It's Over, Anakin; Josh Allen Has the High Ground.
The Bills, Packers and other teams gained valuable leverage over their toughest rivals in Week 1.
In this jam-packed Week 1 edition of Walkthrough:
The Bills and Ravens rekindled our love of football and the human experience with a Sunday Night masterpiece.
The Packers didn’t really need Micah Parsons to trounce the Lions, but they were still happy to have him.
The Falcons found yet another new way to stuff their fans’ hearts into a food processor and grind them into a smoothie.
Aaron Rodgers impressed in his Steelers debut.
Russell Wilson depressed in his Giants debut.
Plus Week 1 Awards and brief looks back at the Thursday/Friday nighters.
A Jedi’s Guide to Jumping to Conclusions (Or: Conclusions Jump to You Must).
For all the talk about X’s and O’s, Johnnies and Joes, coaches and cultures, football is a game of leverage.
The left tackle bursts from his stance and jams his fists beneath the edge rusher’s shoulder pads. He wins. The cornerback squeezes the wide receiver between his body and the sideline on a go route. He wins. Given proper leverage, the scrub can block (cover, tackle) the Hall of Famer, just as skinny old Archimedes could move Earth itself if only he had a long enough lever and somewhere to stand.
Leverage is all about positioning. The low man wins. Or, in military or Jedi strategy: seize the high ground. Gain the initial advantage so your opponent must attack on your terms.
It’s not jumping to conclusions or getting carried away to state that several teams gained invaluable leverage over their toughest divisional/conference foes on Sunday:
The Bills took every haymaker Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson could hit them with, dusted themselves off, and clocked the Ravens with a last-minute flurry of blows for a stunning 41-40 comeback.
The Packers thoroughly outclassed the Lions 27-13, looking like the far superior team from the opening kickoff to the final gun.
The Buccaneers overcame the absences of two key offensive players and survived an absolutely cuckoo-nanners fourth quarter to escape Atlanta with a 23-20 victory over a division rival that swept them last year.
So the Bills, Packers and Bucs are now right where they want to be.
Like Obi-Wan in the clip above, anyone overreacting to the Bills and Packers victories is underestimating their foe’s power. (No one overreacts, or reacts at all, when terrible things happen to the Falcons.) Jedi and Sith can perform physics-defying CGI triple-backflips to regain the upper hand. So can Lamar Jackson. But they can also get hacked to tiny bits and left for dead on a lava river. Though that could, in turn, make them even more powerful. And evil.
Look: the Star Wars prequels were poorly written, making metaphors clumsy. Granting an early advantage to a bitter rival is bad, is what I’m saying.
Let’s take a closer look at Sunday’s three most important “leverage” games.
Game Spotlight: Buffalo Bills 41, Baltimore Ravens 40
What Happened
This is gonna take a few paragraphs.
Derrick Henry barreled for 123 yards and a touchdown in the first half. Lamar Jackson added a first-half touchdown of his own against a surprisingly out-muscled Bills defense. The Ravens were poised to take a 20-10 lead into halftime when Josh Allen fired a 22-yard pass to Dalton Kincaid, who tumbled out of bounds in the arms of Marlon Humphrey just before the clock reached 0:00. Matt Prater, filling in for injured Tyler Bass, kicked a 43-yard field goal that would come to make a big difference.
The Ravens extended their lead on a misdirection tunnel screen to Zay Flowers on the opening drive of the third quarter. They appeared to stop the Bills on the next series, but Josh Allen launched a fourth-and-5 yolo ball to Joshua Palmer, drawing blatant pass interference from Jaire Alexander. An Allen-to-Keon Coleman two-point conversion cut the Ravens’ lead to six.
After trading punts so we could all catch our breath, the Ravens built a quick-strike touchdown drive out of another long Flowers catch-and-run and a vintage one-handed touchdown catch up the left sideline by DeAndre Hopkins.
Allen responded by running the table with trick shots like a pool hustler. He dumped off to James Cook against a heavy Ravens blitz for 50 yards, then bootlegged for a touchdown two plays later. But Kyle Hamilton, who suffered a hand injury earlier in the game, intercepted the two-point conversion attempt.
