N.F.L. Playoffs: Kansas City Beats Buffalo in Overtime

In the back-and-forth late game on Sunday, Kansas City topped the Buffalo Bills in overtime in a high-scoring battle at Arrowhead Stadium. Kansas City clinched its fourth-straight A.F.C. championship berth and will host the Cincinnati Bengals.

The Rams looked in control for most of Sunday’s game at Raymond James Stadium, but Brady led the Buccaneers, who trailed by as many as 24 points, on two scoring drives in the final five minutes to tie the game. Tampa Bay, despite numerous defensive missteps, forced four Los Angeles fumbles, including a late turnover by running back Cam Akers that set up a game-tying touchdown run by Leonard Fournette.

Stafford, who has thrown costly late-game turnovers, did not throw an interception, however, and in the game’s biggest moment, he found his league-leading receiver Cooper Kupp for a 40-yard completion to set up Matt Gay’s walk-off field goal.

In perhaps the most exciting game of the weekend, Patrick Mahomes led Kansas City on a game-winning touchdown drive in overtime to lift his team to a 42-36 win over Buffalo. There were three lead changes in the final three minutes of regulation. Mahomes and Bills quarterback Josh Allen, two of the A.F.C.’s best quarterbacks, had over 700 passing yards and seven touchdowns between them.

Allen led the Bills on six-play, 75-yard touchdown drive to take a 3-point lead with less than a minute left in the game, but Mahomes needed even fewer plays (three) to move his team into field-goal range.

Harrison Butker nailed the game-tying 49-yard field goal to send the game to the extra period, and Allen never touched the ball in overtime. Mahomes threw a back shoulder pass to Travis Kelce in the end zone to send Kansas City to the conference championship game and end the Bills’ promising season.

In this age of the N.F.L., fans are witnessing the flourishing of Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen.

The two young quarterbacks for Kansas City and the Buffalo Bills engaged in a thrilling battle on Sunday night as they went throw for throw in the A.F.C.’s divisional round, exchanging leads and accumulating yards as if it were an elementary schoolyard game at recess. The game was so exciting that it needed more time, the referee saying “great job so far” with a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Harrison Butker kicked a 49-yard field goal to send the game to overtime after both teams exchanged the lead three times in just under two minutes. The contest finally concluded when Mahomes connected with Travis Kelce near the sideline for an 8-yard touchdown, leaving Kansas City with a 42-36 win at Arrowhead Stadium. Mahomes took off his helmet and ran into the end zone to meet Kelce as the wackiness of this game ended and officials confirmed the catch by replay.

“We were all just part of one of the better games in the National Football League,” Kansas City Coach Andy Reid said in his postgame news conference. The Chiefs will now play the Cincinnati Bengals for the A.F.C. championship next week, becoming the first team in league history to host four consecutive conference championship games.

The Bills and Kansas City rattled off highlight-reel plays as if they were ordinary. With 13 seconds remaining, Allen found Gabriel Davis uncovered in the end zone, completing a 19-yard touchdown pitch-and-catch. With 62 seconds remaining, Mahomes found the speedy Tyreek Hill open in space on an in-breaking route. He caught the ball and sprinted untouched for a 64-yard touchdown. In total, 25 points were scored in just under two minutes.

“If you’re not going to go down fighting, then you don’t deserve to be here,” Mahomes said in his postgame news conference.

The two quarterbacks have now dueled three times in the last calendar year. Mahomes bested Allen in last season’s A.F.C. championship game, 38-24, and after throwing for 325 yards and three touchdowns, hoisted the conference trophy at Arrowhead for the second consecutive season. As Kansas City celebrated, Bills receiver Stefon Diggs watched alone on the sideline while red, yellow and white confetti fell.

Buffalo got revenge this season in Week 5, when the Bills won, 38-20, giving Sunday night’s meeting the added drama of a tiebreaker. Both Allen, 25, and Mahomes praised each other in the past week, but Allen acknowledged that he was under more pressure to win, as Mahomes, 26, had already played in three A.F.C. championship games and won a Super Bowl.

“That’s the type of level that we want to be; in order to be the best, you go to beat the best,” Allen said. “And they’ve really been one of the, if not the best team in the last four years.”

Allen played well Sunday, throwing for 329 yards and four touchdowns, all of them to Davis, two of them in the fourth quarter. He also rushed for a team-high 68 yards. His only downfall was that he did not have the ball last. He could only watch from the sideline as Kansas City won the coin toss before overtime, leaving him unable to respond to Kelce’s game-winning touchdown. It was a disappointing end to a successful season in which the Bills won the A.F.C. East for the second straight year and finished with the N.F.L.’s top-ranked defense.

“I know the fans are disappointed, and I wish I could take it off of them,” Bills Coach Sean McDermott said. “I wish I could take it off the team, but we can’t. What doesn’t kill you should only make you stronger. It’s going to take some time, but it will make us stronger.”

Sunday night’s game mimicked the 2018 season’s A.F.C. championship game, when Mahomes saw Tom Brady and the Patriots march down the field and win in overtime. Mahomes joked that he would “take the win,” but that he would have loved to have seen Allen on another possession.

