IRVINE, Calif. — The Buffalo Bills escaped Los Angeles with an instant-classic overtime win, beating the Rams 37-34 to improve to 4-1.
However, for the first time since 2012, when the franchise stayed in Phoenix between West Coast games against the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals, the Bills opted not to return to Orchard Park for practice this week.
With a short week ahead of a road game in Las Vegas, the Bills are preparing for the Raiders by practicing at UC Irvine before flying in on Saturday.
What does this rare week look like for the Bills, and what is ahead for them in Week 6 against the Raiders? The Athletic’s Joe Buscaglia and Tim Graham discussed it in California.
Buscaglia: Well, Tim, it’s a bit of an unusual week for us. We’ve traded the Orchard Park field house for a few days, and now we’re all settled at the Bren Events Center on the UC Irvine campus as honorary Anteaters for the week. We’re just a short walk from something called the Anteatery, so I, for one, am thrilled.
Graham: The facilities here are interesting compared to what the Bills are used to away from Orchard Park. St. John Fisher University actually has a football program with multiple manicured fields. There is no football team at UC Irvine, where Anteaters fans joke they’ve been undefeated since the school’s founding in 1965. The practice fields are vast and spartan, but they’re grass and ready for whatever prep work the Bills want, and the team is staying at a posh Newport Beach hotel instead of dorm rooms.
Buscaglia: Head coach Joe Brady made a good point about body recovery and not forcing the team on two extra cross-country trips in such a short span. But it’s kind of crazy to think it’s been 14 years since they last did this two-week getaway, and this one has already started way better than the last. If you recall, the Chan Gailey Bills had their doors blown off by the San Francisco 49ers at the old Candlestick Park, 45-3. That was Colin Kaepernick’s second season, and it was the most he’d played in a single game at that point in his career.
Graham: Of course, I remember. I’m not that old. It was back during the Carter administration, right? We thought the Bills would follow up with another clunker, but they somehow regrouped without coming home in between, with some luck. They upset the Arizona Cardinals in overtime thanks to Jay Feely’s 38-yard miss as regulation expired and Bills safety Jairus Byrd’s clutch interception in sudden death. Like the current Bills for most of this season, the Bills that day had a horseshoe implanted somewhere. How can the Bills start winning games consistently without getting lucky, Joe?
Buscaglia: Well, for one, the defense has to start finding some answers. We listened to defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard’s video news conference on the drive from Los Angeles to Irvine, and he was, in his words, “pissed,” so I went back and listened to it two more times. Leonhard’s urgency is notable. All year, we’ve heard from Brady and some of the team that they aren’t worried and that it’s eventually going to click. But with the same problems persisting into mid-October, we’re dangerously close to this being who they are. Leonhard said they need to have honest conversations, though he remained optimistic the answers were in-house.
