Sean McDermott on kicking field goals: I wanted to get points

[KC Wolf]

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The Bills took a 9-0 lead into the second quarter of the AFC Championship Game, but the next two-plus quarters didn’t go nearly as well for them.

Kansas City scored its first touchdown early in the fourth quarter and would outscore the Bills 38-6 until the Bills scored nine late points to make the final score a more cosmetically pleasing 38-24. The six points they scored during the Chiefs’ run came on a pair of short field goals by Tyler Bass on either side of halftime.

After the game, Bills coach Sean McDermott was asked why he didn’t leave one of the league’s best offenses on the field on fourth-and-goal from the 2-yard-line or fourth-and-three from the 8-yard-line.

“I thought about going for it on both occasions. Maybe if I had to do it over again, I would have went for maybe one of them,” McDermott said, via Marcel Louis-Jacques of ESPN.com. “But the one before the half, I wanted to get points. We were having trouble coming up with points, and I wanted to at least have something to show for it going into the half, especially knowing they were getting the ball after half. I’ll look back at that and reevaluate that, especially the one after half there, and as an entire team, we’ll learn from the experience.”

It was the Bills’ first trip to the conference title game since the 1990s, but everyone has seen enough Chiefs games over the last few seasons to know that kicking field goals isn’t going to generate enough points to win a game.