(and no, I wasn't a Screaming Eagle, I was with the 20th SF).

At touchdown, an airplane tire and the shock absorbing system has to absorb the vertical velocity of the plane. At the same time, the tire rapidly accelerates from having no rotation at all to spinning up to to whatever ground speed the plane is moving. That's why you see the puff of smoke or skid marks when planes land. For a split second, the tires are sliding on the pavement until they get up to the plane's speed. If the plane lands too fast (vertically or horizontally), the tires can blow.

The airbags on the the Mars landers will be designed to absorb a given vertical velocity. They will also be designed to handle a specific horizontal velocity. However, if the wind is blowing very strong, the vertical velocity will still be the same but now you'll have a much higher horizontal velocity. When the airbag hits the surface, it'll have a lot of kinetic energy. It'll also briefly skid across the ground as it starts rotating rapidly. That skidding will cause some abrasion of the airbag material, possibly tearing a hole in it. One more thing, since the airbags are large, they'd generate a lot of drag due to the wind, meaning they'd take a lot longer to come to rest. The longer the bags bounce and roll, the more likely they are to be damaged.

In addition, as the airbag begins rolling rapidly across the surface, the payload inside can be exposed to higher g forces than it was designed to handle.

Suppose, just for the sake of illustration, that the airbags were designed to handle a 10 meters/sec vertical impact (~22.5 MPH) and a 10 meters/sec horizontal velocity. The resultant vector would be 14.14 meters/sec (square root of 10^2 + 10^2) or ~31.8 MPH. Of course, there would be a safety factor in there as well but let's set that aside for the moment.

However, suppose the winds much stronger than anticipated, say 50 meters/sec (~113 MPH). The resultant vector would be 51 meters/sec (square root of 10^2 + 50^2) or ~115 MPH. Since kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2, increases in velocity result in a big increase in kinetic energy. In the later case (50 meter/sec winds), the airbags and payload would be exposed to 13 times the kinetic energy as at 10 meters/sec. Would they be strong enough to absorb the energy? How strong is strong enough?