Albert Breer’s Week 3 NFL Takeaways: Bills Had a Chance to Show Their Character

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Buffalo Bills
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Quick-hitters

That was one fun Sunday—lots of drama, and sloppy, imperfect, entertaining football. Why don’t we go ahead and cover it all. Your takeaways for Week 3 …

Buffalo Bills

I think we saw how much margin for error the Bills are playing with. Speaking of sloppy, imperfect football, we saw a lot of it in Buffalo. Joe Brady and his staff definitely didn’t draw up Sunday’s game against a desperate Chargers team the way it played out. Nor will Monday’s look at the film be especially pleasant for the Bills’ folks.

But somehow, they came out of it 3–0, 24–16 winners over a Los Angeles team that, while now 0–3, made the playoffs the past two years and arrived in Buffalo as a wounded animal of a foe.

“I’d like to think that great teams don’t have to lose to learn, and, unfortunately, we had a lot of losing football today,” Brady told me later in the afternoon. “But sometimes when people say, Hey, you found a way to win, it can come across as the guys didn’t earn it. That’s not the case. They just kept playing. It’s like, Hey, we might not have our fastball, but can we find a way and just keep digging, and keep playing and kind of roll with it? And I learned a lot about the guys in the fact that they were able to do that.

“It doesn’t have to be pretty. I will never remember the scores of these games. We just remember that we found a way to go 1–0.”

O.K., so as for what went wrong, there was a lot to get to.

The Bills turned the ball over five times on Sunday, and only took it away once. Josh Allen’s passer rating was 54.0, his lowest since New Year’s Eve 2023. Buffalo dug itself a 10–0 hole in the first quarter and drew 10 flags, costing the team 88 yards over the course of the game.

And as such, you could argue the Bills were lucky to be tied at 10 going into the half, having looked like a shell of the team that won in Houston, then pounded Detroit, to open the season. But with all that, their new head coach—who’s been around most of these guys as an assistant the past few years—saw an opportunity to find out a little more about his group.

So he challenged them at the half.

“I told the guys, This is perfect,” Brady said. “We were playing terribly, and it was a 10–10 game, and you never want that, right? I don’t ever want us to have to be humbled. You want to come out and absolutely dominate every game. And I think it’s an excuse when people say there are ups and downs in the season. I don’t think there has to be. But there obviously was today, and it was an opportunity to see the character in the locker room.

“Like, is there gonna be finger-pointing? Are we a front-running crew, and what does it look like?”

Brady got his answer, maybe most so in that the speech didn’t work right away.

The Chargers opened the half with a 13-play drive that consumed more than half of the third quarter and put the visitors up 13–10. And the Bills’ offense promptly fumbled five plays after that, just as it was starting to get some momentum back, then fumbled again on its next possession.

From there? The Bills picked off Justin Herbert, drove for a touchdown, got a fourth-down stop, drove for another touchdown, then held L.A. to a field goal and covered an onside kick.

The key, to Brady, goes back to an offseason mantra—“Our message all offseason has just been just f---ing put the ball down and just keep going for 60 minutes, and they’re gonna have to play us for 60 minutes.” So even with the miscues, the team had Chauncey Gardner-Johnson’s crucial pick, James Cook’s rugged running, corner Davison Igbinosun filling in for Christian Benford, and Ed Oliver registering a key pressure on Herbert in crunch time.

Over the years, everyone’s seen Allen keep playing through those ugly moments. Sunday showed his teammates now can, too. And Brady had a feeling they would, after seeing those guys at the half.

“Look, I don’t want to say [the second half] was any prettier, because we ended up fumbling [twice],” he said. “But we talked all week about us, staying like a chain, staying linked, and I felt that we were that. I didn’t see anybody fighting with each other, pointing fingers like bad teams do. We were able to have success the first two weeks, so you really don’t know how guys are going to handle when we’re not having success. And so I’m really proud. I mean, we had five giveaways. You should never win a football game like that, right? And to be minus-four in the takeaway column?

“But our guys didn’t blink, and they just kept believing that they’re going to find a way.”

