Could Sean McDermott’s game management cost the Bills a shot at the title?

Players win games. Coaches lose them. That’s the adage in the NFL.

And Bills coach Sean McDermott just lost another.

With roughly a minute and a half left in Sunday’s game, the Bills still had a long way to go to take the lead, but quarterback Josh Allen was playing so well that a comeback seemed possible. Imminent, maybe. As the Bills entered the low red zone with about 75 seconds left, FOX Lead NFL Analyst Tom Brady went so far as to say that Buffalo was “in great position.” The Bills were down nine points with a touchdown on the way. And they still had all three timeouts.

Brady, the best situational player in the history of the game, laid out their path to victory: throw for a touchdown, complete the PAT, kick off, stop the Rams for a three-and-out with a timeout after each play and then bring the ball into field-goal range for a win. 

Brady warned: Whatever the Bills do, they cannot run the ball on the goal line.

But that’s exactly what they did.

At the 1-yard line with one minute and six seconds left, Allen ran the ball on a QB sneak. The Rams stuffed Allen, and the Bills had to call a timeout. Their chances of winning plummeted.

“Now you’ve gotta onside kick. We’ve got a 3% chance on an onsides kick. … That changes the entire complexity of the last minute and two seconds of the game,” Brady said. “Even if they score, what’s the big deal? You’re gonna have to go for an onsides kick. I did not like that one bit. That could’ve just cost them the game right there.”

It did.

Allen had six touchdowns (three passing, three rushing), but the Bills still couldn’t pull out a win.

“His back’s gonna be broken,” former Bills running back and FOX Sports analyst LeSean McCoy said of Allen on “The Facility.” “He’s carrying the whole stadium, the owners, the coaches, the trainers. He carrying Buffalo. He’s carrying everybody.”

The Bills also shot themselves in the foot in the final seven seconds of the game when they called for a punt-block attempt and had only nine men on the field due to a brutal substitution error. That was Buffalo’s coaches kicking their players while they were down.

But back to the goal line. It’s not like McDermott made a call that some might consider arguable — or that you would contend is merely a product of hindsight. It’s pretty empirical that the Bills should not have run the ball. Why? Because of the cost of failure. Even offensive coordinator Joe Brady seemed to understand that on Monday.

“You look at us on the 1-yard line this year, and we haven’t been stopped on a QB sneak outside of this game. The only one that didn’t work going into this game was an illegal formation. … At that point — percentages-wise — the highest percentage play was the QB sneak. But at the same time, the cost at not getting it essentially did cost us the game,” Brady said. “So I have to do a better job in that situation. And it’s something we’re continuing to evaluate. … We’ve got to be better. I’ve got to be better.”

It’s nice of Brady to take the blame there. But this is what head coaches are for. McDermott, who is not a playcaller, has to step in to override his coordinators when they can’t see the bigger picture. McDermott let the mistake happen.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened like this. 

Too often under McDermott, the Bills lose sight of the forest for the trees. They get so concerned with what they need on a single play that they forget to manage the game as a whole. 

Just rewind back to the Bills’ loss to the Houston Texans in Week 5. At the end of the game, the Bills threw the ball, repeatedly, when they should have run it.

The Bills were backed up on their 3-yard line with 32 seconds left, and the score tied at 20-20. The Texans had three timeouts. And Buffalo threw three consecutive incompletions to drain just 16 seconds of clock before punting the ball back to Houston, which needed only five yards to get into field-goal position and kick a game-winner. After the game, McDermott pointed out that the Bills needed a first down no matter what because of the timeouts. But every yard counted and so did every timeout. The Bills’ three failed passes put the Texans in perfect field-goal position.

The Bills are the only team in the past 45 years to be tied or leading in the final minute of the game, inside their own 5-yard line and throw three straight passes, per ESPN Research. 

Did McDermott agree with — or communicate with — Brady during the sequence?

“I’m not going to get into that. I don’t think that’s relevant right now,” McDermott said after the game. “Overall, again, that’s on me. We just gotta do a better job. I’ve got to do a better job in that situation.”

