The 41-17 result Sunday at Arizona certainly wasn't anything the Bills wanted to take with them into their bye week, or any other week for that matter. But the team is looking at the big picture with respect to the first five weeks of their season, and will try to improve their performance as they use the bye to prepare for the meat of their 2008 schedule.
"Our guys played hard," said head coach Dick Jauron. "I think they played as hard in this loss as we did in our four wins so I'll always feel good about that. We don't always play smart, there's no doubt about that. We made some errors that we need to correct. And we'll correct them. But we go into our bye week at 4-1 and I'm not sure there are many people that thought that was going to happen. So we'll make our corrections and move forward."
The players were by no means happy with the results of this last game at Arizona, but it hasn't done much to shake their self-confidence.
"We're a strong team and we know that this is just a small part of the adversity we'll see throughout the year," said Jabari Greer. "So we're just going to go back to the basics, correct our mistakes and come back to work."
"It's not the way you want to enter the bye, but we have a week to regroup and two weeks to prepare for a good team coming up," said Paul Posluszny. "We've got to go fix our mistakes and move on."
Among those areas of their game to correct defensively is coming up with a solution for the quick passing game. In order to neutralize Buffalo's pass rush, opponents have been going to quick three step drop timing routes that prevent the rush from putting any heat on the quarterback.
"They did a great job with their quick game and we didn't play as well as we should have against it," said Posluszny of Arizona's offense. "That's something we'll address. We have two weeks to take care of that now because I'm sure other teams will see this film, watch it and try to take advantage of it and we'll have that squared away."
Offensively, coordinator Turk Schonert would like to get more consistent production out of the ground game than they have in their first five outings.
"We've just got to keep working hard and making progress," said Schonert. "But we've got to get our running game uncorked a bit better. (Sunday) I didn't call it enough I probably should've called some more runs. I don't know what we averaged, but I know we only had about 17 carries, but with the game getting out of hand it's hard to keep running it."
With respect to health the bye comes at a good time with Trent Edwards getting more than a week to recover from his concussion suffered Sunday and Ko Simpson will get a week to rehab his hamstring injury with no game on the horizon this weekend. Terrence McGee, who did not play Sunday, will also get another week to tend to his sprained knee.
"This will be a well deserved time having a couple of guys going down," said Lee Evans. "We'll get healthy and come back from the bye week ready to roll."
Buffalo enters the bye week still alone in first place in the AFC East. While disappointed they could not remain undefeated, they recognize they still sit in good position to make a legitimate playoff run when they resume play in Week 7.
"We're 4-1 and in a decent spot right now," said Posluszny. "We have a good chance to do some things later on in the season."