They sure did. And that makes them, at 3–0, and set to play the Patriots, who took the AFC East from them last year, next week, as dangerous as a Josh Allen Bills team has ever been.

Baltimore Ravens

The way the Ravens finished off the Cowboys in Brazil legit gave me goose bumps. Because I’m a believer that NFL games are, more often than not, won on the margins, I’m a sucker for teams that have situational football mastered. And in Jesse Minter’s third game as head coach in Baltimore, he gave off pretty strong vibes that his Ravens teams will going forward.

Consider this: The Cowboys lined up for first-and-goal on the Baltimore 2-yard line with 23 seconds left, down 31–28, and somehow the Ravens won the game in regulation. That they did was a matter of high-level play and high-level gaming of the situation at hand.

First, the Ravens needed to get a stop. They got it, thanks in part to a false start that pushed Dallas back, and forced a Brandon Aubrey field goal that hit the net with seven seconds left to pull the Cowboys even at 31. From there, Minter conceded that he was hoping that Dallas would give the Ravens a touchback, which would give Lamar Jackson a chance to end the game in regulation (albeit a slim one). I’ll let the head coach take you through the rest.

“I thought they may just kick it down there, which makes your returner use some time, which then we would have probably kneeled it out and went to overtime,” Minter told me. “You also risk a return, so I understand the touchback theory. But with the rules, I mean, there’s a six-second play, really, to try to get the 20 yards or so needed to get in range. And it’s really not a high risk, because they’re going to be playing to prevent that. It’s not like you’re going to be throwing into a ton of traffic. And if it’s incomplete, you go to overtime.”

The rule Minter’s referencing, of course, is that a touchback into the end zone now puts the ball at the 35, just close enough, in this case, to create the aforementioned chance.

Generally, the coach continued, he’d want about seven seconds to pull off the play. In this case, with six, Jackson getting rid of the ball quickly, and Zay Flowers hitting his landmarks precisely would be the key. And that’s just what happened. Jackson dropped back, took a couple of extra steps for Flowers to get into a window, then hit him and Flowers hit the deck.

“It’s knowing where the line is, knowing that as soon as you catch it, you’ve got to get down,” Minter said. “You can’t catch it and feel like you’ve got space and try to gain a couple more yards because you’ll run out of time. So, just a great job by him and Lamar putting the ball where it needed to be for us to be able to execute that.”

Then, Minter hit the timeout he’d considered using on the Cowboys’ final third down, but chose not to at the last moment. And Tyler Loop drilled a 56-yard field goal to win it.

Bottom line, a lot of things had to come together for it to work. And seeing it happen?

“Really cool,” Minter said. “Really cool. … Just great execution by Zay, running the route to perfection, running to the right depth. Lamar, obviously, making a great throw on time, which is super important. And a major shout-out to our game management crew—we’ve repped those situations a lot, and you wait for them to come up, and it comes up, and the guys are ready to do it.”

And I’d say that’s a good sign for where the Ravens are with Minter in charge.

Talanoa Hufanga holds up the ball after an interception. — Talanoa Hufanga and the Rams came through in the second half to take down the Rams. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Denver Broncos

Sunday night didn’t get me to back off my feeling that the Broncos and Rams will meet in Super Bowl LXI whatsoever. The Rams are the Rams. They looked mostly great—save for the pick-six, and a couple of defensive lapses—and that was without Puka Nacua and Myles Garrett.

As for the Broncos, they are kind of unspectacular.

But they’re tough and smart and deep and complete, and those things matter, and they showed up in a big way when it mattered most in Sunday night’s wildly entertaining 30–26 win. And maybe most so on the game’s biggest play—Talanoa Hufanga’s 66-yard pick-six that gave Denver its first lead of the game with less than five minutes left.

Hufanga told me afterward that he actually wound up responsible for covering two guys, because the Rams came out in an empty backfield, with all three wideouts to Matthew Stafford’s right, and the safety left with tight end Davis Allen and running back Kyren Williams to the left. Hufanga said at the snap he tried to bait Stafford into thinking he was going with Allen, before he “passed the tight end off to Jesus to cover him.”

Allen was left wide open. Stafford threw to Williams. The rest is history.

