Josh Allen's Miscues, the Broncos Without Nix, and the Juggernaut Seahawks

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1:07Diante Lee:Welcome to the Ringer NFL Show. I am your host, Shiel Kapadia. Today we are talking about the two divisional round games that were played on Saturday. A Bills-Broncos thriller. Denver advances, but we'll have to move forward without Bo Nix. Can they win a Super Bowl with Jarrett Stidham? And where does the blame fall for the Buffalo Bills this time as they fall short once again? And then the night game, Seahawks, just with a laugher against the 49ers. Are they the team to beat the Seattle Seahawks? Who knew? Maybe they are right now. To talk about it all, we are going to have my friend from the Ringer, Deontay Lee.

1:45Diante Lee:Join me. Let's take a break. We'll come back with Deontay. The Ringer NFL Show is presented by FanDuel FanDuel's got it all Same game parlays, quick bets for jumping in live And your way so you can build the bet that fits your play Plus don't miss out on the NFL playoffs all month long Download the FanDuel app or head to FanDuel.com Slash Ringer NFL to get started 21 plus and present in select states Or 18 plus and present in D.C., Kentucky, or Wyoming Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com, call 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut.

2:39Diante Lee:All right, we are back here on the Ringer NFL show. Let's start with Bills, Broncos, Deontay. Just a devastating game for both fan bases, But this Broncos story, I don't remember anything like this. You know, they go from euphoria, win that thrilling overtime game against the Bills, advance to the AFC Championship game. And during the game, we have no idea that anything's wrong with Bo Nix. And then Sean Payton goes to the podium afterwards and says, Bo Nix has suffered a season-ending broken ankle on the second-to-last play in overtime and is out for the remainder of the season. So now the Broncos host the AFC Championship game next week with Jarrett Stidham.

3:21Diante Lee:Deontay, we are one win away from Jarrett Stidham being in the Super Bowl. So here's my question to you. We have seen weird things happen all season. This has been an especially weird NFL season. You and I are, we remember Super Bowls of the past. We remember Nick Foles in 2017. We remember just sometimes everybody counts a team out because of an injury like this. and weird things happen. Is there any chance that the Denver Broncos with Jarrett Stidham can still win the Super Bowl? I think yes, because I think no matter who wins on the other side of the AFC bracket, be it Drake May or CJ Stroud or Patriots offense, Texans offense, I should say, Denver's defense should feel confident, especially coming off of the performance they just had against Josh Allen, one of the three best quarterbacks in the NFL, that they can force turnovers, right?

4:13And I think that, you know, this game was weird in a lot of ways. I think it's really hard, I think, to have sat for like any of like these 30 minute increments and feel like you had a grasp on the flow of the game because things were swinging so often between early turnovers for Buffalo. Denver's offense having absolutely nothing in the third quarter. And then you get a pretty electric finish between late in the fourth quarter in the overtime. but I do think if you're Denver on the whole, you should feel like we're not going to see another offense that runs the ball as well as Buffalo can run the ball at their best.

4:44And if we can just force a few turnovers, then it is within the realm of possibility that you can make a Super Bowl run.

4:50Diante Lee:I think you're definitely rooting for the Patriots. We're recording this, you know, Saturday night after the first two games. So I think you're definitely rooting for the Patriots because that Texans defense against Jared Stidham making his what fifth start in the NFL. Val, that's just going to be a tall, tall task. But to build on your point, here's the case. Great coach, Sean Payton, great defense. They'll be at home and they're facing a flawed opponent. This is not a juggernaut, regardless of who it's going to be. It's not a juggernaut coming in where you're just like, oh man, you have no chance here.

5:22Diante Lee:So Sean Payton has an entire week to figure out a game plan that could potentially work. We did watch him with the Saints, you know, Teddy Bridgewater. He would have different guys come in and they would find ways to win a lot of games. There were stretches there where they were underdogs and they were winning games without Drew Brees. And then here's the most interesting thing to me, Deontay. We've talked a lot about Sean Payton this year. And I don't think there's anything Sean Payton would like more for his legacy than to win a Super Bowl with Jarrett Stidham. I've said it a million times. He's a great coach.

5:54Diante Lee:He's proven it again this year. He also doesn't hide the fact that he believes, he may believe he's the greatest coach of all time. His arrogance is only matched by like his opening script, which was terrific in this game. So this is a very funny little interesting side story to me where we all look at it and go, the Broncos are cooked. And I know there's a part in Sean Payton. I don't know if it's head, heart, gut, where it is on his body where he's saying, I'm going to go win the Super Bowl with Jared Stidham. and 25 years from now, when you're talking about the great Bill Belichick and Andy Reid, my name's going to be right there with all those guys.

