After two weeks of dismal performances, the Buffalo Bills are hunkering down in the desert, and trying to recover and right the ship as they prepare to play the Arizona Cardinals. The Bills elected to stay out west after their game on Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers and have a week in Arizona to get things sorted out.
All Pro defensive end Mario Williams, the Bills most significant free agent signing in decades, is nursing a hand injury but is focused on getting back on the field and putting the past behind them.
“We need to go out and play ball,” Williams said. “Those games are behind us.
“I think the biggest thing for us we are focusing on right now is doing what we can do right now in the present.”
While those games are over, their effect on the team’s psyche remains to be seen. Head coach Chan Gailey acknowledged the difficulty is team is facing trying to recover from last week’s 45-3 loss to the San Francisco 49ers. “I think that they are hurt and if you are not hurt, you are probably in the wrong business,” Gailey said.
“We are not injured, we are hurt but we are not injured. Injured means cannot go. Hurt means you learn to play through it and you try to overcome the deficiency that you have to continue to be successful. I think that is where we are. We are trying to continue to be successful even though we have taken a couple of hard licks the last couple of weeks.”
Gailey went on to clarify that he wasn’t talking about anything that shows up on the injury report, but something much deeper. “I mean your soul is hurt,” Gailey said. “You hurt in your heart. You hurt in your brain. You hurt everywhere when you do not play well. If you are any kind of competitor you are hurt. You want to go out and try to rectify it.”
Gailey sounds like a man in a crisis of the spirit. Perhaps he has taken the wandering-in-the-desert metaphor a bit too far. Unless he gets things turned around, he is going to be on the coaching hot seat soon. Back-to-back losses isn’t the end of the world, the way the Bills has people scratching their heads, including apparently Gailey.
The bulk of the blame has fallen on the defense, as the Bills have become the first team in over 60 years to give up over 550 yard in two consecutive games, and the first team in NFL history to give up both 300 yards passing and 300 yards rushing in the same game, to the 49ers last week. But running back Fred Jackson acknowledges that the offense has a lot of work to do as well. In the 45-3 loss to the 49ers, the Bills didn’t look good on either side of the ball, as they managed just 204 yards of total offense and were 2 of 10 on third down.
“Our defense has taken a lot of heat, but we have not done anything to help them as an offensive unit,” Jackson said. “We scored three points last week. You are not going to beat a lot of people in this league scoring three points.”
Like Williams, Jackson is also trying to look forward rather than back, and focusing on how the Bills can improve. “It is a long season,” Jackson said. “The last two games we played have been ugly for us, but we still have a lot of work to do.
“We have to have a gut check within ourselves and each person on this team is looking at themselves individually and asking what they can do to help make this team better. That is all I can ask of my teammates, and all I can do for myself is what I can do to help get this thing turned around and make plays for my team.”
Things don’t get any easier as the Bills are in the middle of the toughest part of their schedule. This weekend they face the 4-1 Cardinals. Then, after a game against the 1-4 Titans, they face the 5-0 Texans followed by the Patriots again, who beat the Bills 52-28 two weeks ago. They can’t afford losses to the Cardinals, Texans and Patriots if they want to retain hope of salvaging the season.
Hopefully, they have found some answers out there in the desert.