“Understanding football, if you’re covering two guys, if you got one guy, they usually throw it to the other one,” Hufanga said. “So not ideal in terms of what we were in, but I tried to make the most of it.”

In doing so, I think he really illustrated what the Broncos showed themselves to be again on Sunday.

It’s a team built for Sean Payton, in so many ways. Not perfect. But perfect for big moments like those the Rams game presented, because of guys like Hufanga.

“You got to give a lot of credit to Sean Payton and [GM] George Paton,” Hufanga told me. “What they did in bringing people in and drafting players, that’s what they want. They want smart players that are physical, blue-collar workers that go out there and get the job done. And so for us as a team, we’re super grateful that we get these opportunities.”

Based on how Sunday went, they should have plenty more coming.

Las Vegas Raiders

There’s one game next week pitting 3–0 teams against each other, and that the Raiders are in it is a legitimate early-season stunner. And it’s not just me saying it. Most folks inside the Las Vegas organization were preaching patience all offseason—and that this would be a methodical build around a quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, who’d be brought along slowly.

Here’s where you can steal from first-year coach Klint Kubiak’s postgame address to his players in New Orleans on Sunday, and simply say, “F--- that!”

The Raiders beat a fast-rising Saints team 35–27 at the Superdome. The Raiders are 3–0. The Raiders will welcome the mighty 3–0 Chiefs to Vegas on Sunday.

How?

“I mean, this is football,” nearly traded pass rusher and team captain Maxx Crosby told me. “You’ve got to show up and play the games. In the offseason, there’s a lot of chatter and stuff like that. But for us, this group, we’ve been just focusing on the day-to-day. We play for each other. We’ve got real close connections in this locker room, and that’s how you come back and make a second-half push like that on the road and get a big win. So, super excited about what we’re building.”

So, yes, there’s more to it than being tight-knit.

The Raiders’ best players have shined. Kirk Cousins led two touchdown drives in the fourth quarter and had a 119.3 passer rating. Brock Bowers had 10 catches for 116 yards and one of those touchdowns. Crosby had a strip-sack on a fourth-quarter fourth down. Ashton Jeanty had 19 carries. Big-ticket free agent Nakobe Dean forced another fumble to ice it.

But on the togetherness part, there’s a sign at the Raiders’ facility that says “price of admission” at the door, with the first of three points being “team-first approach.” And as hokey as it may sound, Crosby believes that’s why this Vegas team has been so good when it counts. This week, that meant two touchdowns and four takeaways in the fourth quarter. Which means next week, they’ve got as big a game as the Raiders have had in a few years.

Crosby can’t wait.

“Hell yeah, man,” he says. “Absolutely, we cannot wait. We’re going to enjoy this in this moment, enjoy the flight back, and then it’s right back to work.”

And right back to surprising the crap out of the rest of us.

Washington Commanders

Sunday wasn’t what Dan Quinn was expecting, but his Commanders passed the test it gave them. And not just the test that Sunday gave them, but the test the whole week was.

The interesting thing to me here, after talking to Quinn, is how quickly the players aced it. Last Monday, he told me, captains Terry McLaurin, Frankie Luvu, Jeremy Reaves and Tress Way came to him, in the aftermath of Jayden Daniels dislocating his left elbow for a second time, asking that the coach make Marcus Mariota the team’s sixth permanent captain.

“I was always going to leave the sixth out as an honorary one, for a Doug Williams or Brian Mitchell or somebody,” Quinn said. “But they asked and said, Hey, we’d like to make him a permanent captain. And I thought, Man, this is the easiest decision of all time.”

Everyone saw why on Sunday, with Mariota giving the team a steady hand in what could prove to be a season-saving win, 33–31 over the defending champion Seahawks.

But within the walls, to Quinn, the reason his decision was so easy went well beyond a backup playing well. It represented giving the players ownership of the team, and the players wanting it, which showed as they held off repeated comebacks from Seattle, with both a crucial pick-six from Kain Medrano (a second-year linebacker filling in for an injured Leo Chenal) and two first-down runs, one by Mariota, that iced the game at the wire.

