Facing a fourth and five while trailing the Kansas City Chiefs by three points with just two minutes remaining in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, Josh Allen dropped back from the Buffalo Bills’ 47-yard line with the team’s Super Bowl hopes on the line.
But while most of the ensuing focus on the play in question has centered on Dalton Kincaid dropping what would have been a first down at the Kansas City 35-yard line, ESPN’s Benjamin Solak took a different approach.
In a series of posts on X, Solak illustrated his belief that Allen should have targeted wide receiver Khalil Shakir, who motioned into the backfield prior to the snap, providing the Bills’ quarterback with a potential safety valve on the play.
After initially making his case using ESPN’s Next Gen Stats animation — a display of dots intended to represent the players on the field — Solak posted a more thorough breakdown of the play using real-life footage of both the play itself and previous examples of the Bills benefitting from similar concepts.
“Allen moves out to his right and he wants to push this ball down the field and he wants to get it all in one chunk and I understand that and Kincaid is open and it should have been completed,” Solak says toward the end of his five-minute video breakdown. “But there’s a lot of worlds where this look, and this look, and this look — you say, ‘alright, I’m just swinging the ball out here to Khalil Shakir and he’s going to catch it for me and he’s going to go pick up the first down.’ And the drive probably continues.”
While Solak’s breakdowns were undoubtedly thorough, they were also quickly met with backlash from many pointing out that playing football isn’t quite as a simple as the ESPN analyst was seemingly making it out to be. The most common criticism came in some form of “it’s easy to say what a quarterback should have done with the benefit of hindsight and screen grabs — less so when you’re facing the type of pressure that Allen was in real-time during this particular play.”
And it wasn’t just salty Bills fans filling his mentions either.
Even former Chiefs left tackle Mitchell Schwartz jumped to Allen’s defense, noting “the hot answer on 4th and 5 when there’s 2 free rushers instantly isn’t to throw to a guy 10 yards behind the line of scrimmage who’s running lateral and slightly backwards.” Perhaps the most notable criticism, however, came from former NFL quarterback and current Thursday Night Football analyst Ryan Fitzpatrick, who praised Solak’s work as an analyst before pointing out that his suggestion for what Allen should have done merely wasn’t practical.
“I actually really like your passion and knowledge for the game but sitting in your comfortable swivel chair with the heater on in the house and a clicker in hand makes the game very easy,” Fitzpatrick wrote.
“Having two unblocked, unimpeded defenders believe it or not is pretty difficult to navigate…in the interest of credibility, please don’t ever pause the tape again to talk about the space between the unblocked full speed rushers and how the qb just needs to turn his hips and make the throw.”
Solak, to his credit, replied, expressing his belief that Allen could have done more to buy himself time. Fitzpatrick, however, countered that Allen had already done exactly that by running to his right — thus eliminating Shakir as a realistic option on the play.
While Solak’s film work has played a significant role in his rapid rise in the NFL media space, very rarely — if ever — has it been met with this sort of reaction. Ultimately, fans and former players alike seem to agree that there’s more that goes into a quarterback’s decision-making process than seeing which animated dots/players were open in hindsight — and even then, Shakir still might not have been the best option on the play.
Based on his replies to Fitzpatrick, Solak appears to be remaining steadfast in his belief that Allen should have thrown it to Shakir, although he otherwise isn’t reading his mentions, which is probably for the better. Lost in all of this seems to be that Allen actually wound up making a play that should have been caught and the only reason anyone’s currently asking “what if?” is because Kincaid failed to do so.