Bills Handle Packers

Vince Lombardi must have been looking down from the heavens with a mixture of pride and disappointment Sunday night watching his beloved Green Bay Packers.

The calendar says it’s 2022, but it might as well have been 1966 the way the Packers ran the ball Lombardi-style against the Buffalo Bills, piling up more than 200 yards and turning future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers into a game manager.

Here’s the difference then and now. Lombardi’s Packers of the 1960s wouldn’t have lost the way this iteration of Packers did. Green Bay fell behind early and never really seemed capable of pulling the upset as Buffalo earned a 27-17 victory at raucous Highmark Stadium.

“They did a good job,” Bills coach Sean McDermott said of the Green Bay ground attack. “They did a good job and we got to do a better job. I got to put the players in a better position.”

One of those players, linebacker Matt Milano, admitted this wasn’t Buffalo’s best night. “We gotta go check the tape, see what was happening, see who was out of their gap,” he said. “I know I made a couple of mistakes on a few of those runs that I gotta be better on, but we’ll get it corrected.”

Yet even on an off night, really on both sides of the ball, the Bills handled their business and didn’t break too much of a sweat.

“At the end of the day, you just want to win the game,” Bills edge rusher Von Miller said. “I felt like we had the momentum for the most part, about 85% of the game. They were prepared today, they came ready to play, run game was open for them. I was shocked. Me personally, I was shocked that they ran the ball so much. They have Aaron Rodgers and with previous bouts, I was just expecting him to have a little bit more control.”

Yes, they have Rodgers, but the problem for the Packers is Rodgers had virtually nobody rowing the boat with him. Green Bay’s wide receiver corps was already undermanned playing without Allen Lazard and Randall Cobb, and then Christian Watson went out in the first quarter, leaving Rodgers ill-equipped to throw against the always strong Buffalo pass defense.

So the Packers did the only thing they could: They pounded running backs Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon at the Bills all night to the tune of 203 total rushing yards. The downside, of course, is they chewed up a lot of time doing that (they had the ball for more than 33 minutes) and once they were down 24-7 at halftime, there was no coming back.