ATLANTA — It was a Monday night of firsts for the Buffalo Bills, and certainly not of the good kind.
Heading into 2025, the Bills had never lost two straight games heading into their bye week under head coach Sean McDermott.
Then Atlanta happened.
The Bills haven’t been any worse than first place in the AFC East since the end of the 2023 season.
Then Bijan Robinson, Drake London and all 396 of their yards for the Falcons happened, dropping the Bills to second in the division behind the New England Patriots.
After four straight victories and looking like they were on top of the NFL world, the Bills look like a shell of their former selves after a 24-14 loss to the Falcons on “Monday Night Football.”
Now with a 4-2 record and the bye week ahead, the Bills are suddenly a broken contender.
That doesn’t mean the Bills will be broken forever, though. This loss, like when the Bills began last season 3-2, may just be a learning moment that becomes a catalyst for another winning streak. But even last year, a two-game losing streak forced the Bills into immediate action to improve their roster.
This time around, the term “self-scouting” for the bye week is only scratching the surface. McDermott will be akin to a fossil hunter combing miles upon miles of terrain to find the answers. Is it scheme? Is it play calling? Is it fundamentals? Is it personnel? Is it all of the above?
The defense had its fair share of issues, specifically in the first half — and we’ll get to them. But it’s really difficult to ignore the 5,000-pound elephant in the room.
The once explosive Bills offense has been completely zapped. The can’t-be-stopped rushing attack has been bottled up twice in a row. And it’s left the Bills out of answers against two teams who look primed to be in the playoff mix by season’s end.
After the game, once quarterback Josh Allen had grown tired of looking at his phone, he took a deep sigh and sat in the chair at his locker room stall. Practice-squad quarterback Shane Buechele sat in a chair facing Allen, just to his right. Then backup Mitchell Trubisky took a seat facing Allen, just to Allen’s left. Before long, offensive coordinator Joe Brady walked up, put his luggage behind him, pulled up a chair squarely in front of and facing Allen. It was a diamond formation, attempting to decode why the Bills were unable to move the ball consistently for a second consecutive game.
This wasn’t the despondent Allen that we’ve seen in the past after losses. He was frustrated, but eager to figure things out with his inner circle.
And when you begin to analyze where it all went wrong, it’s hard to look anywhere else but the production, or lack thereof, from the boundary receivers.
The Falcons were challenging the Bills to beat them down the field and with their receivers outside the numbers. They went after Allen with blitzes all night, daring the offense to find the answer down the field.
Spoiler alert: The Bills couldn’t and didn’t.
The Bills can talk about how much they love their wide receivers all they want, but they are actively telling us differently by how they deployed their offensive personnel when they needed to string drives together in the second half.
Before the Bills fell behind 24-14, effectively ending the game, they were on the field for a total of 25 offensive plays, including penalties. They were in 22 personnel — meaning one receiver, one running back, one fullback and two tight ends — on 56 percent of those plays. They were averse to 11 personnel, because it took their best chance of moving the ball off the field.
The Bills have seen teams shut down their boundary receivers, like Keon Coleman, in recent weeks. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
If that doesn’t paint the picture enough, here’s some more.
Over the last five games, the Bills’ boundary receivers — meaning everyone not named slot receiver Khalil Shakir — have averaged 89 yards per game, collectively. That group hasn’t gone over 100 yards since Week 2 against the Jets, and even in that game, they barely went over with 104 yards. Against the Falcons, they could only manage 98 yards — and that’s including the bogus garbage-time yards near the end. London had 60 more yards than Keon Coleman, Elijah Moore, Joshua Palmer and Tyrell Shavers combined.
In the buildup to the game, we analyzed how the Bills have a clear wide receiver problem again in 2025, just as they did in 2024, and it’s coming to the surface through both a lack of separation from their boundary targets, and an overall shocking aversion to throwing the ball 20 or more yards down the field. Allen, despite having an incredible downfield throwing ability, is attempting those passes at one of the lowest rates in the NFL.
It all left Allen, facing a ton of blitzes and pressure in his face, to pull a rabbit out of his helmet time and time again on Monday. There were no easy answers to the test.
“It was too hard — too hard tonight on our quarterback,” McDermott said. “It doesn’t need to be that hard all the time where he’s having to run out of the pocket.”
