Coming Attractions: Bills to Host Titans in Week 2 Monday Night Doubleheader
Winning the AFC East two years in a row and becoming a betting favorite to win the next Super Bowl has the small-market Buffalo Bills cultivating a large international profile.
Though they won't be among the teams that play outside the country in the 2022 season, they are expected to be featured in many prime-time national telecasts.
One of them was revealed today, ahead of Thursday's full NFL schedule release: The Bills will host the Tennessee Titans as part of a Monday Night Football doubleheader in Week 2. ESPN will have the telecast beginning at 7:15 p.m. on Sept. 19.
The Minnesota Vikings visit the Philadelphia Eagles in the other game, which begins at 8:30 on ABC.
Many league insiders believe the Bills will have the national spotlight in Week 1 as well, when the defending Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams will play at home in the NFL Kickoff Game on a Thursday night, marking the first game of the regular season.
The Bills are one of the teams scheduled to visit the Rams this season and signed one of their top contributors, edge rusher Von Miller, as a free agent this offseason.
That the Titans-Bills matchup this season was picked for national TV should come as no surprise. The Titans are the only team to have beaten the Bills in each of the previous two regular seasons.
Last season's epic clash was decided with just 21 seconds remaining, when Bills quarterback Josh Allen was stopped on a fourth-and-1 from the Tennessee 3-yard line to preserve a 34-31 triumph. A field goal likely would have forced overtime.
The game turned out to have major playoff and perhaps NFL rules implications.
The Bills finished the season 11-6 when a 12-5 record, which would have tied the Kansas City Chiefs, would have been good enough to secure the top seed in the AFC playoffs because of the Bills' victory over the Chiefs in the regular season.
Instead, the Bills wound up with the third seed, behind the Titans (12-5) and Chiefs, which meant a road trip to Kansas City for the divisional round of the playoffs, where the Chiefs prevailed with the aid of a catastrophic Bills' meltdown in the final 13 seconds of regulation that allowed the Chiefs to tie and force overtime.
After the Chiefs won the coin toss, took the ball and scored a touchdown to win a wild shootout, 42-36, the league was moved to make a change to the postseason overtime rules to allow each team a possession regardless of the outcome of the first overtime series.
Almost everyone still points to that playoff game in Kansas City as the one that forced the league to act. But that game would never have happened had it not been for Allen's foot slipping as he was trying to gain traction for a sneak that fell short some 14 weeks earlier in Nashville.
So consider the stage set.
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Nick Fierro is the publisher of Bills Central. Check out the latest Bills news at www.si.com/nfl/bills and follow Fierro on Twitter at @NickFierro. Email to Nicky300@aol.com.
