Bills head coach Sean McDermott had a lot of praise for the Patriots

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Bills head coach Sean McDermott doesn't seem to be as dopey as Mike Tomlin - he knows what he's up against on Sunday.

"This is an outstanding football team, not that the other ones weren't," he said on a conference call Wednesday. "It just seems like now with the addition of some of the other players that they've added to on the roster with the addition of [Brandin] Cooks and some of the other players they've been able to add the last really X amount of months, I think this is a dynamite football team."

This is a big game for Buffalo. They're 6-5 and holding on to a wild card spot, which is the first time they've been in a playoff race this late in the season in quite some time. We're still not truly sure who made the decision to start Nathan Peterman for a game, but they've somehow survived that.

And to his credit, McDermott has done a very good job with the roster he was given after some of the more notable Buffalo players of the last few years were traded away (Ronald Darby and Marcell Dareus, among others).

Despite his success in his first season, McDermott is looking for bigger things.

"Well really two of the biggest boxes that we want to be able to check, so to speak, are really number one is making sure the culture is heading in the right direction," he said. "Then the second one would be establishing the standard of what's expected, what it needs to look like, how it needs to look, taste, feel, sound, smell, all of those as we move through this year and get to the final part of the year. So those are two big goals in this first season. Really it's just about doing the things that it takes to win – staying together as a team, staying together as an organization through the highs and lows of a season and everyone doing their job and doing their job to a level that is playoff-caliber because that really gives you a chance to get to the championship, which in our business is the Super Bowl."

And while the importance of this game for Buffalo cannot be stressed enough, this is also a big game for New England in terms of keeping pace with the Steelers for the No. 1 seed in the AFC. It wouldn't be surprising if Sunday was a tough one.

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