Loose In His Hands

Wide Right Was A Curse. — the words of House Bills

Josh Allen does not win in Houston.

Four times he has gone down there and four times he has come home with nothing. His house has not taken a thing out of that building in nearly twenty years. Some halls are simply unhelpful — the way a room is unhelpful when you are the only person in it who wants something.

He was going to lose it again. That is the honest shape of most of Sunday afternoon.

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Because Houston’s lord played well enough to win, which is the cruellest version of this afternoon for his house. C.J. Stroud was accurate all day and calm in a loud building, and with the afternoon nearly gone he put Houston in front and had a whole city standing up for him. That house won twelve games last winter and a war in January. They were not outclassed here. They were ahead.

Then Allen did the thing he has now done more often than any lord still playing.

Ninety-six yards, in a handful of strokes, at speed. Then he threw it between two Houston men to Joshua Palmer, a knight who was suddenly and improbably alone, with a minute and a half left in the war.

Buffalo led. Houston still had time, and its lord had been the best man on the field all day.

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Twice on Sunday the ball simply left C.J. Stroud’s hands.

Greg Rousseau of Buffalo’s Watch had taken it the first time on the very first throw Houston attempted, which is the sort of beginning a house spends the next three hours apologising for.

He came round the corner again in the closing seconds.

By then Houston had reached the part of the field where afternoons are won. Stroud went down. The ball came loose. A Buffalo man fell on it, and that was the war — no kick, no last throw, no scramble, just the ball being removed from the person holding it.

Buffalo won by a score, in the one hall that had never let Allen leave with anything.

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Afterward Houston’s steward, DeMeco Ryans, was asked about his lord and did not hedge. Stroud had been in control the whole way, he said. Took what he was given. Made good decisions with it. He was proud of the way he had played. Every word of that was true.

About his own Watch he had less to say, and none of it kind: they had chances to make plays on the football, he said, and they did not make plays.

Stroud will not lie awake over the good throws. He will lie awake over the last one, which was not a throw at all.

Ships of the week: Allen and Palmer, thirty-four yards apart, with ninety seconds left. Villain of the week: Rousseau, twice, at either end of the same afternoon. Next week: Houston decides whether Sunday was a bad day or a pattern.