Patriots at Bills: 3 Storylines to Follow for Playoff Battle
Forget catching the football. Just holding onto it is going to be difficult, even with all the technology available to NFL players these days that keeps rigor mortis from setting in in sub-freezing conditions.
Bottom line: The Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots will be playing in an outdoor freezer Saturday night, when the temperature at Orchard Park's Highmark Stadium is expected to hover between 1 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's going to make things mighty uncomfortable even for a quarterback like the Bills' Josh Allen, who played his college ball at Wyoming. Certainly his Bills counterpart from the University of Alabama, rookie Mac Jones, will feel it too.
So without further ado, here are the top three storyline.
Weather or not
How each team handles the extreme conditions will go a long way toward which one prevails.
Because the Bills like to chuck the ball around a lot more than the Patriots these days, the homefield advantage will be audio only.
"It's not fun getting hit in the cold," Allen said, "it's not fun catching hard passes in the cold. Getting off the ground is a little more exhausting throughout the course of the game. So just trying to get used to that, I think it's more of a mental barrier than I think a physical barrier, if anything."
Starting strong
The Bills are 8-0 this season when scoring a touchdown on their opening possession. When they don't, well, they're vulnerable.
"I think early on in the game is the biggest part," safety Micah Hyde said. "You have to start fast in the playoffs ... have to put some points on the board, have to start playing some good defense right from the jump. You can't go out there and lay an egg in the first half and go out there in the second half and say, `hey, we're going to get this thing going.'
"You have to start fast and you have to make the plays early."
Run to the light
Offensive coordinator Brian Daboll has insisted all season that game plans will reflect whatever they believe is needed to win against a specific opponent on a specific week. They won't hesitate to run it 40 times or throw it 40 times or have try to achieve balance.
But it's obvious the Bills' identity is all about Allen's right arm and right and left legs. In a perfect world, they want him to throw first, run second and hand off a distant third.
Saturday night's world will be decidely imperfect, which means they're almost certainly going to need to take the ball out of his hands more than they'd like and place it in those of running back Devin Singletary.
Singletary in his last four games has carried 76 times for 323 yards and five TDs. That's by far the most work he had in any four other games this season, and it's no coincidence they have won them all.
"He's earned the playing time and the touches that he's gotten based on the results," offensive coordinator Brian Daboll said. "... I just think he's earned this opportunity and he's done a good job of it."
They're going to have to be two-dimensional, though. Unlike the Patriots, who won this season's first meeting by attempting just three passes, the Bills aren't built to win that way. They'll need balance in this game, or they won't be able to score, at least with their offense.
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.
