The Bills escaped Sunday's 24-16 win over the Los Angeles Chargers with their record intact. Josh Allen knows they gutted out a win in a game that wasn't pretty, and is not pretending otherwise.
Buffalo coughed it up five times and still left the new Highmark Stadium at 3-0 in the Joe Brady era. Afterward, the QB made it clear the perfect start does not come without alarm.
"Overall, I mean, again, we win. But a lot of smoke detectors going off right now," Allen said postgame. "We got to clean a lot of stuff up."
Brady reached for the same image when the subject turned to ball security, saying the problems were ones the Bills had already spotted before they showed up against Los Angeles.
"The house was on fire today," he said to the media. "That's
unacceptable."
"I talk about the smoke detectors all along, just because we get up with the ball doesn't mean it was right. It showed its head today, and that's going to get you beat, right?"
The first-year head coach was not about to let 3-0 paper over what actually happened.
"We can't just gloss over this because we won the football game and be like, hey, you know what? We won. Let's keep it moving," the head coach added. "Like, no, no, that's going to get you beat."
Allen, for his part, could hardly believe the game was still tied at the break given all the giveaways.
"Sitting there to be tied at halftime felt like a dream, to be honest," Allen noted. "But our defense played fantastic."
For Brady, winning ugly to stay undefeated over three weeks says something about the group — even if the sloppiness itself cannot be excused.
"And the fact that we were able to still find ways to win football games speaks to the character in that locker room and the guys not pointing fingers and staying together and just continue to put the ball down," Brady continued. "So it's never easy to win in this league. I'm never going to apologize for winning."
The Bills are 3-0, and the smoke detectors are still beeping in Orchard Park.
The division slate opens Sunday, Oct. 4, when the 1-2 New England Patriots visit the new Highmark Stadium at 1 p.m. ET on CBS.
This article originally appeared on Bills Wire: Bills' Josh Allen: 'Smoke detectors going off' during win vs. Chargers
