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Sean McDermott could’ve gone through chapter and verse of what he saw from the Dolphins’ intergalactic offense over the tape of the 2023 season’s first three weeks. The Bills coach could explain how Tyreek Hill’s speed changes the math for a defense, how creative the Miami run game is, or how quick the ball was getting out of Tua Tagovailoa’s hand.
But his preparation, and the Bills’ preparation, for the biggest Miami-Buffalo game in a generation was so much simpler than that.
"Yeah,” he says, pausing and laughing in a quiet moment from his office at Highmark Stadium on Sunday afternoon, “I went to church every day after I left work. You can print that. I went to church every day after I left work and twice this morning.”
Consider his, and the Bills’, prayers answered. And know that this wasn’t about McDermott and his staff waving some magic game-planning wand or delivering some speech on who’s ruled the AFC East over the past three years.
How the Bills’ 48–20 win came to be on a Chamber of Commerce Sunday in Western New York was much simpler than that. Buffalo has a lot of really good players, a few elite ones, and a great quarterback who played really well—things you might have forgotten three weeks after all of them had one bad night in New Jersey.
What came to be against Mike McDaniel’s Dolphins in Orchard Park—a rout that stunned a lot of folks swept away in September storylines—has been in plain sight for seven years. So when things got hard for the Bills, a table didn’t need to be flipped over in the locker room. A players-only meeting didn’t need to be held, nor did a drastic reimagining of the Bills need to take place.
Buffalo just needed to play better than it did against the Jets. And in doing so, over the past three weeks, and emphatically Sunday, they blew the doors off post–Week 1 storylines that ignored history and instead latched on to a single Monday night.
“No, it that boring,” center Mitch Morse told me from the Bills’ locker room. “We find the more boring it is, the better. And finding the fun and executing and getting better, it’s going to correlate to Sundays. We’re going to have a test here again. I mean, it’s been kind of smooth sailing for the past few weeks. But we understand this is the NFL.”
Meaning the momentum the Bills have built, Morse continued, won’t just keep steaming ahead, uninterrupted through the fall and into the winter. But what Buffalo showed in gathering its stride and exploding against the Dolphins is that the team still can run with anyone—and be the kind of team the 2022 Bills were built up, by folks on the outside, to be.
Even better, as the first month of the season has shown, this battle-tested group is more equipped than it’s ever been to deal with the times when it doesn’t look that way, either.
