The Buffalo Bills may have gone into their Thursday night game against the Rams as Super Bowl favorites, but there was still a layer of uncertainty about just how good this team actually was. It’s the Bills after all, an organization that hasn’t quite delivered on promise and potential in the past.
However, they certainly delivered on Thursday, overcoming four turnovers to dominate the defending Super Bowl champions 31-10 on the Rams’ home turf on the night they raised their Super Bowl banner.
It was an inspired performance, but one win doesn’t earn anybody a Super Bowl. So what from the game was most important for fans to keep in mind?
Here are the three key takeaways from the game, as I see it.
Stefon Diggs is playing less…which is a good thing
After playing 79% of snaps per game last year, Stefon Diggs was only on the field for 64% of the Buffalo Bills’ offensive snaps in their win over the Rams. It wasn’t simply because the Bills were rotating through all of their receivers at the end of a lopsided game because Gabe Davis played every snap but one during the game.
No, the Buffalo Bills made a strategic decision to take Stefon Diggs off of the field more in Week 1, and that’s a good thing for Diggs, and absolutely doesn’t mean Davis has “passed” him in any way.
On his 37 snaps, Diggs ran 30 routes, which was just eight fewer than Davis on 20 fewer snaps. Diggs was also targeted nine times to just five for Davis. That’s 30% targets per routes run for Diggs, which is an incredibly high number. He was at 24% last year.
So Diggs seems likely to lose out on run blocking assignments and maybe a handful of targets but should still be able to run a high number of routes and be the focal point of the passing attack. As a result, Diggs appeared fresh and more electric when he was on the field. He toasted Jalen Ramsey on a deep touchdown and hauled in eight of his nine targets for 122 yards and that touchdown on the day.
For the Bills’ star receiver, it seems like less is more.
New look defensive line delivered
In our recap, we covered how dominant the Bills’ defensive line was on Thursday. They recorded seven sacks and 15 quarterback hits while also stuffing the Rams’ rushing attack. While much has been made about the addition of Von Miller, and the improvement from young defensive ends Greg Rousseau and AJ Epenesa, I think not enough people are talking about Jordan Phillips and Boogie Basham.
Phillips is a former second-round pick of the Dolphins who was released and then broke out with the Bills in 2019, before signing a lucrative free agent deal with Arizona. When that didn’t work out, he came back to Buffalo and re-introduced himself with a bang, notching four tackles, 1.5 sacks, and two quarterback hits.
Jordan Phillips was a FORCE in the Bills season opener:
🔹 2 sacks
🔹 6 total pressures
🔹 90.0 pass rush grade pic.twitter.com/jrWmp2u355— PFF BUF Bills (@PFF_Bills) September 10, 2022
The emergence of Phillips is important with Ed Oliver limping off the field twice with an ankle injury. While Oliver says he’ll “be alright,” Sean McDermott admits that Oliver is sore and they will take it one day at a time with him. If Phillips is able to keep playing like this, the Bills can be cautious with Oliver’s snap count until he can get back to 100%.
They can also afford to do that because second-year-pro Boogie Basham stepped up in a big way on Thursday too. Despite playing inside at Wake Forest, Basham has been primarily a defensive end with the Buffalo Bills. When Oliver went down, he shifted inside to defensive tackle for a handful of snaps, allowing the Bills to rest Phillips, DaQuan Jones, and Tim Settle.
That kind of flexibility will be huge for the Bills’ defensive line, especially with a tough test against Derrick Henry coming up.
Josh Allen is running too much and the RBs are doing too little
Josh Allen was the Buffalo Bills’ leading rusher again on Thursday, totaling 56 yards on 10 carries. That fact in and of itself isn’t an issue. Allen is dynamic with the ball in his hands and has been more judicious with his scrambling, really only running now on designed play calls and when the pocket is truly collapsing.
The issue is that Allen was still running late in the game when the Bills had the win in hand. That should make the fanbase nervous.
Allen has shown the ability to take big hits and get right back up, but the Bills don’t need to be taking that kind of risk with their star when they have Super Bowl aspirations.
The bigger issue is that the Bills may not have another option to wind down the games.
Devin Singletary looked really strong, carrying the ball eight times for 48 yards, but he’s a smaller back and the team has not shown a willingness in the past to have him grind out hard yards to seal a win. Zack Moss is the running back most well-built to do that, but he was inconsistent on Thursday, showing flashes of power on one run and then getting stuffed on others.
Then he fumbled trying to earn extra yards late in the game.
And rookie second-round pick James Cook fumbled on his first touch and wasn’t given another opportunity for the rest of the game.
While it didn’t hurt them on Thursday, the Bills will need another running back aside from Singletary to step up and gain the trust of the coaching staff. The team had success on the ground early in the third quarter and will need to keep doing that in order to win, but that success can’t keep coming almost exclusively from Allen.
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