“Sometimes it’s nuts and guts,” Quinn said. “And this one I attribute to leadership, Reavo and McLaurin and Mariota and the captains in this group. They were down for the fight.”

Which now gives them a chance to get to .500 in London against the Colts on Sunday.

Quinn told me Daniels will “more than likely” travel with the team to the United Kingdom when they leave on Tuesday night. He doesn’t know yet whether Daniels will play in six days. But that there’s even a chance tells you that the 2024 Offensive Rookie of the Year isn’t far off.

And it sure sounds like he’ll come back to a team that’s gotten stronger, simply by having to handle the challenge his absence presented. As Sunday illustrated.

Jameis Winston looks up without a helmet on. — Jameis Winston got the start under center, and the Giants beat the Titans in the rain. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

New York Giants

While we’re on the topic of injured quarterbacks, the Giants just made it through a brutal week, too, coming out with a win. The team didn’t even get back to New Jersey, after last week’s loss to the Rams on Monday Night Football, until about 7:30 a.m. ET, and it was near midday before they got wind that Jaxson Dart was likely out for the year.

John Harbaugh responded the next day, to his players, with transparency.

“The team was upset because Jaxson is our leader and everybody wants to see him out there and playing. He cares so much,” safety Jevon Holland told me. “Harbs summed it up when he said he woke up Tuesday and he heard that Jaxson wasn’t gonna be playing, he was out for the season, and it sucked, like it’s the end of the world. And then you wake up on Wednesday and you have to still do your job. And that's the reality of the situation.”

Four days later, the Giants would do just that, with Holland picking off Cam Ward in the end zone with 17 seconds left to ice a 12–7 win over the Titans.

The reality is there was nothing spectacular about it. The game was played in a Nor’easter in front of a lot of empty seats. Jameis Winston did enough. Cam Skattebo had 100 scrimmage yards, fueling the run game with 60 of those yards on 20 carries. The defense shut out the Titans for three quarters, with rookie Arvell Reese playing a starring role.

But surviving, this week at least, was enough, and did plenty to shed some light on the program building Harbaugh’s done.

“Everything is a testament to Harbaugh,” Holland said. “A team takes the personality of the coach, and Harbs is a calm … he’s a calm psycho. I mean, he loves the game, and he explains the game and the mindset for the game in such a unique way, but so clear to the fellas that we’re able to tangibly apply the things that he wants us to do. It’s building this football war machine, so that no matter what the circumstances are, we’re able to come out on top.”

Which is to say they didn’t have much time to recover from last week. But it was enough, and that it was enough does say something about the Giants.

Indianapolis Colts

The Colts are a really, really well-coached team. The roster’s got its issues right now. With Alec Pierce on the shelf, Laquon Treadwell and Keenan Allen caught the two balls from Daniel Jones that set up Indianapolis’s game-winning field goal. The team’s top pass rusher Laiatu Latu was hobbled throughout. The linebacker spot is still in flux.

Yet, there Jones was, hitting Treadwell and Allen in the two-minute drill to set up Spencer Shrader’s 53-yard game-winning field goal to vanquish the Texans 19–17.

And they were ready for the moment because Shane Steichen and his staff had them ready, regardless of who was or wasn’t out there. Wednesday practice starts with the offense and defense in a full-speed two-minute simulation. It’s starters vs. starters, let the best man win, in an effort to condition the players for such a situation. Kickers are involved, too.

“And so I don’t think anyone flinched in that moment,” Steichen told me. “Quenton [Nelson] was on the sidelines and high-fived me. He’s like, We’re going to win this freaking thing right now. I didn’t think there was any doubt, no one had any doubt. It was like, We’re going to go get it done. And so I think that’s where it starts is the mindset of the situation that we’re going to go find a way to get it done. And we did.”

Obviously, with the shift in ownership, there are lots of questions about the direction of the franchise, and new boss Carlie Irsay-Gordon is clearly getting a closer look at how the steak is made (and not, in the words of Big Tom Callahan, taking the butcher’s word for it).

I think the coaching is one thing that’s in a good place, and Sunday showed it again.

