Both the Bills and Ravens dominated their first round playoff opponents, setting up a thrilling divisional round matchup.
Both teams look rested and like they’re peaking. And we’re going to start in Buffalo where, on Sunday, the Bills looked again like a punches-in-bunches kind of juggernaut—where a close game can get out of hand quickly.On the game’s third play, Denver Broncos rookie Bo Nix delivered a dart on a deep in-breaker by Courtland Sutton to convert a third-and-8. Two plays later, Nix took a shot off a deep drop, going downfield to connect with Troy Franklin for a 42-yard score.
So less than three minutes in, the Bills, under plenty of pressure to deliver this January, were down 7–0 against an upstart Broncos team clearly taking a house-money approach to the afternoon. It looked messy from the outset, and the Bills certainly could’ve felt the stakes. Instead, they followed their leaders. “I’m always going to stay optimistic,” future Hall of Famer Von Miller told me over his cell, from the locker room postgame. “It’s all I know. That’s the energy I brought today. I just have so much faith in our defensive coaches, and I know how the playoffs go. All the teams are good. They’re going to get some punches in. We’re going to get some punches in, too. We just got to make sure we got more points than them at the end of the day.” As Miller said, both teams threw plenty of punches from that point in the first quarter. The Bills just wound up landing way more of them. Thirty-one unanswered points later, and Buffalo advanced to the divisional round for the fifth consecutive year. And it’s in the divisional round where the Bills have lost for the past three years. For Buffalo to get to the AFC championship, the Bills will have to beat the Ravens, who handled them easily in a 35–10 rout in September (to be fair, the Ravens have fewer playoff wins with Lamar Jackson than the Bills do with Josh Allen). On Sunday, we got a glimpse, again, of why this group might be different. Yes, Josh Allen played like an MVP candidate, throwing for 272 yards, two scores and a 135.4 rating on 20-of-26 passing. But it was more than that. It was how Buffalo ran for 210 yards. It was how Allen completed passes to eight different guys, with all eight targeted more than once and six having multiple catches. It was how, after the first drive, the Bills’ defense held the Broncos to just 154 yards and 11 first downs, while shutting them out.“It all starts with Josh,” Miller says. “He’s an elite quarterback. Your team is just a shade of who your quarterback is. It starts with Josh and translates down to everybody else.”We’ll know how much of a difference soon. For now, though, as Miller continued to paint himself as the eternal optimist—“Even in Denver, when we probably shouldn’t have won a game, I still felt like we had a chance to win the Super Bowl”—they can at least hang their hat on the number of guys who can throw the aforementioned punches. It’s allowed them to use a veteran like Miller as a specialist, which has juiced his production of late. It’s made them more difficult for an opponent to handle.“I can’t compare to those guys,” Miller says, referencing the champion 2015 Broncos and ’21 Rams. “But I know we got a great quarterback. We play great defense. The energy of this team, I can’t put my finger on it yet. We got to keep working and keep winning. In a couple weeks, we’ll figure it out.”Ravens over Steelers The Ravens broke the Pittsburgh Steelers’ will Saturday night—and it makes Lamar Jackson even scarier to face. Remember, this is one of the most rugged rivalries in the history of the sport. So it’s not often that one side steals the other’s soul. But you could see it happen at M&T Bank Stadium on this cold January evening. It was there in how Derrick Henry easily stiff-armed his former college teammate, Minkah Fitzpatrick, to the ground in the first quarter, as the Ravens built their lead. It showed up again in how Patrick Queen was less than enthusiastic in filling the hole on Henry’s 44-yard touchdown. And it was painted all over the stat sheet at halftime—at that point, the Ravens had a 308 to 59 edge in yards, with 164 of them on the ground. The Ravens finished with a 28–14 win. And while you can give the Steelers credit for fighting back some, with a bunch of Russell Wilson moonshots late, it was clear how thoroughly the Steelers’ spirit was broken. “Those first few drives, 14-play drives, it’s wearing on people,” said two-time Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum. “I’m proud of the guys. I wouldn’t say quit, but that’s always the goal going in is to try to get a team to quit. They’re a physical team, but we’re a physical unit, too.”While the Ravens have been that way forever, I think there’s a difference this year, and he wears No. 22. And he’s going to present a problem for the Bills next week like he did earlier this season when he rushed for 199 yards in Baltimore’s 35–10 win over Buffalo in late September. Earlier in the year, after the Ravens beat the Bengals in a shootout in Cincinnati, John Harbaugh told m
PLAYOFFS RAVENS BILL JACKSON MILLER
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