For the first time since 1999, their last playoff season, the Bills are over .500 at 7-5 after 12 weeks. But head coach Doug Marrone, while saying he does “appreciate” having a winning record at this point of the season, saying so four times, the team can’t enjoy it much.
“You’ve got to work harder,” said Marrone. “You’ve got to push harder. You’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep working through it. You’ve got to get the best plan. You’ve got to put the players in the best position. It’s always like that. You’ve got an opportunity to play a game and win a football game. Like I said before, when you lose games, it’s hard to get over. It takes a couple days. When you win them, they’re pretty much done right away.”
This weekend’s game against the defending AFC Champion Denver Broncos (9-3), along with a stretch run that has two more 9-3 squads (Green Bay in Week 15 and New England in Week 17) sandwiched between a game at Oakland, is a challenging final quarter of the regular season to try and get Buffalo back into the postseason. And it starts on Sunday with facing off against a “Hall of Fame quarterback” in Peyton Manning with a “lot of playmakers on the perimeter”, according to Marrone, although that could be said for when the Bills face Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady soon as well.
“The line is doing a very good job,” Marrone said of a front five that has allowed a league low 13 sacks and has opened up big holes for running back C.J. Anderson (335 yards rushing and a touchdown in the past two games. “There’s really not a weakness to anything that they’re doing. From a standpoint of personnel, you look across the board and they’re all solid players, if not elevated above that. It’ll be a challenge for our defense.”
Manning’s ability to change plays and confuse defenses at the line of scrimmage is something the second-year head coach admits is “difficult” to deal with, though the four-time MVP’s ability to get skill players like Demaryius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders, Wes Welker, and Julius Thomas “all involved” is what makes Buffalo’s task this weekend to stop the league’s fifth-highest scoring offense (30.1 points per game) so tough.
“Make no mistake about it, he has a lot of good players around him and he’s good enough to get them all involved,” said Marrone. “It’s not just one person. That’s the difficult part about it when you play these types of quarterbacks. You go into a game and you want to take somebody away and, next thing you know, you’re getting your butt kicked by a guy that wasn’t as productive the week before or two weeks before. Then, you throw in the running game and now you have to stop that. That’s just another thing that you have to do. Again, they’re a heck of a football team and it’s going to be a challenge for us and we’re going to get our guys ready to go.”
Linebacker Nigel Bradham believes that the defense should stick to what it has done all season, which has helped make it the fifth-best total defense in the NFL.
“Everybody has their way of attacking him and at the end of the day, we still have to be our defense and play our game,” said Bradham. “We just have to be on point with everything that we do. No room for error and execute very well.”
Bradham called Anderson a “patient runner”, and knows Buffalo will have to stop him in order to have the best chance to stop Manning.
“Great, shifty back and you have great speed and size and then they have a great offensive line, so you’re going against an offense like that who’s balanced where they can do either or you have to make them one dimensional, so that’s what we have to try to do,” said Bradham.
Of course, even limiting the effectiveness of the Broncos offense won’t much if the Bills offense don’t produce more than the 19 points that they had on Sunday against Cleveland. One issue since the bye week has been Sammy Watkins, who has 13 catches for 105 yards in the past four games after 580 yards and five touchdowns in the first half of the season.
Watkins was limited in practice with a hip injury, with Marrone saying the injury that the team has to “be smart” during the week with how much he is given.
“This way he’s well-rested and ready to play,” said Marrone. “It’s going to be important for him to go out there and play well.”
Watkins said the hip, which he said was bruised during the Browns game but was “something that you have to play through”, is “doing pretty good”, and he had a “good day” in today’s practice.
“I’ll be ready for the game,” said Watkins. “I just have to prepare the right way and take care of my body.”
Another problem has been the ineffectiveness of Kyle Orton, who only has four touchdowns to two interceptions since the bye week after nine touchdowns to only three interceptions in the first four games of his starting. While he is facing off against one of the best players at his position, Orton, says he thinks there is “hopefully nothing” different about preparing for this weekend’s game compared to others.
“Hopefully you put that effort in every week and go out and try to score as many points as you can and try to play smart football, so I don’t think we feel any more pressure this week because of the quarterback the defense is facing,” said Orton. “We try to go out and like we faced the last few weeks, we’re playing against a good defense. They give us enough problems to worry about on that side of the ball and we’ll have to play our best game to execute against this defense.”
For the first time since his broken collarbone injury against the Minnesota Vikings in Week 7, C.J. Spiller returned to the practice field with his teammates. Spiller will be eligible for the Week 16 game against Oakland, but Marrone sees it as a “good sign” that he was out practicing today.
Spiller called it an “exciting day” for him and his personal trainer Jon Hernandez, but he is still trying to get to playing condition, as he is taking the potential ability to play against the Raiders “one day at a time”, though that’s the game that has been “pinpointed”.
“We’ve been working tremendously hard for this day and today was successful so we’ll see how it goes, how I feel in the morning and just continue to build from there,” said Spiller. “There’s some fatigue in there but that’s just all about getting the strength back into it and getting it moving back around like normal. For me, it’s nothing that’s concerning or any setbacks that we have right now so it feels good.”
“Just cutting, I haven’t done that in about a month and a half so just cutting, going out with the backs, holding the football again, putting the helmet back on, so it was like a little kid in a candy store today for me. So, I thought today was a successful day for me.”
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