Little went well for the Bills' quarterback in a frustrating game Thursday night against the Houston Texans.
And still he came close to driving the Bills to a victory before an late pick in the last moments sealed their fate in a close loss.
Allen endured back-to-back sacks on the team's final possession, resulting in a fourth-and-27, but the Bills (7-4) gained 44 yards on a quick throw from Josh Allen to Josh Palmer, who flipped a lateral to Khalil Shakir.
Following a false-start penalty created a fourth down situation for Buffalo, a Texans defender intercepted Allen’s throw at the 9-yard line with under half a minute remaining.
“We had a opportunity to come out on top there at the end,” Allen stated. “We did a solid job of hanging tough and our defensive unit saved us a few instances. We must figure it out, and we didn’t.”
Proved difficult for the signal-caller to get anything going on a evening he was sacked a career-high on eight occasions and pressured four other times. The QB threw for 253 yards with two interceptions and zero scores after accounting for six TDs in a win over the Buccaneers last week.
Whenever they hit our QB 12 times, that's unacceptable,” Bills coach Sean McDermott commented. “I don’t like that statistic at all. It’s just not a safe way to compete and it’s not a good way to preserve our field general in good shape for the rest of the season. We need to improve our performance.”
Josh Allen was sluggish to get up after a sack in the opening two quarters. He said he was fine and that his left shoulder “lost some feeling” after he landed on it in an awkward manner. He was questioned about being hit so frequently during the game.
“It’s not fun,” he remarked. “I ran into a few myself. I need to be better at disposing of the football. On multiple occasions, I was losing ground.”
The Bills' QB lost 70 total yards on the eight quarterback takedowns. Anderson had 2.5 sacks to lead the Houston defense. His second one occurred when he almost sacked the QB near the scrimmage line, but he wriggled away and Anderson got up and pursued him downfield to tackle him for an 18-yard loss to force a punt early in the third.
The Bills competed for a second straight game without wideout Coleman after he was once more a healthy scratch after he was tardy to a team meeting before their previous contest. He was earlier benched for the first series of a loss to the Patriots in Week 5 after additionally being delayed for a meeting.
“Nothing new. We are taking it day by day,” McDermott noted. “I thought he had a improved week, but we’re taking it one day at a time. It wasn’t that it wasn’t thought about, but we went with the players that give us the optimal opportunity.”
Khalil Shakir topped the Bills with eight catches for 110 receiving yards and Cook had 116 yards and a touchdown.
The quarterback was disappointed that the Bills were unable to make plays down the stretch.
In the end, we’ve got execute, and we failed to succeed of that this evening,” he concluded. “Whatever situation and whatever condition, we’ve got to discover a solution, and we came up short.”
