AFC Notes: Bills, Dolphins, Jets, Patriots

Bills

The Chiefs look like the NFL’s next potential budding dynasty and helped reinforce that claim by winning Sunday’s AFC Championship game 38-24 against the Bills. The game also helped illustrate how hard it is to beat Kansas City by kicking field goals. Buffalo passed up a fourth and goal from the two-yard-line and a fourth and three from the eight to kick, adding six points to their total while the Chiefs scored 31 in the second and third frames. With the benefit of hindsight, Bills HC Sean McDermott acknowledged he might have done things differently — maybe. 

“I thought about going for it on both occasions. Maybe if I had to do it over again, I would have went for maybe one of them,” McDermott said via ESPN’s Marcel Louis-Jacques. “But the one before the half, I wanted to get points. We were having trouble coming up with points, and I wanted to at least have something to show for it going into the half, especially knowing they were getting the ball after half. I’ll look back at that and reevaluate that, especially the one after half there, and as an entire team, we’ll learn from the experience.”

• Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer thinks Bills DC Leslie Frazier is the favorite to land the Texans’ head coaching job. 
• Bills WR Cole Beasley revealed he played the past several weeks on a broken fibula. It wasn’t a full break, but Beasley said his first game back was bad until he “took a few meds and sucked it up.” (Matthew Fairburn)

Dolphins

• Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer mentions new Dolphins QB coach Charlie Frye has a relationship with first-round QB Tua Tagovailoa dating back to the Elite 11 high school camp. 

Jets

Before he interviewed with the Jets, new HC Robert Saleh heard a lot of the same things you do about how the team is dysfunctional. But Saleh had such a terrific first impression from his interview with New York that he says they rocketed to the top of his list right away. 

“A lot of the interviews, you go through it, and you’re like, ‘Huh, that’s exactly what people told me it was gonna be,’” Saleh said via Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer. “When I walked into the Jets [interview], the Zoom call, it was like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t that bad.’ I was expecting something different. I was expecting something disorganized. Instead, what I got was a very organized interview, a very collaborative interview. It felt like it was done really, really well by them.

“And then I was brought here, and you can take every preconceived notion and you can take all the perception and throw it out the window, of what people think of this place, just because of the way [owner] Christopher Johnson, [GM] Joe Douglas and [president] Hymie Elhai were.”

• NFL Media’s Tom Pelissero says the Jets will retain special teams coordinator Brant Boyer under Saleh.

Patriots

• The Patriots hosted WR Jordan Suell for a tryout and the 6-6, 205-pound former Southern Oregon wideout is a candidate for a futures deal, per ESPN’s Mike Reiss.