6:34Look, I'm sure that that is absolutely an aspiration of his, right? I think you can take some of the games they played in the second half of the season. I think about their game against the Raiders. You think about their game against the Chiefs. You think about, you know, just kind of how they played in the second half of the season when they didn't have much of a passing game going and they were kind of able to change gears and get into, hey, we're going to manage first and second down, get to third and two, throw the ball out in the flat and you were just going to be banging your head against the wall as a defensive coordinator because there's nothing you can do against our efficient ground game I do think though if you're trying to lay out what the pathway looks like you have to be really worried about Denver's rushing attack in this game right and I don't know if it was I don't know how much of this I think comes down to just their short possessions in the third quarter because I thought in the first half they move the ball on the ground decently maybe not as well as you would have expected given the way that Buffalo has struggled in terms of run defense on the whole of the season.

7:27But them not being able to really dominate the trenches up front, losing to Ed Oliver when he was in the game, losing to Deone Walker throughout the game. I think you have to be a little bit nervous about what game flow would look like, even if you're trying to chart out the most optimistic path.

7:41Diante Lee:It's backs against the ball. It's unlikely. It's not no chance. I think that's how I would, that's how I would describe it. That, you know, especially again in this wild season that there is a chance on Knicks just, I mean, that's tough for him. You know, that, that is so tough to put in all this work, the entire season, OTAs, minicamp training camp, all season. You are one of the surprise teams in the NFL. He goes down the field, that last drive and regulation makes that beautiful throw to Marvin Mims down the left sideline there to give the Broncos the lead. I mean, if they win the Superbowl, that's like one of the plays you're talking about years from now, when you're talking about this Superbowl run.

8:20Diante Lee:And we were talking about the play where he got injured, where he goes down, he pops up, he throws it the very next play. You would have never known. That's why this is so weird, because I imagine there are Broncos fans who are driving home after the game, who are out and about celebrating the victory. And it wasn't even in your head. You know, sometimes you have a game where then you're checking your phone. All right, I need to check updates for the quarterback because he went down in the second quarter. This wasn't that they didn't mention it on the broadcast. and then all of a sudden you get the news after the game.

8:50Diante Lee:So tough for Bo Nix, tough for Broncos fans, but let's see what the Texans and Patriots show us on Sunday and let's see what this matchup looks like next week. All right, the other side of the ball here, Deontay. I suspect before the Knicks injury, this was going to be the biggest story, I think potentially coming out of wildcard weekend and that's the Buffalo Bills failing to get to the Super Bowl once again. And I want to give you my take on this And I want to try to offer a nuanced take because I do feel like this is one where people on both sides are going to be yelling crazy things. That's right.

9:25Diante Lee:So you tell me if I'm able to pull this off or not. I am sympathetic to Josh Allen's emotion he showed after the game. For those that didn't see it, he is up there at the podium with tears coming down and saying, I let my teammates down. I do think he's a great player. I think there will be a year when he gets over the hump. Bills fans, I'm not going to tell you when that is because I don't know how much more heartbreak you can take. But having said that, I just think it's fair to point out that the Bills lost this game in large part because Allen didn't play well enough and made too many mistakes.

9:57Diante Lee:And I don't think that should be controversial. I don't think that should be a hot take. I just think that's the truth. I think it's OK to expect greatness when you have someone who you think is a great player, who's a future Hall of Famer, who's in his prime, who has a big opportunity here to get to the Super Bowl to get over the hump. And he has four turnovers. Even if you say, hey, two weren't really on him, that's fine. Two were on him, I think. He had a terrible play at the end of the first half where you're trying to be aggressive. He scrambles. He doesn't protect the football. He fumbles.

10:26Diante Lee:And now you give the Broncos three points in a game that ended up going to overtime. After Bo Nix throws that interception in the second half, Josh Allen takes a deep shot. Deep shot. He's intercepted on that. You don't get any points after getting a turnover when it looked like you were to control of the game. And then Dawson Knox on what looked like a touchdown for them. End of regulation, third down. He's got him. I know he was pressured. He misses the throw. And I know everybody misses throws from time to time, but I'm sorry, in a high leverage spot, in addition to those other mistakes, that was one that really could have changed the game.

11:02Diante Lee:So I know the Bills don't have a great team. They needed Josh Allen to be great and he wasn't. And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that out loud. All right, what do you agree with? What do you disagree with there? I think I'm right there with you. Funnily enough, I think ironically, I think my takeaway from this game is really similar to the conversation that me, you and Steven were having on this show last year after the Ravens-Bills divisional game, right? Where, yes, this is an excellent quarterback who did give his team an opportunity to get back in the lead, to have a chance to put this game away late.