It’s really difficult to see where those answers are going to come from with the receiver room as it’s currently constructed.
After a great second half against the Ravens in Week 1, Coleman has gone from a potential breakout candidate to a barely average receiver in the five games since. Palmer had a pop play to begin the game for 45 yards, but that was the extent of their successful downfield throwing. However, he has been wildly inconsistent all season and left the game with an ankle injury.
The only other receiver who didn’t play on Monday was Curtis Samuel, and after more than a season of evidence, the Bills certainly aren’t going to convince anyone that he’s a big part of the solution.
Just as it looked both during and at the end of the 2024 season, the Bills are missing another piece to put their receiver room over the top. And the last time it looked this way, general manager Brandon Beane sprang into action with an in-season trade.
For now, Allen and Brady look out of options. Brady has his crutch plays that make the Bills, at times, predictable. It’s all about manufacturing yards after catch rather than pushing the ball down the field. He wants to run the ball, and run it a lot behind one of the best offensive lines in the NFL — and who could blame him?
The offensive line can only do so much. They and James Cook remain the best thing about the Bills offense right now outside of Allen’s heroics, but without anything scary outside the numbers to keep the defense honest and off-balance, they’ll just continue to see the same approach that they’ve seen the last two weeks. Stacked boxes and daring the Bills to win down the field.
Even with that accounted for, Brady isn’t doing Allen any favors by going back to the well one too many times with his favorite calls. If one play is working, he’s known for hammering it until it doesn’t work anymore. But when it stops working, the Bills get behind in the down-and-distance game, and don’t have the consistent air attack to bail them out like they used to.
They are quick to say what worked last year can’t be depended on. Well, here’s a prime opportunity heading into a bye week. Ty Johnson was a great third-down back last year, but he hasn’t had the same effectiveness. Any snaps with Cook off the field, especially in high-leverage situations like third down, aren’t challenging enough for a defense.
The Bills couldn’t have asked for many more opportunities on offense. The defense was horrendous in the first half, and they allowed only three points in the second half. They went from allowing 9.3 yards in the first half to the inverse of those digits, allowing merely 3.9 yards per play in the second. Heck, the Bills even blocked a field goal attempt to keep it a seven-point deficit.
The Bills had three drives in a row with a chance to tie the game at 21, and they gained a combined 31 yards on those three possessions — 2.2 yards per play, for those wondering.
That’s not to excuse the defense, but we knew they’d have their issues. It was a snakebitten day right from the start. On a day they knew the Falcons would test their run defense, the Bills lost a starting defensive tackle, DaQuan Jones, to a pregame injury in which he unpromisingly “popped” his calf. The Bills were down to a three-man rotation, and then lost middle linebacker Terrel Bernard to boot.
Even with all of that, allowing nearly 400 yards to only two players is outright embarrassing. The Falcons, ridiculously, didn’t complete a single pass to a wide receiver other than London, but it didn’t matter. The tackling issues against Robinson were on full display all game long, too.
BIJAN ROBINSON 81-YARD TD!
BUFvsATL on ESPN
Stream on @NFLPlus and ESPN App pic.twitter.com/Nfb1IdvNK8— NFL (@NFL) October 14, 2025
Even with all that, a Bills offense with Allen as its quarterback should be able to score more than 24 points in a game. And that’s what the Bills have to swallow on their way to a week off from football practices and a game.
If you’re a Mr. or Mrs. Brightside, there’s at least something to rest your optimism on as the week away approaches.
The Bills haven’t lost more than one game to NFC opponents per year since the Allen playoff streak began in 2019. The Bills take on the NFC South Carolina Panthers in Week 8. On top of that, the Bills are a whopping 8-0 coming out of the bye with McDermott as head coach.
If those two trends get bucked like the ones that were uprooted on Monday night in Atlanta, this may go from a teachable in-season moment to a much, much deeper problem not even halfway through the regular season.
What defines a season is not the individual sections of a year, but what a team learns from them and how they evolve. And the 2025 season is far from over, with plenty of time for the Bills to figure themselves out.
As for now, the Bills have nothing to do but stew on another game they had every opportunity to steal in the second half. A game that championship-level teams often win, when everything else screams that it should be a loss.
The Bills just haven’t been that team the last two games.
“I mean, it’s gonna eat at me the next two weeks,” Allen said.
Something tells me Josh won’t be the only one.
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