ORCHARD PARK - Credit where credit is due Monday afternoon asBuffalo Bills cornerback Maxwell Hairston, who blew off the media following his poor performance Sunday in the loss to the Patriots, apologized for his behavior.
“I wanted to start this off by apologizing for walking out yesterday,” he said, interrupting the regular scheduled press conferences that are reserved for head coach Joe Brady and coordinators Jim Leonhard and Pete Carmichael. “Feeling very emotional, I let my emotions get the best of me and I didn't want to say something I might have regretted. You live and you learn. That's kind of immature, and I'm better than that. So I wanted to get that out of the way.”
Hairston had an awful game in every way and he surely knew how damaging
his performance was. He allowed four receptions totaling 44 yards on seven targets and while that doesn’t seem terrible, when you break down the situations, it was all of the completions resulted in first downs including two touchdowns by Romeo Doubs, plus there were a couple other regrettable moments.
After getting beaten by Doubs in the first quarter for the first score of the game, Hairston had a nightmare series at the start of the third quarter as he essentially gave the Patriots their go-ahead touchdown. On a critical fourth-and-2 play at the Bills’ 17, Hairston was lined up across from Doubs and for some reason gave him nearly 10 yards of cushion and it became an easy pitch and catch from Drake Maye to Doubs for a gain of nine.
Three plays later on third-and-goal from 2, Hairston was flagged for holding in the end zone which wiped out a Landon Jackson sack that probably would have forced the Patriots to kick a field but instead gave them a first down at the 1. Two plays later, Doubs beat Hairston one-on-one for the go-ahead touchdown.
And then came the exclamation point on Hairston’s day. After Josh Allen’s terrible interception, the Bills got the Patriots into a third-and-10 from the 19 with 55 seconds left and a stop would have given Allen another chance. Instead, Maye threw a pass into the right flat to Hunter Henry and as Henry was angling for the first down marker, Hairston took a terrible and half-hearted angle and could not prevent the game-clinching first down.
"No. I think that's clear, and I think he would tell you that,” Leonhard said when he was asked if he felt Hairston gave full effort on the play.
Leonhard then quickly defended Hairston, chalking up the day to a young player struggling and needing to find a way to learn from it and move on.
“The thing that I love about Max is the pride,” Leonhard said. “He cares, he wants it, he will address it. I'm sure he's as pissed as anybody in the organization on how that looked and the way it went about, and again, that sometimes goes down to you have to look inside of the player, of the things they went through in the game, and sometimes they're just processing.
“That's not the time to think. That's the time to turn your brain off, max effort, go find a way, right? You're the only guy in position to get us out of a bad situation on that point. We're going to continue to push Max and get him to grow. And he's got a lot of pride, so I think he'll get it done.”
Hairston was asked about that last play, and he indeed owned it.
“First, as my DC, we have a standard that we set,” he said. “It's really on me to hold myself accountable to that. But it's also for him to be able to let me know that I'm not playing up to the standard and from that point on, it's on me to get the job done and correct that and not put it on tape again.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for more than four decades including 37 years as the full-time beat writer/columnist for the D&C. He has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Bills' Maxwell Hairston owns mistakes after loss to Patriots
