Pat Patriot
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- Mar 19, 2019
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The Bills had the 10-time defending AFC East champions on the ropes. They couldn’t punch them through.
“Well, credit goes to them,” Bills quarterback Josh Allen told reporters after the 24-17 loss to the Patriots. “They played a heck of a game. It’s a really good defense and obviously they’ve got No. 12 over there at quarterback.
“It sucks. Obviously they’re an AFC East division rival and that’s their consecutive whatever it is year winning the division. So we’ve got to find a way to get over that hump, we were playing to put ourselves in position where we could potentially win it. But they played well today and hats off to them.”
The Bills came incredibly close to tying the Patriots atop the division with a week to play. New England’s win made the Patriots the fourth and final team to clinch a division in the AFC, joining the Ravens (North), Chiefs (West), and Texans (South).
The Bills are still in the playoffs, where the No. 5 seed is sewn up. And Allen said the Bills have learned plenty from late-season games against the likes of the Ravens, Steelers, and Patriots.
“If you look at the type of teams we’ve played the last three weeks, they’re all playoff-type teams,” Allen said. “So getting that experience against these defenses, teams we might be able to see again, it’s all valuable experience because playing games in December that mean something; not many people are doing that right now and we’re one of those teams. So it feels good to be in the situation that we’re in and the position that we’re in. But, again, we didn’t do a good enough job today, we’re trying to win a football game. This one hurts for us obviously because we don’t want anybody to win the [AFC] East during our game, that’s one that we’ll take to the heart. So we’ll learn from it.”
The Bills definitely will be a tough out in the playoffs, with the Texans likely the first teams to face them and, if Buffalo wins, the Ravens, Patriots, or Chiefs up next. And the Bills are good enough to disrupt things in the AFC, and to force their way to the AFC Championship for the first time since 1993, the last year the Bills went to the Super Bowl.