“Whenever you have two teams going back and forth the way that we were going, it kind of stings that you can’t see the other guy go,” Mahomes said.

Kansas City, too, experienced a pendulum of emotions as the game concluded. Reid and the players credited Mahomes’s resolve and the team’s preparation. In his postgame news conference, Hill said the team practices late-game situations on Fridays, and that resolve showed on Sunday. Mahomes demonstrated his greatness, Hill said, by driving Kansas City 44 yards in three plays with 13 seconds left to set up Butker’s game-tying kick. On the sideline before that sequence, Reid told Mahomes: “When it’s grim, go be the grim reaper.”

“This is just another step to get him into the Hall of Fame,” Hill said.

The game in some ways resembled Kansas City’s season. The team started 3-4 and looked vulnerable, as defenses found ways to contain its downfield strikes with zone coverage. But it rebounded, losing only one game since November and earning the No. 2 seed in the conference. Buffalo used some of those defensive strategies, but Mahomes was patient, relying on shorter throws and scrambling through open holes. In the rushing attack, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Jerick McKinnon and Mecole Hardman combined for 115 yards. It was a complete performance, Mahomes said, that he will not forget.

“I’ll remember it forever,” he said.

Harrison Butker’s kick was good from 49-yards to send the game to overtime.

Josh Allen found receiver Gabriel Davis in the end zone for the go-ahead score. Allen and Davis have connected for four touchdowns in the game.

Stefon Diggs caught the pass on the ensuing 2-point attempt, and Buffalo took the lead, 29-26.

The drive was 16 plays long.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Tyreek Hill caught a 64-yard touchdown from Patrick Mahomes.

And Hill showed precisely why you put him back there.

Kansas City’s miss on the extra point could be huge later.

Mahomes is 13-of-19 passing for 114 yards and a touchdown. He also rushed for 49 yards and a score.

The offense has looked in sync — Mahomes has hit five different targets and running backs Jerick McKinnon and Clyde Edwards-Helaire have combined for 39 yards. All season, most teams have played Kansas City with heavy doses of zone coverage to negate the downfield strikes and explosive plays. Buffalo employed some of that strategy, it allowed Mahomes to scamper for a 34-yard gain to set up their first touchdown. On their next scoring drive, Mahomes took underneath throws to march down the field. The Bills’ defense stopped them near the goal line, but a holding penalty gifted Kansas City a fresh set of downs. Mahomes then sailed a pass to Byron Pringle, who completed a contested catch for a 2-yard score.

But Allen responded, needing only seven plays 75 yards to find receiver Gabriel Davis open in the end zone for an 18-yard touchdown. Allen is 15 of 18 for 113 yards and a touchdown, and has also run for 45 yards. The Bills have played aggressively, converting both of their fourth down attempts on the opening drive, which ended with a 2-yard touchdown from Devin Singletary.

Mathieu is a team captain and one of Kansas City’s best defensive players.

He joined the team in 2019 and was a key contributor to their Super Bowl run. Teammates said that he infused a hard-nosed, dogged attitude in the locker room. He is a three-time Pro Bowl selection and has been named to three All-Pro teams.

Sean McDermott did not come to Kansas City to coach scared.

In that year’s wild card weekend, Kansas City shut out the Texans in Houston, 30-0. Later that day, the Pittsburgh Steelers upended the host Cincinnati Bengals, 18-16. The following day, the Seattle Seahawks beat the Minnesota Vikings, 10-9, in frigid Minneapolis, and the Green Bay Packers knocked off the hosts in Washington, 35-18.

On Saturday, the Cincinnati Bengals shocked the top-seeded Tennessee Titans in Nashville, 19-16, on the last play of the game. The San Francisco 49ers repeated the feat in the evening game when Robbie Gould kicked a winning field goal as time expired to knock off the Packers in Lambeau Field.

Earlier Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams held on to beat the defending champion Buccaneers in Tampa, 30-27, after blowing a 24-point lead.

Now it’s the Bills’ turn to try to win on a playoff game on the road. They haven’t won a playoff game outside Buffalo since 1993, when they beat the Miami Dolphins, 29-10, in the A.F.C. championship game and earned a trip to their third consecutive Super Bowl.

But Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, after nearly losing the ball on first down, connected with Cooper Kupp on a 44-yard pass two plays later, then hustled his team to the line of scrimmage to spike the ball and set up Gay’s field goal.

Kupp led Rams receivers with nine catches for 183 yards, and Odell Beckham Jr. added 69 yards on six catches.

It was a decisive and swift series to end the game, and the only one that went the Rams’ way. Far too often this season, Stafford, despite his impressive passing numbers and arm strength, had hurt the Rams’ offense with costly turnovers, particularly late in games.

Stafford tied the Jaguars rookie Trevor Lawrence for the league lead with 17 interceptions this season, and his interception to end overtime of the Rams’ Week 18 loss to San Francisco gave the 49ers their playoff berth.

The Rams had traded precious draft capital to acquire Stafford ahead of this season in the hope that he could catalyze a Super Bowl run, but his propensity to turn the ball over followed him to Los Angeles after 12 seasons as the Detroit Lions’ quarterback, where he threw at least 10 interceptions in all but one season and never won a playoff game.

