The Bills now have had three very exciting games against NFC West opponents this season. Today, the Bills came close but ultimately fell short in a 32-30 loss to the Arizona Cardinals. The Cardinals won the game when Kyler Murray unloaded a 43-yard hail mary to DeAndre Hopkins. Hopkins caught the ball with two seconds left on the clock, reaching over Tre'Davious White, Jordan Poyer and Micah Hyde to seal the game for Arizona. Jordan Poyer explained his assignments and his point of view on that play.
"It was a weird play, Poyer said. "We were just playing quarters. And I was playing on the left side of the field, and I saw him start to roll out, so I just started pushing my zone. As he threw the ball up in the air, my only thought was to just knock it down. As I saw the ball in the air, I was tracking it, tracking it, it was kind of a far run. But like I said, we've just got to find a way to knock the ball down. That's it."
Micah Hyde, who was also in the end zone on that last play, knows what it is like to have an emotionally back and forth game like this. During the 2015 season, when he was with the Packers, Hyde played a divisional-round playoff game in Arizona with a similar dramatic finish. Hyde expressed his thoughts after the game and said that this one didn't feel good.
"Coming off a loss like that, it's hard to see the bright side right now," Hyde explained. "Like I said, I know that this group of guys is resilient. We're going to rally around each other. I feel like the defense, obviously, we could have made more plays. I'm sure the offense is saying they could have made more plays. It's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel after that game. It's frustrating, everybody's pissed. Good football teams have to find a way to win that football game. You can't give up a Hail Mary to win the game. Last time I was actually in this stadium, the same thing happened. I was just on the other side with Green Bay so, I kind of have been on both sides of the spectrum here in Arizona. This one doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good coming off of a loss, Hail Mary to win the game. We take pride in getting that last play to steal the game and I feel like we've done that pretty well throughout the last however many years that we've been here and it's unfortunate."
Right before that Cardinals game-winning drive, the Bills thought that they had locked up the game with a 21-yard Stefon Diggs touchdown leaving just 34 seconds on the clock. To lose the way that they did is a gut punch for the Bills coaches, players and the fans at home. Josh Allen reflected on the game and took the blame for putting the ball in harm's way too often, but said this game is fuel for the fire.
"Obviously, losing is never fun," Allen stated. "To lose like that is painful - it hurts. It's why you play 60 minutes of a game. Throughout the game, I put the ball in harm's way too often. It shouldn't have come down to one play. I take this very personally. The two interceptions can't happen. You can't expect to win after turning the ball over. It sucks going into the bye week because it's going to be the only thing on our mind for the next week and a half, two weeks. But I think it's also a good thing. It makes us hungry. You're not going to win every game, but to lose this one the way we did - it hurts. But it's fuel for the fire."
The Bills now sit at 7-3 with their bye week coming up - a blessing and a curse. On one hand the Bills could use some rest and hopefully get some players back to being healthy. On the other hand, they now have to sit on this loss with a bad taste in their mouths until they play again on Nov. 29. Dion Dawkins said that they can take the extra time to learn from this loss and critique themselves extremely hard to get better.
"Well, the good thing is that we're pros and we understand that there's going to be a winner, there's going to be a loser," Dawkins said. "And in this case, we ended up short on the last play of the game. We're going to go in, we're going to look at the film, we're going to get graded hard, we're going to critique ourselves extremely hard, we're going to be hard on ourselves, and then we're going to move on. And the good thing is that this wasn't the Super Bowl. We still have plenty more games to play. We look to win every game, but this isn't the Super Bowl. And we just got to execute until the end."
