ORCHARD PARK - Buffalo Bills offensive coordinator Joe Brady did not mince any words Monday afternoon when he spoke to reporters via Zoom, all the while trying to process what went wrong the night before against the Baltimore Ravens.

Brady said if anyone was looking to blame someone for the Bills’ 35-10 defeat, it was him.

“I don’t think we had a bad game plan, I think the game was called bad,” he said with his best mea culpa face.

Well …

Look, Brady was not to blame for the entire breakdown of the team. Yes, he probably didn’t give the offense its best chance to succeed with some of the decisions he made, and it was noble of him to fall on the sword, but this wasn’t all on him. The defense was horrible, too, special teams had its poor moments, and all of it conspired to produce a clunker of seismic proportion.

Obviously, at the forefront of Brady’s mind was the egregious trick play he dialed up in the third quarter at a point when the Bills were down 21-10 but showing a little life after they had scored a touchdown on their first possession of the second half.

“It was a pretty bad play call,” Brady said. “There is no other way to sum that up. Ultimately it cost us a football game.”

He had Curtis Samuel take a shotgun snap with Josh Allen lined up wide to the left. Samuel ran left and pitched the ball to Allen who was then supposed to throw to someone downfield, but it was blown up by the Ravens’ Kyle Van Noy who defeated his blocker, hit Samuel, and then hit Allen and forced a fumble which Baltimore’s Kyle Hamilton recovered. A couple minutes later the Ravens scored to bump their lead to 28-10 and the game was essentially over.

“We talked about it after the game, we talked about it again today,” coach Sean McDermott said. “And I think we feel pretty strongly that's a situation that we want back, and we can learn from, and we will learn from. Felt like we had some momentum there at that point in the game and we were doing a fairly decent job at that point, at least in the second half, of moving the football.”

It was a pretty bad call, no doubt. But it wasn’t the sole reason for the defeat. First of all, there was no guarantee that, down 21-10, the Bills would have gone on to win had that play, and the resulting turnover, not happened. In fact, as poorly as the defense played, it’s unlikely the result would have flipped.

Still, Brady owned the fact that he had a bad night, maybe his worst since taking over the role midway through 2023.

“Not even as a bad play call just because of the result of the play, but I try to provide myself on the feel and flow of the game and how things are going,” he said. “Even if we had been able to get that off, and even if we were able to do something with it, it just wasn’t good timing for the play. I have to have a better feel and understanding. Just a poor play call and ultimately cost us a football game because we had an opportunity to cut it to a one-score game because we were kind of flowing right there, so I have to be better.”

Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, and he has written numerous books about the history of the team. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana. https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

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This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Joe Brady blames himself for Buffalo Bills loss to Baltimore Ravens