Buffalo Is 5-1 and Josh Allen Is Chasing History — the Defense Is Torching the Whole Thing

The Bills limped into the bye week with bodies in the medical tent, a Monday night overtime thriller behind them and a 33-30 rock fight in Las Vegas on Sunday that was closer than it needed to be. They're 5-1 anyway. Two of their last three wins came by a combined six points, one of them in an extra period at SoFi Stadium, and their only loss is a three-point home defeat to New England. That is a team with an excellent record and a very thin margin.

The offense is not the problem. Josh Allen through six games: 1,504 passing yards, 8.8 yards per attempt, nine touchdowns, four interceptions and a 102.1 passer rating — plus 240 rushing yards and eight more scores on the ground. He threw for 210 and ran for 121 in the overtime win over the Rams, a performance The Athletic summed up by calling him "an absolute psycho." James Cook has 627 rushing yards and six touchdowns on 117 carries, and Keon Coleman has turned 19 catches into 283 yards and three scores. Buffalo is averaging 32.8 points and 6.9 yards per play, and its 0.211 EPA per play trails only San Francisco league-wide. The Bills have ripped off 32 explosive plays doing it.

The math on the other side is uglier. Buffalo allows 28.5 points and 399.7 yards per game. Over the last three, that's 31.0 points and 416.7 yards with a scoring margin of plus-1.0. Greg Rousseau is wrecking games individually — six sacks already, an All-Pro pace — but the back seven got carved up by Kirk Cousins on Sunday and by the Rams the week before. Opponents are converting 50.8 percent on third down, and the team has 11 sacks total.

The season-long point differential of plus-26 looks fine in isolation. Plus-4.3 per game does not look like a 5-1 team controlling games. Buffalo's offense has been good enough to make a leaky defense read as a stylistic choice rather than a problem. That works in October. It gets harder.

The bye arrives at a useful moment on the health front. Spencer Brown, limited earlier in the week, was a full participant by Thursday and played in Las Vegas — meaningful for a line that's had to shuffle. DJ Moore and Joshua Palmer both carried questionable designations into the weekend, and DeAundre Alford is also flagged; the Week 7 injury report isn't out yet, so treat that as the current state of play rather than a final word. Buffalo doesn't take the field again until Nov. 1.

That's when the schedule stops being polite. Baltimore at home, at Minnesota, at the Jets, Miami at home, then Kansas City on Thanksgiving night. The Vikings are 5-0. The Chiefs are 5-0. The Ravens are 4-2 in a crowded AFC North. If the defense keeps handing back 28 points a game, Allen has to keep being superhuman just to protect the No. 2 seed in the conference — and the distance between "5-1 with a plus-26 differential" and "5-1 with the best offense in football and a defense that can't get off the field" is precisely the kind of thing that gets exposed in January.

The bye week is a chance to fix it. The schedule won't offer many more.