“We needed to wind the clock and move the chains and that’s on me. Overall, that’s on me. I’ve gotta do a better job in that situation.”

Go back further and you’ll find more issues.

There was the Bills’ bungling of the final 13 seconds against the Chiefs in the divisional round of the playoffs following the 2021 season. The Bills were celebrating on the sideline like they’d won the game while Patrick Mahomes was on the other sideline planning his game-winning drive. The score was 36-33, and he had three timeouts — it was far from over. The Bills played prevent defense, which allowed Mahomes and Tyreek Hill to pick up 19 yards on an easy dump-off. On the next play, Buffalo stayed in prevent defense and made it easy for Mahomes to get 25 more yards from Travis Kelce. It was astonishingly poor situational playcalling. And Harrison Butker took the game to overtime, where Mahomes won it.

The Bills finished that season and postseason 0-6 in one-score games.

There are many other examples of McDermott’s issues, including one where the wrong decision seemed to work back in 2017 during his first season as head coach. It was dumping snow, with about six inches on the ground, and the Bills needed a win to stay in playoff contention. There were four minutes left in overtime (with a tie in play), and McDermott elected to punt on a fourth-and-1. The Bills were seemingly playing for a tie when they needed a win to get into the postseason. It was woefully conservative. But it worked. The Bills eventually got the ball back and scored a walk-off touchdown from McCoy. But the win came despite that decision to punt — not because of it.

After the Bills’ loss to the Rams, McDermott is 88-50 as the team’s head coach (including the postseason), but he is 35-31 (53%) in one-score games (including the postseason).

For a point of comparison, Andy Reid is 130-103-1 (56%) and Bill Belichick was 135-102 (57%) in one-score games. Those are the contemporary greats of game management. McDermott isn’t in the mix.

So let’s get back to the present.

Where do the Bills go from here?

Allen is the best football player on the planet. Buffalo can’t waste another postseason with poor in-game management. Because you know who’s lurking to exploit that? It’s Reid and Mahomes. They’ve won 15 straight one-score games. The Bills beat the Chiefs this year, which was actually one of McDermott’s best examples of progress. He aggressively went for a fourth down in the fourth quarter — and Allen ended up with a game-clinching touchdown and a nine-point lead that put the score out of reach of Mahomes. (And still, I was in the building for that final minute and there was absolutely no sense of relief until the clock ticked zero. Because the Bills know what Mahomes was capable of: anything. They learned their lesson in 2021 about celebrating early.)

“You’re going to have some things come up from time to time that you’re going to want to not come up,” McDermott said Monday regarding game management. “But you have to fix them. You’ve got to get them worked out. That’s what we try to do in the days after.”

The Bills’ overarching philosophy has been to trust Allen in these situations — even when it doesn’t make sense. And perhaps that’s where they need to take a step back and rethink how they’re making the decisions. Because it’s possible that Buffalo’s schema for decision-making isn’t working. Instead of plugging the leaks, the Bills need to figure out why the leaks are happening.

It’s not enough to look at their in-game failures and say: We won’t do that again. Every game is different. Every decision is different. McDermott might need a better infrastructure in place so he can quality control his coordinators.

The Bills were not forthcoming about how they manage their late-game situations except to indicate that defensive coordinator Bobby Babich calls the defense and Brady calls the offense. It’s worth noting that Marc Lubick has the title of game management coach. He’s been with the Bills as long as McDermott but only stepped into the game management role in 2020. It’s unclear, however, exactly how involved Lubick gets in these situations and decisions.

“Those are not easy situations overall. There’s a lot of communication that has to unfold. … [We’ll] adjust our process a little and hone that in a little bit closer,” McDermott said.

That process is everything for the Bills. This is a Super Bowl-caliber team. Its coach needs to be ready to make Super Bowl-caliber decisions. And he doesn’t have a consistent track record of doing that.

Prior to joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna.

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