Two weeks ago, the Buffalo Bills were 4-0 and looked like the best team in the NFL. A Sunday night defeat by their AFC East rival, the New England Patriots, started the slide, and the Bills' 24-14 Monday Night Football loss to the Atlanta Falcons pushed them further down the standings and the power rankings.
The Bills' Week 6 L actually had a promising start with the defense causing a Falcons fumble on the game's opening play. However, an offside call—one they didn't replay on the broadcast—gave the ball back to the home team, which promptly went down the field and scored a touchdown to take a 7-0 lead.
While Josh Allen and company answered and tied the score on the next drive, the Falcons never trailed in the game after that opening score.
As Buffalo tries to pick up the pieces heading into their bye week and figure out what went so wrong the last two weeks, let's look at the Bills most to blame for the stunning Week 6 MNF loss to the Falcons.
Sean McDermott
The Bills will never win a Super Bowl with Sean McDermott as head coach. Full stop.
McDermott and his cohort, general manager Brandon Beane, deserve a lot of praise for what they have done in Buffalo. They took a franchise mired in a 17-year playoff drought and built it into a perennial contender. That's no small feat, and McDermott and Beane must get their flowers for that.
However, the founder of a company is not always the best CEO to lead said company when it hits a certain point. The skills required to build something from the ground up are not necessarily the same skills that it takes to make the leap from one level to another.
Bringing it back to the Bills-Falcons game, the reason Buffalo lost was that its offense was stuck in the mud, and Atlanta gashed the defense time and time again. Both these issues stem from having McDermott as head coach.
This is McDermott's ninth year in charge of the Bills. He got the job in 2017 after making his name as the Philadelphia Eagles and then Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator. He's a defensive guy, and this defense frankly stinks. And while announcers may talk about how the talent is lacking, the unit has plenty of high picks on it.
Ed Oliver, Gregory Rousseau, AJ Epenesa, Dorian Williams, Terrell Bernard, Cole Bishop, and Tre'Davious White (more on those last two below) were all picked by the team in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. That's over 60% of a starting defense that the team invested significant draft capital in, so it's not like McDermott is working with 11 undrafted free agents every week.
A head coach needs to be able to scheme something up on one side of the ball or the other in a big spot to help his team win. McDermott can't do that on offense and hasn't done it on defense any time in recent years, so what is he adding to the team? It's certainly not game-management acumen as his use of timeouts shows.
To be a defensive guru and have a defense that can't stop anyone is unacceptable. The longer the Bills go with a defensive-minded head coach whose defense stinks, the more years of Allen's career they are wasting. And the way the Bills-Falcons game went illustrated that perfectly.
Cole Bishop and Tre'Davious White
The Bills' secondary is not good. Outside of Christian Benford and Taron Johnson, the unit breaks down in big spots, and moving from draft bust Kaiir Elam (who got abused in the AFC Championship Game last season) to the washed-up White hasn't improved anything.
The Falcons targeted White all game with Drake London seemingly getting open whenever he felt like it. White committed penalties, and when he didn't, big gains followed. The same is true of Bishop, who is a liability in the pass and run games. His biggest miss was the inability to tackle Bijan Robinson on the Falcons running back's 81-yard touchdown run.
The best running back in the NFL — Bijan Robinson. pic.twitter.com/OpXRDVpubh
— CJ Vogel (@CJVogel_OTF) October 14, 2025
Yes, McDermott needs to scheme the D up better, but in fairness, when key players can't make a play in a big spot, that is harder than it should be. These two aren't NFL starters right now, but they play a huge role on the Bills' defense, and that is a major problem.
Josh Allen
Allen is the biggest reason that the Bills win games, but he also has to get some of the blame when the team loses. His receivers are well below average outside of Khalil Shakir, so he has to be near perfect to win, but he was far from that on Monday night.
The Bills quarterback can do it all, including throwing and catching a touchdown on the same play, as he famously did last season against the San Francisco 49ers, but he's best when he plays more conservatively. In Week 6, he didn't do that.
Down 21-14 at the end of the third quarter, Allen tried his backhanded pitch move on fourth down instead of setting himself and throwing. The ball was too short for Ty Johnson, and Buffalo turned the ball over. He also threw two interceptions, giving him four in the last three games. That's a major departure from last season when he threw just six INTs all year.
Allen was under a lot of pressure against the Falcons' excellent pass rush, and his receivers struggled to get open. Still, the situation is what it is, and Allen needs to be near perfect for the Bills to win each week with his defense letting the other team score on nearly every drive, and he simply wasn't close to perfect Monday night.
