Buffalo overcame five turnovers and early-season adversity to remain undefeated, proving to their head coach that this resilient roster won’t blink when execution fades and pressure mounts.
The Buffalo Bills' 24-16 victory over the Los Angeles Chargers was far from the type of performance Joe Brady wanted from his team.
Buffalo turned the ball over five times, struggled to consistently move the football and repeatedly put itself in difficult situations. Yet despite all of that, the Bills walked away with a 3-0 record.
For Brady, though, the ugly performance provided an opportunity to learn something about his team.
In fact, he called it “perfect.”
“I told the team at halftime, I was like, this is perfect,” Brady said. “And look, and I meant that. Like, it was, I wanted to see how we were going to respond. I wanted to see what it was going to reveal.”
Brady wasn't suggesting the Bills' performance was perfect. Quite the opposite. Buffalo gave the Chargers plenty of opportunities to take control, and Brady acknowledged afterward that there was a lot the team needed to clean up.
Instead, the first-year head coach viewed the situation as an early-season test of the team's character.
Brady wanted to see how the Bills would respond when things weren't going according to plan and whether the adversity would lead to players pointing fingers.
“And were we going to be a team that is just going to point fingers when things aren't going well?” Brady said. “How are we going to respond?”
He liked what he saw.
“And, you know, I'm so proud of the way that the guys did respond, that they didn't blink,” Brady said. “They just kept going.”
That response was particularly important considering how poorly things went offensively at times. The Bills committed five turnovers, but the defense repeatedly kept them in the game and eventually helped create the opportunities Buffalo needed to win.
Brady said the experience could become something the team looks back on later in the season.
“I hated it, you know, but it was perfect in terms of as we're building our football team to be able to look back and say, OK, guys, we're later down the line,” Brady said. “It's like, hey, guys, it wasn't perfect early. So what? Let's keep going.”
That mentality was evident in Brady's comments throughout his postgame press conference. He repeatedly acknowledged that the Bills had plenty to fix while also refusing to diminish the significance of finding a way to win.
“It's never easy to win in this league. I'm never going to apologize for winning,” Brady said.
The Bills are now 3-0, but Brady knows the Chargers game exposed problems that Buffalo can't afford to ignore. The value of the win, in his mind, may ultimately come from how the team responds to those problems moving forward.
For a team still learning what it is under Brady, Sunday provided an answer to one important question: when things go wrong, what will the Bills do?
