Had the Buffalo Bills lost Sunday’s game to the Miami Dolphins, they would be 10-7 and sitting in the seventh seed. Because they won, however, they go into the postseason with an 11-6 record and the second seed, able to remain at home unless they face the Baltimore Ravens in the conference finals.
With so much of their status swinging on a single game, against a divisional opponent trudging through a mountain of injuries, some have questioned the legitimacy of their playoff status. They had the second-best record in the conference (tied with Cleveland, Kansas City, and Miami), but how much better are they than the teams seeded behind them?
“Buffalo, they’re kind of a flimsy two-seed”, former All-Pro CB Richard Sherman said on the Undisputed program. “They’re not the two seed where you’re like, ‘Hey, they’ve been dominant.’ They’ve won five straight, so you give them credit for that, but it hasn’t been a dominant team we’re you’re like, ‘Oh, they definitely should beat Pittsburgh’”.
The Bills enter the playoffs on a five-game winning streak, as Sherman noted, having reached that point after they were sitting at 6-6 and watching their playoff hopes fade. They had lost five out of eight games prior to their current winning streak, the longest of any team in the league to end the season.
Yet the Steelers are on a hot run as well. After losing three straight amid turnover at the quarterback position due to injury, they ended the season with three-straight wins behind Mason Rudolph.
“I can see a scenario where Pittsburgh makes this a muddy, grimy game and they come out of it with a win”, Sherman said, and he laid out a plan for what that would look like. “Najee Harris has a good game, [Jaylen] Warren has a good game, Mason Rudolph doesn’t turn the ball over, he’s efficient with it, they hit the quick game like they have been offensively, Alex Highsmith and the boys on the d-line put a lot of pressure on Josh Allen, and things could get really weird”.
I don’t think anybody plays in a higher percentage of weird games than the Steelers do, but more importantly, it had better be a close game. While they’ve shown the ability to put up 30-plus points recently, I still don’t know if they are equipped to play from behind.
Yet they are 9-2 in one-score games this year, including two of the last three games, albeit by a full touchdown in each case. The only time they won a game by more than one score was their first win in the latest streak, a 34-11 blowout of the Cincinnati Bengals.
That was the first and only time all season they played what you might call a complete game. But how many have the Bills had? Both have relied upon opportunistic defenses. The biggest difference is that Buffalo has a more boom-or-bust, volatile offense with high-scoring potential to make up for its many mistakes. As long as the Steelers keep the margin for error low, they have a real chance.
