Sean McDermott broke down the Bills late touchdown decision and why avoiding mistakes mattered more than bleeding time.
With 1:04 remaining in the fourth quarter, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen scored a one-yard touchdown run to put the Bills up 27-24 on the Jacksonville Jaguars. That touchdown ultimately proved to be the game-winning score thanks to a Cole Bishop interception on the first play of the Jaguars' next drive. But between Allen's touchdown and that interception, many were wonder if Buffalo scored too quick.
Did they leave the Jaguars too much time despite being at the one-yard line and Jacksonville having no timeouts left.
After the game, Allen and head coach Sean McDermott said that they were focused on getting the ball to the endzone. On Monday, McDermott dove deeper into that decision during his usual meeting with the media.
"I mean, come on, who would not want to bleed time off that clock?" McDermott said while admitting that he and his staff haven't fully discussed the decision to score right away yet.
"It is a slippery slope, though, at the same time. If you try and get too cute, and then you'd all of a sudden take yourself out of, call it quarterback sneak position, now you're running different plays, and now the chance for a negative play to come into play becomes more and more real, so there's a downside to that."
McDermott then said that he was for killing time off the clear, but wasn't sure how that would look in that situation.
"You want us to, hey, get the ball and just kind of do one of those," he said making a motion of going to the right and dropping down. " It happens in the backyard, but there's going to be a lot of people that is going to say, 'hey, oh, you could just do that.'
"I wanted to make sure that we didn't get too cute. That was when it's a little gray, you say, 'hey, let's trust our defense', and they did a phenomenal job."
McDermott said that despite is initial desire to kill clock, he vetoed himself after he "thought better" of it. He added that it was a situation he knows he's never been a part of but believed it happened somewhere to someone in the history of the league.
So, now, he says the staff will do their research on how other teams might have handled it, and that it's become one of their "core group of situations to try and work, and we'll go work on it."
"It'll probably never come up from here on out," he said. "I'll be dead."