On the next possession, Jackson ran about 75 total yards on a non-Euclidian curlicue scramble for a 19-yard gain on third-and-8, then Henry blasted through a hole for a 46-yard touchdown.
Allen slid at the end of a scramble about one foot short of the first down marker on the next series. A Dion Dawkins holding penalty turned third-and-1 into third-and-11. Nnamdi Madubuike sacked Allen, forcing a punt with 9:27 to play. Game over? Hehehehehehehehe no.
The Bills defense forced a stop. An attempt to pin the Bills at the one-foot line on a punt failed when the Ravens gunner brushed the goalline with the edge of his glove. Allen resumed his Minnesota Fats impersonation, eventually sinking a touchdown to Coleman in the right corner pocket on a fourth-and-2 bankshot off the hands of Dawson Knox.
Ed Oliver punched the ball loose from Henry on the next series; it was the game’s only turnover. Terrel Bernard fell on it on the Ravens 30-yard line. Allen fired a skinny post to rookie tight end Jackson Hawes at the goal line. An Allen sneak failed. A Cook plunge failed. The two-minute warning arrived. Allen leapt over the top for a touchdown …
… But Nate Wiggins blanketed Coleman on the two-point conversion attempt, knocking Allen’s pass away.
The Ravens could not produce a first down to ice the clock. The Bills got the ball on their own 20-yard line with 1:26 to play and no timeouts. Completion to Khalil Shakir. Completion to Coleman, who got out of bounds to stop the clock. Scramble out of bounds. Then a perfectly layered floater to Palmer running a corner route, followed by a slant to Coleman, who put the moves on Alexander to get the Bills to the 9-yard line. Allen, who threw for 251 yards in the fourth quarter alone, knelt a few times to line up the field goal and make sure the Ravens didn’t get another possession.
Finally, Prater split the uprights perfectly from 32 yards out with 0:00 and was carried off the field.
Ain’t football beautiful?
What It Means for the Ravens and Bills
Something something Bills hold head-to-head playoff tiebreaker something something. It’s late, OK?
Both the Bills and Ravens appear to be playing at a higher level than just about every other team in the NFL right now. Either would have beaten any opponent except each other by at least a touchdown based on how the whole league played on Thursday through Sunday.
The Ravens looked tougher, quicker and smarter than the Bills for the first 50 minutes of the game. Yet they gave away so many opportunities: the field goal before halftime, the pass interference on fourth-and-5, the failed pin on the punt, some sketchy play calling (including a half-assed Flowers jet sweep) on their final possession. Losing games in which they outperformed tough opponents must be heartbreaking for the Ravens. Yet they cannot help themselves.
The Bills need to worry about their run defense against opponents that are as physical as the Ravens. (Checks Bills schedule.) (Keeps checking.) Yep, they may need to worry on December 28th against the Eagles.
What’s Next
The Ravens host the Browns, whose quarterback was their starter way back in the 2010s.
The Bills visit the Jets, who somehow beat them in the Meadowlands in 2022 and 2023 and threw a Monday night 23-20 scare into them in 2024.
Game Spotlight: Green Bay Packers 27, Detroit Lions 13
What Happened
The Lions stood pat when they lost their coordinators at the start of the offseason. They stood pat in free agency. They stood pat when center Frank Ragnow retired. They stood pat as injuries piled up in the preseason. They even stood pat when the Packers traded for Micah Parsons, shifting the balance of power in the NFC North.
The Lions then stood miserably pat as the Packers mounted a 17-3 lead by the middle of the second quarter and thoroughly outclassed them in the trenches on both sides of the ball in a game which never felt close.
Parsons was nearly invisible on the stat sheet for much of the afternoon but made an early impact. He applied pressure on Jared Goff on one failed early-game third-down conversion. He later beat Penei Sewell inside to force a rushed throw which was intercepted by Evan Williams. By the time Parsons finally chased Jared Goff down for his first sack with the Packers, the game was no longer competitive.
Jordan Love, meanwhile, faced minimal pressure, allowing him to distribute passes to 10 different targets, most of whom actually caught them.
What It Means for the Packers
Acquiring outstanding, proven players at positions of critical need is apparently good. Who could have predicted it?