11:35But you look at those, you look at those sequence of turnovers and it's, it's rarely just the turnovers in a vacuum it's almost always how the turnover look and then what it immediately did to game flow right late in the second quarter you really probably you really could have just been playing out the string to get to halftime but i'm not mad at trying to make a push to see if you can get in field goal range because you're playing at altitude that extends your range right i think that you should be feeling good about trying to push i like that decision just flat out i Same with the scramble. I wasn't mad at the scramble for Josh Allen.

12:06I thought that was good.

12:07Diante Lee:Yeah, especially with a superstar veteran quarterback. I feel good with the way guys are kicking now that it's a high-scoring game. Your defense isn't great trying to get points there. So I actually disagreed with the broadcast there, not to interrupt you, but just wanted to make that distinction. Go ahead. No, I'm right there with you. And I think that, again, game flow matters, at least so much for me, right? They have been moving the ball at will in the first half, especially on the ground. I thought there was an opportunity to really catch Denver on their heels going into the half. Not that they were going to put together a touchdown drive, but you get in range, maybe get an opportunity, you know, to take a big deep shot, even with the scramble.

12:41Hey, get what you can, see if you can maybe squeeze some extra out of it. He's really loose with the football. He has to own that 100 % of the way to come right back out. And it's a tough situation to be in when your pass protection breaks down as quickly as it did in the first drive coming out of the half and you get blindsided. But again, ball security matters, right? And for the big quarterback, one of the selling points of why Josh Allen is a game-breaking quarterback is that the guy is built like an ox, right? He's one of those humongous 6 '4", plus 230-plus pound guys that edge rushers struggle to take down, and we expect him not to fumble even if he's taking sacks.

13:16So to have those back-to-back turnovers, which allowed Denver to get points in a really cheap way without having to be efficient on offense, and they were not towards the end of the half and opening up the second half, really all the way throughout the third quarter, I think that those really sting. and I would say while all of the misses are not on him, the one that was most disappointing was the deep shot he takes, which ended up being intercepted, right, by the backup safety in Denver, I'm locked. Because all he has to do is lay that ball out. I just think to your point in the same conversation that we had with Lamar Jackson last year, you just can't because you are playing up against teams that are just talented enough to take that margin and win a game with it, even though they're playing flawed on the opposite side of the ball.

13:59and for an MVP, I don't think it's beyond the pale to say, hey man, can we protect the ball a little bit better than what we saw on Saturday?

14:08Diante Lee:Yeah, he made some great plays. He's always, almost every game you watch him, he will make great plays and he made a lot of great plays in this game, but I just look at it and it didn't unfold. If you told me they were going to lose, I didn't think they were going to lose this way. I didn't think this would have been the way it unfolded. I would have thought, man, they got gashed for 200 on the ground. Their defense just didn't, you know, couldn't get any stops and Josh Allen was great, but you know what? It wasn't enough. And it's kind of not what happened. If you watch this game, all right, a lot of controversy at the end of this one, Deontay.

14:37Diante Lee:So we're having a whole different conversation. If that throw to Brandon cooks, which that was a great throw to your point that was in overtime. And if he makes that catch downfield, Josh Allen just launches one downfield. It looks like Brandon cooks has it. It's third and 11. You're saying this isn't all, this isn't on one of the best plays of the playoffs so far. Jaquan McMillan wrestles the ball out of his hands. Officials rule interception. I thought it was a catch. I swear I watched it seven times. And every time I watch it, I go, it looks to me like he has control. His body is on the ground.

15:16Diante Lee:He is being touched. And then the ball gets wrestled away. That's not how it was ruled. Gene Steratore, who's their officiating analysis, said he agrees with the NFL's call. really the only officiating analysis analyst that I really like because he will go against the NFL is Terry McCauley. And he tweeted out a player going to the ground to catch a pass, must maintain control during and after contact with the ground. That's the rule apply accordingly. And he said that they ruled it correctly. Now I kind of feel like you did have control going to the ground. What did you, what did you think when you watch that?

15:55Diante Lee:What do you think about it now? I think that this is one of the specific plays that is confounded no matter how detailed they try to be with the rules, right? Because there's just a confluence of events in a way that doesn't always come up when we're talking about possession, right? Because in most scenarios, if Brandon Cooks is not being tackled by Jaquan McMillan as that ball is going down and the ball just ricochets out as he rolls on his back, we say incomplete, right? Because he doesn't survive contact on the ground. And I try to apply that. The only issue with that in this scenario is that now we're talking about issues of dual possession, which typically favor the offense.

