So it's agreed, then: The only Super Bowl that America should demand after the year we've all had is Bills-Lions. It has all the elements we think we deserve—points, absurd plays, points, easily caricatured main characters, points, long-to-the-point-of-seemingly-interminable-suffering fan bases, points, a coach who wants all his linemen to have touchdowns, more points, another coach who has been slagged repeatedly for not reaching let alone winning the big one, additional points, the MVP and the Coach Of The Year if you're into that sort of thing, further points, towns that fight the odds just by getting out of bed every day, another round of points, drunks jumping through furniture, and one final round of points.
Now comes the hard part, which is coming to grips with the likelihood that we likely won't get Bills-Lions again, and having the fortitude and dignity to refuse to watch whatever matchup the National Football League tries to pretend we'd rather have instead. In other words, if it ain't Bills-Lions, we must cancel the parties, refuse to get dressed on game day, and hate-watch the Puppy Bowl instead. If we can't get it together to do the right thing in November, we may as well give it an honest go in February.
Sunday evening's show, which was immediately hailed as a potential Super Bowl preview by people who say that every weekend from Hallowe'en through Valentine's Day, was the best (and worst, if you're counting all the Lions' injuries) the sport has to offer. The 48-42 final was statistically remarkable on its own, as it was one of the highest scorigami games in history and the Lions' third this year, but the way the game played out was more worthy of note. The Bills led for 55 of the 60 minutes, true, but watching the Lions try and try and try to catch up was a thing of mesmerizing awe.
Detroit went for the first down on a fourth-and-4, converting it and eventually turning it into a touchdown pass to tackle Dan Skipper, made famous a week earlier for vomiting through head coach Dan Campbell's postgame speech, to Campbell’s approval. They went for it on fourth-and-5 and then fourth-and-10 in the same drive, and the fourth-and-10 came with a hook-and-ladder to Jahmyr Gibbs; that drive ended with a touchdown that cut Buffalo's once-massive lead to six. Detroit tried two onside kicks, nearly giving up a return touchdown to Mack Hollins on the first—again, on an onside kick—and nearly recovering the second. And all this happened because Detroit punted the first two times they had the ball, fell behind 14-0, and decided that they would be doing no more of that.
The team that loves to run so it can establish the ass-kicking to come threw the ball 58 times without an interception. In sum, they showed yet again that their offensive playbook is not a guide but a series of tests that doesn't end until everything's been used. Sunday's game was the fifth time this year the Lions have scored more than 40, and it was the most enjoyable of those, because competence plus daring plus desperation is the best kind of anything.
And the Bills? They lost last week, 44-42, so they're fine with letting the other guy get his.
Buffalo scored at least 30 points in their first three games and in each of the last nine, and are on pace to have the ninth highest scoring offense in history—which would be more noteworthy if not for the fact that the Lions are on pace to be fifth. Josh Allen, the aforementioned MVP, has either thrown or run for 15 touchdowns by himself in the last four games, and should have had a 16th; his 10-yard two-hand chest pass to Dalton Kincaid was nullified by a holding call and instead led to one of the game's two field goals, for those of you who hate kickers.
In sum, these two teams put on the sort of show that Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs used to, and in a season when Mahomes has either struggled by his standards or gotten hurt, the Bills and Lions are a high-octane change of pace—especially since these Chiefs have the third-best record after 14 games in league history but share the 607th-best point differential with the 1963 Boston Patriots, who finished 7-6-1. The Chiefs are defined by Mahomes's improvisational gifts, while the Lions are defined by Campbell's disdain for the percentages and the Bills by Allen's general DGAF-fery. This year, the latter two have been by far the better show.
So how do they not meet in the Super Bowl all right-thinking Americans now demand? Well, there's Detroit's mounting injured list, which added defensive players Khalil Dorsey (leg), Alim McNeill (knee), and Carlton Davis (jaw) to what was already the longest docket in the league. Even more frightening is the fact that Campbell's swashbuckling nature got enough of a comeuppance that even he second-guessed himself on the first onside kick that Hollins nearly housed.
Bills coach Sean McDermott broke the headset wall by saying he wasn't sure what Campbell “was thinking there, but it paid off for us." Worse, Campbell agreed.
“Obviously, now sitting here in hindsight, after them taking it down to the [five]-yard line, yeah, I wish I wouldn’t have done that,” Campbell said, via Nolan Bianchi of the Detroit News. “But it is what it is.”
That's not the Campbell we know and have decided to love, and it is the first sign that as the games get bigger he might become more recognizably coachly and less incandescently YOLO. "It is what it is" is always the most bullshit of answers, but the more you use it, the more it starts to seem like a sensible thing to say, and that's not Campbell. That's how you end up being Kyle Shanahan, a winning coach with a much-imitated philosophy that people have decided is washed because he sucks at keeping players on the field. The Lions have looked like the best team in the league all year and have been touted as such since the end of last season, and we suspect that part of the reason is Campbell's preternatural desire to go for it in all situations; the Lions rank 29th in field goals attempted, and the other three teams in that neighborhood, Carolina, Chicago, and Tennessee, rank 26th, 27th and 28th in scoring. They come by their reluctance to kick honestly, as they are rarely in position to do much other than punt; Campbell just doesn’t believe in it.
The second reason is traditional. Defense wins championships, and this is the repudiation of that theory. It's not the way to bet, though.
And the final reason for concern here is, well, the Chiefs. The king isn't dead until the coroner says he is, and Kansas City is still 13-1, despite how un-13-1 as they seem. Nobody has ever won three Super Bowls in succession, and the Chiefs' 21-7 win over the moribund-in-triplicate Cleveland Browns on Sunday was their most lopsided victory of the year. That is held against them even though they have only two wins in their championship seasons with a wider margin than that, so they're somehow used to it. The other most viable-looking alternatives in the league rely upon either Sam Darnold or Nick Sirianni, and we are not culturally prepared for those scenarii quite yet.
In short, we know what we want but know enough not to expect to get it. We’ve been on something of a losing streak culturally, and it will take a serious course correction to provide us with one more game like Bills-Lions. The Rams beat this same Bills team a week ago, 44-42, in a sensational game, and then beat the 49ers 12-6 in a mudslide without the mud. Nothing is guaranteed, though everyone being disappointed in the end is a well-established chalk play. In short, this still feels like the kind of year that ends with Carson Wentz holding the Super Bowl trophy, and there isn't enough alcohol in Scotland to make that feel right.
