Take a seat, Josh Allen, there’s no more need to play in the regular season
You wouldn’t expect to use a college bowl where the mascot gets eaten alive as a reference point for a potential NFL Most Valuable Player, but this is 2024 and, well, things are weird these days. Barely a day after Miami’s Cam Ward opted to sit for the second half of the Pop-Tart Bowl to protect his future options, Buffalo’s Josh Allen faces a similar question in Week 18 of the NFL regular season.
No, Allen isn’t trying to protect his NFL standing; he’s got that pretty well locked down. Allen is chasing two career-defining milestones, an MVP award and a Lombardi trophy. Buffalo’s Week 18 game against the Patriots might help him burnish his chances at the former, but it will do absolutely nothing for the latter quest.
Allen led Buffalo to a 40-14 annihilation of the New York Jets that was as thorough and merciless as anything short of a stadium demolition. Allen wasn’t spectacular – 16 of 27 for 182 yards and two touchdowns, plus another on the ground — but he didn’t need to be. Buffalo led 40-0 deep into the fourth quarter, and the destruction was so complete that even Mitchell Trubisky got some run at quarterback for the Bills.
Next week, he ought to get a whole lot more. The only regular-season game left on Buffalo’s slate is a road contest against New England, and there’s absolutely nothing at stake for the Bills — or, for that matter, for the Patriots, who were eliminated from the playoff hunt back around the Fourth of July.
Buffalo is locked into the second spot in the AFC playoffs, meaning the Bills are going to welcome the Chargers, Steelers or Broncos to chilly Orchard Park in a couple weeks. There’s no outcome of the Patriots game that changes Buffalo’s seeding. And there isn’t even any “best effort”/fair play concern for the Patriots, since there’s no scenario where that game means anything to the final teams in the hunt for the last AFC playoff spot.
The Bills, in fact, have been playing with house money for awhile now. Buffalo clinched the AFC East with five weeks remaining in the year, the first team since the 2009 Colts to grab a divisional championship that early. (In a good omen for Buffalo, that Colts team would go on to reach the Super Bowl; in a familiar omen, the Colts lost that Super Bowl to New Orleans.)
In other words, from a team perspective, there’s no reason for Allen to play next week. From an individual perspective … maybe? Allen is, by all accounts and metrics, the runaway favorite to win his first MVP. BetMGM has him listed at -350, with Lamar Jackson well behind at +250 and Saquon Barkley at +2500. Yes, Jackson had a spectacular Christmas Day performance — two passing TDs, one rushing TD — and has a chance to prettify his stats even further with a regular season finale against the Browns.
But is it worth risking Allen’s health on the road in search of an award he may already have won? After Sunday’s game, Bills head coach Sean McDermott stated his case succinctly and effectively: “I think Josh Allen continues to show why he should be the MVP.”
McDermott declined to say whether Allen would play in Week 18, instead indicating that the team would discuss how to handle rest later this week.
Allen, for his part, punted like it was fourth-and-long, saying of the decision to play, “That’s up to coach. I’ll do whatever is asked of me.”
That’s the right answer from a political perspective, but from a Super Bowl-chasing one, there’s an obvious play here. It’s time for Allen to watch Buffalo-New England from the closest spot in Gillette Stadium. For him and Buffalo, there’s plenty of work left to do after Week 18.