Jacksonville Jaguars

The Jaguars had something to prove Sunday. Did you notice how the upstart Patriots and Bears got a lot more attention coming into this year than the upstart Jags? All three teams, you’d recall, had massive breakthroughs in 2025. Two were discussed as potential Super Bowl contenders this summer. Jacksonville? Not so much.

You can argue as to why.

But what you can’t argue, after Sunday, is that the Jaguars don’t belong. Liam Coen’s crew ran for 137 yards and held the Patriots to 3.2 yards per carry, Trevor Lawrence more than doubled Drake Maye’s passer rating (102.9 to 48.6), and Jacksonville beat those Patriots so bad that Maye was pulled from the game before Scott Hanson took RedZone into the Witching Hour.

Those Jaguars got their bounce back from last week’s loss to the Broncos. They also posted their sixth consecutive regular-season home win, with those wins coming by staggering margins of 29, 17, 28, 34, 24 and, this week, 29 points.

If you missed all that, it’s understandable. They’re in a small market, and the networks are still sending their games to smaller swaths of the country.

Meanwhile, they keep getting better. Maybe, at some point, people will take notice.

Either way, these guys think you’re missing something pretty good. (I’d agree.)

“It’s been special,” receiver Parker Washington told me. “Liam does a really good job in just how he runs our program, our organization, our team—guys just buy in. And when you have a group of guys and you get as many people to buy in, that’s what makes a team special. It’s a good connection that we have.”

It’s easy to see it, too, watching the Jags. If, that is, you care to.

Cleveland Browns

Deshaun Watson deserves credit. I’m not here to make moral judgments. I’m here, instead, to tell you that the embattled Browns quarterback had every chance to fold up the tent two weeks ago, after Cleveland got run out of north Florida by the Jaguars in the opener.

At the time, he was probably one bad game away from things becoming so untenable that starting him for a home game in Cleveland might’ve been impractical for the franchise.

Instead, he’s showed flashes of who he used to be. Last week, he was nails in a 23–19 win over Tampa Bay that was played in sections because of a rain delay, posting a passer rating of 121.9 and throwing a game-winning touchdown pass to Blake Whiteheart. This week, in the home opener, he was a little more up-and-down, but led another game-winning drive, covering 65 yards and hitting Harold Fannin Jr. to give Cleveland the lead for good.

The Browns are 2–1 after the 21–18 win over a good Panthers team. Watson is showing why Todd Monken was resolute that he was the team’s best option at the position—a sentiment that was echoed all summer by those coaching for and against Cleveland.

Maybe now, at least for a little bit, we can just let this thing play out.

Bijan Robinson runs with the ball against the Packers. — Bijan Robinson ran wild Thursday night at Lambeau Field. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Quick-hitters

Your quick-hitting takeaways for Week 3, right now …

• It was Thursday, but … Bijan Robinson is unreal. Maybe as good at his job as anyone else in the NFL is at theirs.

• If Baker Mayfield needs UCL surgery, then he’d be out for five or six weeks, and the 0–3 Buccaneers are probably facing some bigger-picture questions.

• Then again, they’re only a half game out of the three-way tie atop the NFC South.

• Jeff Hafley’s Dolphins certainly fight. On the first possession of the game, it looked like the Chiefs would win by 100. The final was a respectable Chiefs 24, Dolphins 10.

• Aaron Glenn’s Jets aren’t waving white flags either. They were right there with the Lions on Sunday, just like they were right there with the Packers last week.

• The Chargers have the Seahawks, Broncos and Chiefs before their Week 7 bye, and the Rams, Texans and Ravens after it. Even a split of those six games would put them at 3–6 in November.

• If the Titans keep losing, and wind up with a high pick again, Cam Ward will have to do more than he’s doing right now to keep them from taking a quarterback.

• For all the guff we’ve given them, the Steelers are 2–1 and tied for first place in the AFC North.

• The 49ers’ injuries are going to catch up with them eventually. Right?

• I didn’t want to write a longer takeaway about Brian Flores’s Vikings defense for a third consecutive week, because I figured that might be overkill. But … yeah, they won another game on Sunday.

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