I’ve agreed with you a lot in this thread. I’ll start with this. Look at our first drive. They stopped Henry, Henry then dropped a wide open pass, and Lamar had to do his Lamar magic routine for us to score. Our last drive, it starts with a penalty, Lamar’s second WR goes out and Lamar has to do Lamar magic again. It’s easy to say that you just can’t have two turnovers, but when you combine the idea of ‘not’ having them, with HOW we scored the vast majority of our points, you would end up with Lamar needing to play perfect. Allen didn’t have to do much because Buffalo created an offense that doesn’t require him to be Superman to work. His presences isn’t even this big difference maker in their running game. Their offensive line is good enough for them to run effectively without him even being involved.
This is why I continue to say, you can expect your QB to play within the offense when everything comes down to him, within it. Last week, he ran six times early on to open up the defense for Henry. He HAD to do that for our running game to work. Otherwise, they would’ve stopped Henry, because we decided that we wanted to take chances along the OL at BOTH Guard spots. Last night, Lamar didn’t run early but maybe a scramble or two and guess what? They stopped Henry.
He can’t turn the ball over, every pass has to be perfect, and if he doesn’t buy time and dodge pass rushers like Houdini, many, if not most of our points aren’t scored.
The defense doesn’t force turnovers. We’ve seen other great QBs win playoff games after turning the ball over twice. It sucks, it can’t happen, but we’ve seen those QBs not have to play perfect to win. That’s just not the case here and it continues to be an issue.