But in a crucial stretch, Stafford found Kupp on a blown coverage route. He did not hold the ball and play for overtime. He did not turn the ball over. And he bested the quarterback on the other side of the field, Tom Brady, who is much more accustomed to late-game heroics.

Stafford ended the day with 366 yards on 28 of 38 passing, and three total touchdowns.

“He certainly delivered in a big way today,” said Sean McVay, the Ram’s head coach, when asked if Sunday’s performance was the reason the team signed Stafford. “I’ve always had a lot of confidence in Matthew. That never wavered.”

It was Brady who threw the game’s only interception, ending the Buccaneers’ possession near the end of the first half, and it was Brady who lost his cool under pressure. In a disastrous first half, he was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct for the first time in his career after complaining to the officials about being hit in the face by Rams linebacker Von Miller in the second quarter.

The flag came in the midst of Brady and the Buccaneers’ most productive drive of the game to that point. Brady had converted on second-and-17 from the Rams’ 50-yard line, finding Leonard Fournette for a 19-yard gain, but the drive stalled three plays later. Ryan Succop missed the 48-yard field goal attempt, leaving the score at 17-3. The Rams kicked a field goal and went into halftime up 20-3.

In an attempt to defend last year’s championship win, Tampa Bay returned all 22 of its starters from last season’s team, a first in the salary cap era. The Buccaneers re-signed Chris Godwin, one of the off-season’s biggest free agent targets, and also brought back Antonio Brown, whom Brady had lobbied for the team to sign last season.

Neither player was available to Brady in Sunday’s game, however, as Godwin tore an anterior cruciate ligament during the regular season and Brown was released by the team in December. Another of the team’s high-profile adds, defensive back Richard Sherman, was placed on injured reserve with an Achilles injury.

Those losses, coupled with the fact that the Buccaneers were without their All-Pro right tackle Tristan Wirfs, manifested in protection issues in the passing game and offensive inefficiency. Tampa Bay converted just three of 14 third downs.

But Brady has to this point in his career been the ultimate postseason advantage and, in the second half, it looked like the 44-year-old quarterback known for his late-game heroics could lead yet another dramatic postseason comeback.

The Rams extended their lead to 27-3 on Stafford’s 1-yard touchdown run at the beginning of the third quarter, and Tampa Bay struggled to respond with a field goal. But Kupp fumbled the first pass on the next possession, giving the Buccaneers new life and a short field.

Starting from the Rams’ 30-yard line, Brady orchestrated a seven-play touchdown drive that was punctuated when Fournette, playing in his first game since Week 15 after returning from injured reserve, punched the ball in from the 1-yard line.

The teams traded fumbles on successive plays to begin the fourth quarter, with Brady losing the ball after being hit again by Miller and Rams center Brian Allen fumbling the snap. Clinging to its two-possession lead, Los Angeles forced two Tampa Bay turnovers on downs late in the game.

With less than five minutes remaining, Brady heaved a pass to receiver Mike Evans, who was covered one-on-one by the Rams’ star defensive back, Jalen Ramsey. Evans hauled in the pass for a 55-yard score that cut the lead to 27-20.

Cam Akers fumbled on the Rams’ ensuing possession, giving Brady another short field. He capitalized with another touchdown drive, punctuated by a Fournette run to tie the score, 27-27, with 42 seconds remaining.

But then Stafford took over and ended Brady and the Buccaneers’ season.

Brady finished with 329 yards on 30 of 54 passing, with one interception.

The loss brings questions about what lies ahead for Tampa Bay. In the week leading up to the game, as he has in previous postseasons, Brady fielded questions about whether he might retire after this season because his contract runs through the end of the 2022 season. After Sunday’s loss, Brady told reporters that he hadn’t “put a lot of thought” into how he’d approach this off-season.

Before Sunday afternoon, it may have seemed like he would have more time to confront the prospect. Stafford made sure he did not.

After the turnover, Tampa Bay converted a play on fourth down, and the drive ended in a 1-yard touchdown run by Leonard Fournette.

Tampa Bay went three and out on its first possession of the quarter and, after allowing a 33-yard punt return, gave up another touchdown to the Rams. Los Angeles leads 27-13 heading into the final period.

Matthew Stafford, the Rams quarterback who notched the first playoff win of his career last week against the Cardinals, guided the Rams down the field thanks to a pass to tight end Kendall Blanton for 11 yards, a short pass to Kupp then a 10-yard completion to Odell Beckham Jr., who hauled in the pass and got two feet down as he was diving out of bounds.

Tampa Bay, which has been largely outplayed on offense, defense and special teams, put together a promising drive afterward, highlighted by a big play from Tom Brady to tight end Rob Gronkowski for a 42-yard gain.

But the Rams defense has pressured Brady consistently throughout the game, and the Buccaneers’ drive stalled at the 13-yard line. They settled for a 31-yard field goal from Ryan Succop.

The Buccaneers’ score at the end of the quarter cut the Rams’ lead to 14.