16:34And we do allow receivers to use a defender's body to help secure possession when we're talking about these dual possession instances. But the fact that the ball bounced off the guy's shoulder plate and then he tries to trap it, the ball is never really secured in both hands. I think there's just enough space where if you're an official and your initial ruling is interception to stick with it. I think if Brandon Cooks had plucked that out of the air and then in rolling over and wrestling with McMillan, McMillan comes out with it, you probably grant him dual possession there and say that, hey, offense wins.

17:07But I think this was probably the one instance where I would be okay with a defender rolling over the top of an offensive player coming out with the ball and you calling it a turnover. But that's just like, again, about as tough a way to have a game decided. If it got ruled a catch on the field,

17:22Diante Lee:it feels like you probably just stick with that. They're not overturning that at all. There's no way you're overturning it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how many different ways Bills fans can just have their hearts broken. I mean, that's just going to be another play. That's just like, how many of these can they have year after year? Man, again, I felt Josh Allen's pain. This isn't me. Like, I actually love that when I see a player lose like that and show that a bullshit. I'm just like, great. That shows how much it means to him. He wants to control it in this, you know, in these 15 minutes in front of the media.

17:54Diante Lee:They don't want to be doing that, but he just can't control it. It's shortly after the loss. He's feeling it. He probably feels what we were saying that I am a great player. I expect more of myself. And if I don't, because in the, in the, in their past losses, it wasn't like this. He did everything he could and they still lost. This one was different where it felt like he was responsible for again. And it's not everything. I know there were other things in this game, but he was responsible for some of the key mistakes, high leverage plays where that hasn't been the case in the heartbreaking losses of the past.

18:26Diante Lee:So again, they just find a different way here, which is really, really tough. Hang in there. The funny thing for me is like, even with the turnovers today, you can still make a very credible argument that he's still the best player that we saw in the playoffs so far. Yeah. Like I would say that he was probably the most valuable player that we've had in the postseason up to this point. Right. Like, and that's factoring in all the missed opportunities. the fact that they weren't able to connect on deep passes, the turnovers, you know, not being able to have the kind of pocket field that we typically associate with Josh Allen in high leverage moments.

18:57Still, with all of those things that went wrong, I don't feel like there's any quarterback understanding that I would trust more in the postseason than I have Josh Allen so far.

19:06Diante Lee:Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah, I totally agree with that. That's why one game sample, you know, this is what happens here. The defensive pass interference penalties on that last Broncos drive, Deontay, I don't know if you had strong takes on those. There were two of those for 47 yards. I think that'll be a big talking point coming out of this game. I thought the first one was bogus, but I think that the Bosa roughing the passer probably gets called most of the time anyway. So that one, it's like, all right, they got 17 yards instead of 15 yards. And the second one I kind of thought was legit when they slowed it down.

19:43Diante Lee:I don't like that that's, you know, I hate underthrow defensive PIs, but they're a real thing. Trey White was wrong. It's pass interference. Every DB who gets caught in those underthrow scenarios that end up undercutting the receiver as they're in the air, they get called for it a thousand percent of the way. The Teron Johnson one, I'm with you. Totally bogus. And I think the referees totally misplayed that. You wave off the defensive pass interference. You reward them with the roughing the passer. They get their 15 yards. That very much felt like referees just saying, Hey, this one's a more punitive one.

20:14Diante Lee:Yeah, man. And they had those two plays. I mean, you got two plays where your starter goes down. The backup has to go in. They attack the backup. And those are literally two of the biggest plays and two touchdowns. Two of the biggest plays of the game. And I can't even hate on Dane Jackson because that was a dime from Bo Nix. He wasn't like, you know, he didn't get cooked on that play or anything. It took a great throw, a great catch. And they made the play. But, you know, listen, good job by the Broncos. identifying that right away and saying we are attacking them right now. First one was Darnell Savage coming in as the safety and he overruns it and they get the touchdown and the second one to danger.

20:51Diante Lee:So all these things that had to happen for the Bills to suffer the heartbreak and now they're probably looking at it going, oh my gosh, now the Broncos are advancing and they don't even have their quarterback. You know, it somehow got worse if you're a Bills fan after the game was over. All right, let's take a break. We come back, we get to Seahawks. This episode is brought to you by the Home Depot. Spring is starting, so it's time to wake up your yard. And at the Home Depot, they've got everything you need to do it with low prices guaranteed. Mowing your lawn is a dream with top brand outdoor power tools like the Ryobi 40-volt mower with up to 50 minutes of runtime.