My challenge to the Bills against Ravens in Week 8
· Yahoo Sports
I’m challenging the Buffalo Bills to do something specific in this Week 8 game against Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens.
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How about a truly convincing win over a quality opponent?
Maybe even a wire-to-wire victory. No comeback needed. Heck, let’s even up it to a two-score margin.
Parity has never been more ubiquitous in this game, which is largely why the NFL is so damn good and endlessly entertaining.
A win is a win in this league, but I can’t write that all wins are viewed as equal.
And existing solely in one-score game land is living dangerously.
Over time, essentially all clubs regress to the mean in those tight contests. Now, teams with superstar quarterbacks and a collection of other excellent players can stay on the right side of the ledger in the hard-fought battles, but it’s not how any organization wants to regularly operate.
And, right now, even at 5-1, just for their reputation and perceived staying power, the Bills are dire need of a game in which they were, undeniably, the better team throughout.
It’s been a while for the Bills to secure that type of a win against a legitimately strong opponent.
Since the beginning of 2020, Buffalo owns the league’s best collective point differential… by an enormous margin. They’ve outscored their combined opponents by 902 points. The Ravens have the second-best point differential in that time frame… at +581 points.
That’s almost unfathomable, isn’t it?
A season ago, the Bills beat the eventual 10-7 Steelers 26-7 in Pittsburgh, a thoroughly dominant, run-game driven thrashing of an eventual above .500 playoff team. That game felt out of reach for the Steelers for the vast majority of the contest. Obviously though, that Pittsburgh team was thoroughly flawed despite the regular-season record it managed.
In the 2024-2025 wild-card round, the Bills beat an upstart 10-7 Broncos team with rookie quarterback Bo Nix 31-7 at home.
Earlier that year, Josh Allen’s thunderous fourth-down scamper late against the, at the time, undefeated Kansas City Chiefs that finished 15-2, catapulted the Bills to a nine-point victory. But even that game got dicey late, of course. And it was Allen’s heroics that lifted Buffalo to a two-score win.
A few weeks prior to that, Allen and Co. commanded the game from start to finish in Seattle against the eventual 10-7 Seahawks in a 31-10 win.
What I’ve listed above are the Bills’ only triumphs by more than a touchdown over teams that finished above .500 in the past two seasons.
And yes, blowout wins over eventual playoff teams are, quite naturally, reasonably rare for every club in the modern NFL. The ability to win close games is what separates the bad from the good and the good from the great.
But Buffalo is past destroying bad-to-average teams.
We know the Bills can do those things.
They’ve been decidedly better at it than anyone else in football in the post-2020 Allen era.
This core mission of this team is beating good teams in January and February, and while they’ll have to wait for their next opportunity to do that, today represents a prime test on the first day of November.
I want to see the Bills start this game with loads of energy, feeding off what should be a raucous crowd, and play sound, reasonably complementary football in a win that won’t have any of said attendees — or the millions watching around the country — gnawing their fingersnails late.
You know, a game in which Buffalo rises to the occasion and sends a message to the rest of the NFL that they, on this afternoon in Orchard Park, were clearly a better team than the Ravens.