American Football
Who, what and exactly how good are the Buffalo Bills this season?
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It feels faintly absurd to ask this question about a team that is 11-4 heading into Week 17, riding a four-game winning streak and led by the reigning MVP. And yet here we are: exactly who, what and how good are the 2025 Buffalo Bills?
That's the question we explore as we stand on the brink of yet another postseason in which expectations for Sean McDermott's side are as high as ever.
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The Bills remain one of the NFL’s most baffling propositions, a team whose record insists they are elite while their weekly performances argue, loudly and often convincingly, that something still doesn’t quite add up.
On paper, this should be straightforward. The Bills have beaten the Kansas City Chiefs comfortably. They’ve taken apart the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They bullied the Pittsburgh Steelers. Those are not empty wins, not schedule-padding exercises. At their best, Buffalo still look capable of overwhelming good teams with pace, power and the sort of controlled chaos that has defined the Josh Allen era at its peak.
But then there’s the other version. The one that lost to the Miami Dolphins and the Atlanta Falcons, teams who have spent most of the season looking a tier or three below serious contention. The Dolphins held Buffalo to 13 points. The Falcons limited them to 14.
Even within their current four-game winning streak, the Bills have made heavy weather of games they should have controlled, none more so than the Week 16 slog against the lowly Cleveland Browns, a game that felt far closer and far messier than the standings suggested it had any right to be.
The inconsistency runs straight through the offense. There have been five games in which Buffalo have scored 35 points or more in 2025, explosive, ruthless displays where everything clicks, and defensive coordinators are left guessing wrong at every turn.
And then there are the days when the attack looks oddly blunt, struggling for rhythm, misfiring in the red zone and leaning far too heavily on Allen’s improvisation rather than a coherent plan. The gap between those two versions is vast, and increasingly hard to explain away as random variance.
Defensively, the story is much the same. Injuries have bitten hard, particularly in the secondary, and there have been long stretches of the season where the Bills simply haven’t been able to keep opponents at arm’s length.
And yet, at times, this unit has looked genuinely elite. The addition of Joey Bosa has brought a pass-rush threat that Buffalo have been chasing for years, changing the geometry of games when he’s healthy and firing. On their best days, the Bills pressure quarterbacks, disguise coverages and close drives with authority. On their worst, they leak yards and points with alarming ease.
Josh Allen, inevitably, sits at the centre of it all. The reigning MVP has been both spectacular and strangely mortal. There have been superhuman performances, like the demolition of the Bengals three weeks ago or the commanding divisional showing against the Patriots in Week 15, games where Allen controlled everything.
But there have also been four games with a sub-80 passer rating, 10 interceptions already this season, and a sense at times that he’s forcing moments that don’t need forcing. For context, he threw just six interceptions in the entirety of 2024.
And yet, the opportunity is obvious. With the Chiefs, Bengals and likely the Ravens all out of playoff contention, the AFC is as open as it has ever been during the Allen era. The path to a franchise-first Super Bowl is there, waiting.
Whether the Bills can take it depends on answering the question they keep posing themselves every Sunday. Until Buffalo find consistency, no one truly knows what they are – including, perhaps, the Bills themselves.
