After six weeks of football, Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills, once 4-0 and seemingly cruising toward another AFC East title, suddenly find themselves in a state of disarray.
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Their 24-14 loss to the Atlanta Falcons on Monday night marked their second straight defeat and dropped them to 4-2, exposing the deeper cracks. The numbers tell the story too. In back-to-back games, the Bills’ offense has failed to score more than 24 points. Their running game seems to have evaporated, and Allen has been forced into near-constant survival mode.
The best example of this was seen on Monday, when the Bills’ boundary receivers, Keon Coleman, Elijah Moore, Joshua Palmer, and Tyrell Shavers, combined for just 98 yards. Over the last five weeks, that group has averaged only 89 yards per game, a stunning drop-off for a team once defined by its deep threats.
That said, it’s not like the defense is helping either. The Buffalo Bills allowed 396 total yards to the Falcons, with Bijan Robinson and Drake London running around the field for fun.
Meanwhile, key injuries continue to pile up, from DaQuan Jones’ calf issue in pregame warmups to Curtis Samuel, Terrel Bernard, and others struggling to stay on the field. Simply put, all these factors have added up to a team that’s exhausted, predictable, and dangerously reliant on one man to fix it all: Josh Allen.
And that’s exactly what Emmanuel Acho believes is at the heart of the Bills’ problem. Speaking on Speakeasy, the former NFL linebacker turned analyst didn’t mince words. “The Buffalo Bills are in significant trouble,” Acho said, adding, “because Josh Allen has to do entirely too much.”
Acho explained that with injuries to Dalton Kincaid and Curtis Samuel, the Bills have stripped their signal caller of reliable weapons and left him carrying the offense alone.
“You lost to the Patriots because Dalton Kincaid had to be your number one wide receiver, and he’s a tight end… Now, this game, you don’t have Dalton Kincaid. You don’t have Curtis Samuel… and Josh Allen is having to put the entire team on his back,” Acho pointed out.
He then detailed the late-game chaos that has become the Bills’ offensive identity recently — Allen backpedalling, scrambling, throwing across his body, and hoping for a miracle.
“That last interception Josh Allen threw, he scrambles right, he backpedals, he scrambles left. Ball gets tipped because he’s rolling to his left, throwing to his right. Falcons catch it. Game over,” Acho said, before adding that the QB’s earlier 21-yard scramble to keep the Bills alive was “miraculous” but unsustainable.
“The Bills are asking Josh Allen to be Superman every single game. But there’s a reason Superman had the alter ego of Clark Kent, so he could recover. Josh never has the opportunity to recover,” Acho concluded.
As damning as the words are for a team with a 4-2 record, it’s also an accurate assessment. The Bills’ scheme and personnel issues have turned their star quarterback into a worn-down one-man band. Even HC Sean McDermott admitted postgame, “It was too hard, too hard tonight on our quarterback. It doesn’t need to be that hard all the time.”
Though the bye week might give Josh Allen a brief reprieve, the road ahead won’t get any easier. The next 6 games will see the Bills facing two tricky opponents in the Panthers and the Texans, while also battling it out against solid contenders like the Chiefs, Bucs, and the Steelers.
So there is a very good possibility that if the Bills don’t work on their shortcomings soon, their 4-2 record can easily turn into a 6-6 or a 5-7 record. Safe to say, Allen and company have a lot to figure out during the bye week.
