseason.’ I don't want to say it again this year, but it's something you're going to have to feed off in the offseason and continue to learn from. This one's going to hurt for a little while.”
