Stunner: Furious rally a testament to the Buffalo Bills' heart
Josh Allen was perfect. His receivers delivered. This is the kind of win that'll help these Bills in January. Our column live from Highmark Stadium is inside.
ORCHARD PARK, NY — This era of Buffalo Bills football, fair or not, has been condensed to monikers. Individual games get nicknamed immediately and embed themselves into the psyche of locals. Thirteen seconds. Hail Murray. Wide Right II. Last season’s Fourth and 5 in the AFC Championship Game still haunts. This is not a silly exercise in self-torture. There’s a point. All snapshots elicit a memory of this team at this time failing to deliver when it matters most.
For all of Josh Allen’s brilliance, the Bills’ death grip on playoff games too often loosens as the game clock creeps toward triple zeroes.
There’s an explicit implication in those nicknames that no matter how electrifying Josh Allen plays, these Bills are destined to blow it.
Sunday night was a sign that maybe the 2025 season will be different.
So, here’s a submission for Sunday night: “0.9.”
With 4 minutes and 48 seconds remaining in last night’s Bills-Ravens Week 1 epic, the Bills had a 0.9 percent chance of winning, per ESPN’s analytics. Baltimore gave the reigning MVP an opening, he took it and there’s one conclusion to draw from an exhilarating 41-40 Bills win: This team has an extreme amount of heart. The fourth quarter of the Bills’ first game this season was a testimonial to the type of player GM Brandon Beane brings in and, yes, Sean McDermott’s coaching. Fans were quite literally leaving. From the press box, you could see large swaths of empty seats with plenty of football left. An eerie silence overtook Highmark Stadium.
Honestly, as a father of three, I do not blame those departing one bit.
Plus, there was nothing on the field to suggest the Bills would stop this juggernaut Ravens offense at all. Final daggers appeared to pierce the home team on a third and 10 with 12 minutes left when Joey Bosa and Greg Rousseau barreled down on Lamar Jackson at perfect angles. The QB who many believe got screwed in the MVP voting last season retreated alllll the way back to his own 12-yard line, wasted those two defensive ends, tucked the pigskin and raced ahead to the Bills’ 46 with his back towel flowing in the wind. The next snap, Derrick Henry smoked Taylor Rapp around the corner to push the lead to 40-25. One disgusted fan hurled a water bottle onto the field from high above.
All of this, of course, after Henry had already monster-trucked multiple Bills tacklers.
Sunday night also announced the arrival of another Ravens star: Zay Flowers.
Go Long is your home for longform this season.
At this point of the game, Bills players are asked, how are you not totally demoralized? Football’s a human game. It’s easy to see your defense getting punked and think it really doesn’t matter what you do with the ball.
Wide receiver Joshua Palmer turned the tables on me.
“Ask how they feel right now. About us. They’re probably asking, ‘How do we stop these guys?’ Palmer said. “They played a great game but we stepped up when we needed to.”
That’s precisely the finishing touch these Bills have been searching for since Allen’s arrival as a superstar in 2020. Everyone filling this stadium for the final time in 2025 grasps the context. Barring a catastrophic change of events, Buffalo will win the AFC East. And then it’s about conjuring the necessary (and elusive) late-game magic in January. We all fall victim to Week 1 overreactions, but the pulsating finish to this heavyweight tilt — one of the greatest regular-season games of the last decade — hints at an identity shift in Western New York. A refusal to quit. Maybe now the Bills are officially finished wondering What will wrong? as pressure ramps up. They took major strides in this regard a season ago.
The response to the Lamar ‘n Henry Show was the best we’ve seen in the Allen era.
After exchanging punts, the Bills drove downfield and faced a fourth and 2 from the Ravens’ 18. That’s when their probability decreased below 1 percent.
Baltimore’s secondary blanketed all receivers downfield. Allen bought time, rolled right and gunned one into the end zone that was tipped by tight end Dawson Knox and cradled by Keon Coleman. Back to the ‘24 draft, one of the qualities that enticed Beane was this exact skill. He saw a receiver who could improvise when No. 17 breaks the pocket. Replay the touchdown and you’ll see quarterback and wide receiver in unison. Coleman was just hoping Khalil Shakir wouldn’t tip the ball a second time.
“We’re not even thinking we’re down,” Coleman said. “There’s time on the clock. You just have to go win. We have to make each play.”
Coleman’s night may be the most important revelation of all. He caught eight balls on 11 targets for 112 yards with the TD. For all “everyone eats” talk, Buffalo needs a go-to alpha to emerge by the postseason. Allen doesn’t necessarily need a Transformer like Henry to reach his first Super Bowl, but someone amongst his supporting cast must ascend. It could be the former Florida State wideout. Coleman credited the work put in all offseason, all camp. “It’s showing up,” he said. “The trust he’s putting into me, the hard work we put in — the reps and reps and reps and reps — in the classroom and then on the field after practice, it’s coming to fruition.”
On the Ravens’ second play of their very next drive, Ed Oliver — who had the best night of his pro career — bullied 6-foot-5, 316-pound Roger Rosengarten and punched the ball out of Henry’s grasp.
Allen, in vintage form, clearly smelled blood in the water.
The very next play, he took a shot deep to… to… Jackson Hawes. Huh? In need of a play, the Bills turned to a blocking tight end who caught all of 16 passes last fall at Georgia Tech. Hand in the dirt, he took off up the right seam and hung onto a bobbling 29-yarder for his first pro catch.
Postgame, seated on a stool at his locker, Hawes was still on Cloud 9. He grew up a Ravens fan in Utah. Haloti Ngata, who’s also from Salt Lake City, got him into the team as a kid. “So this one was like, ‘OK, I need to ball out.’” On this play, if a team shows a one-high safety, he runs up the numbers and bends his route in. When he saw the ball in the air, Hawes admitted he told himself: “Holy cow. Josh is throwing it to me.” The Bills only ran this play once or twice in a walkthrough and Allen threw it elsewhere.
“Right then and there,” Hawes added, “I just happened to be open.”
Allen scored three plays later to knife the deficit to 40-38.
Christian Benford’s excellent tackle of DeAndre Hopkins on a third-down crosser got Buffalo the ball back — the last time he played these Ravens, as the corner explained, he suffered a scary concussion.
And on the game-winning field goal drive, the hero was newcomer Joshua Palmer.
Palmer’s 32-yard reception steered the Bills into field-goal range. The ex-Charger roasted veteran Jaire Alexander. In an offseason 1 on 1 with Beane, the GM was arguably most animated pointing to this signee. “We’ll find out if I’m wrong,” Beane said then, “but I’m not paying him 11 million bucks because I think he’s an average player. I think he’s a good player. No one’s talking about that.” Palmer could be exactly what Allen needs on the other side of Coleman.
Coleman’s 29-yarder (also vs. Alexander) got them closer. And then Matt Prater, who’s so new to town that he probably doesn’t know Orchard Park from Jurassic Park, split the uprights to win.
All parties involved derive energy from the MVP.
Lamar was Lamar. He harpoons defenses by air, by ground. But after dinkin’ and dunkin’ for three quarters, Allen went nuclear and stole this win in the dead of night. He threw for 251 yards in the final quarter alone to prove, on a national stage, that he’s the rightful MVP. Before Sunday, teams were 277-0 when they score 40+ points and rush for 235+ yards. Allen made it 277-1. When I asked Coleman what makes his quarterback unlike any other in the league, he said "What can’t he do?" and pointed to my chest. "He’d put it right there on that first button,” he said, before holding up his hands. “Just do this. He’ll put a great ball in an area only you can get it.” Not bad for someone who completed 52 percent of his passes as a rookie.
One of his finest throws was actually dropped up the sideline by the sure-handed Ty Johnson two plays before Coleman’s score. Allen’s accuracy in Game No. 1 was spectacular.
Backup Mitchell Trubisky called Allen a “beast” and a “dog” and said nobody on the sideline ever thought they were out of this one. Between the lines, he’s never seen a competitor like him.
More specifically, the Bills prepare for these exact scenarios as a team.
“We’re in a lot of big games,” Trubisky added. “And there’s a lot of great situational football down the stretch — a lot of teams don’t even come across those situations, but we have. We study them. We’re ready for them. We have a plan for when we’re down two scores. We have a plan for when we need eight, need six, need seven. And at the end, we took a knee so they don’t have a chance to get it back.
“We go through all those situations. We’re on top of that. All of the guys are communicating. There’s no quit in this team. We stick together.”
The Bills have very real issues to sort through on defense, but they’ve got 16 regular-season games to figure those out.
Top to the bottom, the Ravens are loaded. It would’ve been easy for anyone on Buffalo’s sideline to mentally check out like many of those fans in the stands.
This night was about heart.
Heart that’ll be much-needed a few months from now.
Allen, tongue in cheek, asked everyone in the stands to have a little more faith next time. Coleman knows there will be more games like this, too.
Come January — when Mahomes or Lamar or Burrow await — the Bills will absolutely think back to that 0.9 percent.
“It’s the NFL. There’s a lot of one-score games out there,” Coleman said. “So every win is a big win. No matter what team’s name is across their chest, we’re trying to win it. For us, it’s another win. It is a good win. Historically, we’ll both be in the playoffs and have to beat each other to get to the big dance.
“It’s a great Week 1 win and shows a lot of fight in us.”
