John Shale, Bills backup fullback and munitions expert
The Barrister
UPDATE: We recorded a carcast en route to the bar to watch the game and Scizz just sent me the audio file from his phone so here it is! Bonus points for listeners who can decipher what's playing on my car radio at any given moment.
UPDATE: We recorded a carcast en route to the bar to watch the game and Scizz just sent me the audio file from his phone so here it is! Bonus points for listeners who can decipher what's playing on my car radio at any given moment.
That was a fucking splendid afternoon of Buffalo Bills football we got yesterday. Unfuckingreal.
With a season as short as that of the NFL, generally a full week between games, every outing becomes a narrative-guiding metric even if we know it shouldn’t be. We should be able to relax and remain patient while we wait for a more reasonable sample size to come in for evaluation; we should be able to wait to see just how successful our particular squad is and, perhaps even more crucially, how good or awful the opponent really is, before putting much stock into any one week’s result. The Week 1 win against the Colts seems a little less impressive given how poor they’ve looked since; last week’s loss to the Patriots looks a little more forgivable now that we’ve seen another week wherein they dismantled their opposition (albeit to the most dismantle-able team in the league); and now yesterday’s win, well, it is both heartening and devoid of meaning given how good the Bills looked and how bad the Dolphins have been in their three games.
So, what to make of it? The sample size went up a game, the Rex Ryan-led Bills showed us something new by bouncing back from a brutal day and parlaying their fourth quarter would-be heroics into a massively dominant afternoon against a division rival, and the Dolphins are a dog shit football team that most halfway decent teams should be able to beat. So the Bills are at least halfway decent. Maybe even pretty good since they won by thirty. Maybe stacked with enough talent both on the field and on the sidelines that they can make a true run at a Wild Card. Predictions are dumb in this sport, we’re still talking about less than a quarter of the season in terms of available data, and I’m most certainly wrong due to any combination of the following factors:
Onto the recap!
With a season as short as that of the NFL, generally a full week between games, every outing becomes a narrative-guiding metric even if we know it shouldn’t be. We should be able to relax and remain patient while we wait for a more reasonable sample size to come in for evaluation; we should be able to wait to see just how successful our particular squad is and, perhaps even more crucially, how good or awful the opponent really is, before putting much stock into any one week’s result. The Week 1 win against the Colts seems a little less impressive given how poor they’ve looked since; last week’s loss to the Patriots looks a little more forgivable now that we’ve seen another week wherein they dismantled their opposition (albeit to the most dismantle-able team in the league); and now yesterday’s win, well, it is both heartening and devoid of meaning given how good the Bills looked and how bad the Dolphins have been in their three games.
So, what to make of it? The sample size went up a game, the Rex Ryan-led Bills showed us something new by bouncing back from a brutal day and parlaying their fourth quarter would-be heroics into a massively dominant afternoon against a division rival, and the Dolphins are a dog shit football team that most halfway decent teams should be able to beat. So the Bills are at least halfway decent. Maybe even pretty good since they won by thirty. Maybe stacked with enough talent both on the field and on the sidelines that they can make a true run at a Wild Card. Predictions are dumb in this sport, we’re still talking about less than a quarter of the season in terms of available data, and I’m most certainly wrong due to any combination of the following factors:
- