I’m sure it was a question that Sean McDermott got a lot Monday, but it was one I felt like I had to ask for myself: Have you ever been through anything quite like that?
The Bills went into the final five minutes of Sunday night’s showdown with the Ravens, who happened to be their last opponent at Highmark Stadium (in last January’s divisional round), down 40–25. With a missed two-point conversion in there, they had to score three times.
And somehow, they did it.
So, sitting in his office for some 16 hours, McDermott racked his brain, with his public relations director Derek Boyko alongside. Boyko, who was together with McDermott in Philly during the Eagles’ Andy Reid years, raised the 2010 Miracle at the (New) Meadowlands. That day, Mike Vick led Reid’s crew back from a 31–10 deficit in the game’s final nine minutes, a comeback capped by DeSean Jackson scoring as time expired on a punt return.
“Yeah, Philly and the Giants,” McDermott pondered, “it was something like that.”
It was really something, period.
The stakes, of course, are apparent. Given the strength of both teams—they’ve combined to get to three of the past five AFC title games (the Bengals account for the other two), only to be thwarted by Reid’s Chiefs—there’s a pretty decent chance the outcome will determine the location of a playoff game. Beyond just that, for everyone involved, there was the opportunity to set the tone for the 2025 season.
Safe to assume, the Bills feel like they’ve set a good one.
So coming out of it, I figured it would be good to get McDermott’s assessment on where the Bills are moving forward after having some time to decompress. Here are a few of his takeaways, with less than a full day to get some perspective on the thriller.
Defense steps up
Believe it or not, McDermott came out of the game having seen a little something from his defense, despite all the struggles in slowing down the Ravens’ freight train of a run game.
“We weren’t doing a great job at times defensively, and to come out needing those stops against Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson, who are great athletes, great runners—to be able to contain them for three straight drives in a situation where they could just slow it down and ground control us?” McDermott said. “That’s a hard ground game to stop for three straight drives.”
Indeed, on those three possessions, the Ravens ran for 12 yards on six carries, and actually were at minus-1 yard on five carries if you take out a 13-yard Jackson scamper, after allowing 226 rushing yards on 23 carries before that. Generally, a struggling run defense doesn’t improve as the game wears on, but somehow, the Bills’ did.
‘We gotta continue to grow this’
That doesn’t mean, for what it’s worth, that McDermott is glossing over those 226 yards on the ground that the Ravens rolled to (Jackson and Henry had actually combined for 236 yards on 19 carries at that point).
“No, there is concern. Listen, we’ve got quite a few new players on that side of the ball; some of those guys are young,” McDermott said. “Just overall defensively, we weren’t where we needed to be in terms of being in our gaps, playing a physical brand of football. And when you do that against those two and that running game, they’re gonna expose you. It’s gonna look bad.
“So you gotta start somewhere, and I was really proud of the guys, how they started, and they came back and re-found themselves, and they ended well. But in between that, that’s not how we’ve played defense here in Buffalo for the better part of eight years. We gotta continue to grow this, and get guys to understand how we do things, and the standard that we expect to play at.”
Where the players met the moment
Of course, the players upheld that standard in just about every way over the back half of the fourth quarter, and highlighted it in a few individual plays. I pulled out three in particular—where it felt like the players met the moment—and presented them to McDermott.
The first was Keon Coleman’s concentration on his fourth-down touchdown catch, tracking the ball off a Dawson Knox deflection and corralling it in the end zone. The second was Ed Oliver’s superhuman punch-out of the ball, as he was trying to get the 247-pound Henry to the ground, which gave the Bills the ball back down 40–32 with 3:06 left. The third was on the next play, on Josh Allen’s seam throw to Jackson Hawes, with the rookie keeping his head and gathering a ball he bobbled at first, for a 29-yard gain to set up another touchdown.
“Yeah, I really believe that we were at our best when it was required the most—that’s a good quality,” McDermott said. “We try to practice some of that. And the players went out and, really, they were doing their jobs on one hand, and on the other, it was elite in so many ways.”
So how do they work on those things? McDermott explained that they try to put pressure on the guys by generating critical situations in practice. It’s not quite the same as in a game, but it sure looked like it had the Bills players prepared.
‘Game-winning plays right there’
There was another hidden big play that McDermott wanted to ascribe to the players’ hard work on the details—Allen’s throw on an out-breaking route to Dalton Kincaid with seven seconds left that set up Matt Prater’s 43-yard field goal to end the first half. McDermott and his staff keep a grid with plays for every situation, based on windows of time, the number of timeouts, and the field position. And, obviously, that one worked to the second.
Kincaid got out of bounds with precisely a second left, which was after the offense executed a 26-yard strike from Allen to Khalil Shakir before that, with Allen and the group rushing to the line afterward to spike it and afford themselves the seven seconds to run the play to Kincaid.
“No timeouts, [25] seconds on the clock, we get a quick two-minute drive,” McDermott said. “That led to three points, which I would say were forgotten about at the end of the game. But those could’ve been game-winning plays right there.”
‘He continues to impress and amaze’
O.K., now there’s the acknowledgment—this doesn’t happen without Allen. He made the throws at the end of the first half and at the end of the game. On the four critical drives where the Ravens knew the Bills had to throw it (one at the end of the first half, then three at the end of the game), Allen was 13-of-17 for 217 yards and a touchdown, and one of the incompletions was a spike. That’s good for a 137.5 passer rating.
Again, these numbers are in situations where pass rushers can pin their ears back and coaches can play coverage. And in thinking about that, I remembered how, when I was at Bills camp, how calm and in command Allen looked, as if the wild bronco of a quarterback had finally figured out how to harness all of his ability.
“When he was younger, what did you call him, an electrical storm?” McDermott said, referencing a phrase I’d borrowed from Todd McShay to describe what watching Allen practice used to look like. “His development, his evolution, he’s really grown, and I think he’s really become a student of the game, a student of the NFL and understanding scheme, and what it takes to win, and what it takes to sustain success in this league week-to-week but also year-to-year, which is also growth.
“It’s just a lot of fun to watch. I’ve got a son who’s grown up, and I was thinking about this as you were talking. My son’s 15 and he gets a chance to watch Josh Allen in his prime. Now, my son’s trying his hand at playing quarterback, but he gets a chance to watch Josh every Sunday, whether it’s on TV or in the stadium. And it’s, What’s next for Josh? He continues to impress and amaze. He’s a heck of a competitor and a great player.”
‘I think it helps buy-in’
As for what this means for the other 52 Bills? Some of the guys have already been to two AFC title games, and so these high-leverage situations aren’t uncommon for them, even if how Sunday night played out was unusual. Still, for the 2025 team as a whole, going through an evening like that can have a lasting effect and will be one they can look back on.
“It’s early, but you always want to win a close game early in the year; I think it helps buy-in,” McDermott said. “And it sounds crazy, saying ‘buy-in’ in Year 9. But it’s for a team to jell and buy into each other, the locker room, to get a little bit closer early in the year, that’s all the residual benefit of a game like that.”
What’s ahead for the Bills?
The other reality of Sunday night?
There’s a pretty good chance these two teams haven’t seen the last of each other for the 2025 season, and McDermott acknowledged that he thought about that as he walked to midfield to shake hands postgame with Ravens coach John Harbaugh. McDermott and Harbaugh worked together for a decade in Philly, starting in 1998 under Ray Rhodes, before the two were both kept on after Reid arrived in 1999.
“I think he understands and expects that and I do as well,” McDermott said. “We have a really good friendship, really good relationship, ton of respect between the two of us. Our families are good friends. So it’s hard. It’s like Andy [Reid]. You play them in the regular season, you turn around, you come off the field, and whether we win or lose, you’re like, Yup, there’s a chance we see them again. That’s just become every year in the AFC.”
And as Sunday night showed again, the rest of us are the beneficiaries of it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sean McDermott Explains Several Benefits From Sunday Night’s Bills-Ravens Thriller.