The Buffalo Bills dispatched the once-mighty San Francisco 49ers with relative ease in a snowy Week 13 35-10 victory. With that, they became the second team in the NFL to clinch a 2024 playoff berth and the first to clinch its division. So, despite the five remaining weeks of the regular season, it’s fair to start discussing the Bills’ 2024 NFL Playoff seeding and matchups.
At 10-2, Josh Allen and company should finish no lower than third in the AFC and have a real shot at taking the No. 1 seed. If they slip up, the 9-3 Pittsburgh Steelers could catch them, but it would take a massive collapse for any of the other four and five-loss teams to do so.
On the other hand, if the Chiefs slip up just one more time and the Bills can keep their record clean, Buffalo will take the top spot in the conference and get the lone bye as a result of their Week 11 30-21 victory over Kansas City.
While the bye would be ideal, home-field advantage until the AFC Championship Game wouldn’t be a terrible spot either. What the Bills truly must hope to avoid is another meeting with the Baltimore Ravens.
The Bills nightmare 2024 NFL Playoff matchup is the Ravens
Ahead of the 2024 Bills season, a playoff matchup with the Ravens would not have been the AFC East team’s nightmare scenario. In fact, it would have been one of the squad’s preferred options.
Buffalo had beaten Baltimore in its last two meetings, going back to 2020, including in the 2020 playoffs. In both games, Sean McDermott and the defense had a good handle on how to contain Lamar Jackson, keeping him in the pocket by using a spy.
When teams kept Jackson in the pocket in those years, the Ravens’ lack of explosive running backs and wide receivers became a real issue.
Things changed in the 2024 offseason, though.
Several things happened, such as the Ravens defense getting worse and WR Zay Flowers getting better, but from a Bills perspective, those things are a wash. The big thing that happened is that Baltimore signed a 30-year-old running back named Derrick Henry.
Despite playing in an era where RBs are being readied for the retirement home at 27-29, Henry has found the fountain of youth and is still going strong into his third decade. Perhaps that is because at 6-foot-2, 247 pounds with a 4.54-second 40-yard dash, Henry has never conformed to normal human standards.
No matter the reason, Henry is having a near-MVP season and, after 13 weeks, he is second in rushing attempts (240), second in rushing yards (1,407), and first in rushing touchdowns (13). He also has the longest rush of the season at 87 yards, which brings us back to Buffalo.
That 87-yard scamper (if you can call what a 6-foot-2, 247-pound man does “scampering”) came the first time he touched the ball in the Ravens 35-10 Week 4 win over the Bills. And that single play — along with the 23 carries for 112 yards that came after it — shows the biggest problem in a Bills-Ravens playoff matchup. And that is that Henry absolutely kills the Bills.
While the Bills have looked good over the years against the Ravens, they struggled against Henry’s former team, the Tennessee Titans. While Buffalo prevailed in 2023, the team from Nashville won in 2021 and 2020. In those games, the big back had 210 rushing yards and five touchdowns.
The Bills should have a decent time against the Los Angeles Chargers, Houston Texans, or Denver Broncos in the first round and second rounds, and they are a team built specifically to compete with the Chiefs should they see them in the AFC Championship. However, if they get the Ravens in any of those rounds, there could be trouble in Western New York.
Right now, whether the Bills stay in second or get the top seed, they need to hope the Ravens finish as high as possible in the standings to avoid them in the first or second round. If they win the AFC North, the Bills must get the one-seed to definitely miss them.
If it’s Bills-Ravens in the AFC. Championship, so be it. But until then, Buffalo must hope that the final seedings fall in a way that they don’t have to play Baltimore until they absolutely have to.
