The Buffalo Bills were trailing the Los Angeles Rams 44-35 with just over one minute remaining when Bills coach Sean McDermott dialed up a Josh Allen quarterback sneak from the 1-yard line.
The Rams stuffed Allen, forcing the Bills to take their first timeout of the half. Fox announcer Tom Brady criticized Buffalo’s play call and handling of the goal-to-go situation.
‘I did not like that one bit,’ Brady said. ‘That could have just cost them the game right there.’
Brady explained that by burning a timeout, the Bills effectively guaranteed they would have to attempt a low-percentage onside kick to win the game. That wouldn’t have happened if the Bills saved all three of their timeouts, as they had before the ill-fated quarterback sneak.
‘We’ve got a 3% chance on an onside kick,’ Brady detailed on Fox’s broadcast. ‘To me, take three shots throwing it, don’t use a timeout and then you can kick it deep, use your three timeouts and still get the ball with good time.’
NFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.
Buffalo’s approach allowed the team to score a touchdown on a second sneak after the timeout but forced them to try an onside kick. It failed, and the Bills never got the ball back even after forcing a Rams three-and-out.
Los Angeles was able to run the clock down to seven seconds remaining before punting it deep into the Buffalo end zone. According to ESPN’s Bill Barnwell, there were just nine Bills players on the field at the time of the final snap.
Thus, Brady’s words about the Bills sneak call proved prophetic.
‘That changes the entire complexity of the last minute and two seconds of the game,’ Brady said.
Sean McDermott explains timeout after QB sneak vs. Rams
McDermott was asked about the quarterback sneak and subsequent timeout during his postgame news conference. He referred to the 1-yard sneak as Buffalo’s ‘best play all year,’ so he was confident running it.
As such, McDermott acknowledged that taking the timeout ‘felt like the best course of action’ once the sneak failed, given how little time was already remaining in the game.
‘You get two options and neither are great,’ McDermott said of calling the timeout after the sneak or trying to save all three timeouts. ‘So when you’re in that situation, holding three timeouts with the ball, it felt like we were underneath the time overall where we felt like we could get the ball back with a legit chance to win the game with no timeouts.’
McDermott also explained that saving the timeout would have been difficult after the quarterback sneak was stopped.
‘You’re in a pile, number one. [Allen is] in the pile. To unload the pile, get back on the line, that takes some time,’ McDermott told reporters. ‘Whether you’re going to clock it at that point, just to get up off the pile to do all that takes longer than you’d like in that situation.’
McDermott said he and his staff would review the sequence, but he had one main takeaway after the game.
‘At the end of the day, we’ve got to play better overall so we stay out of those situations, quite frankly,’ he said.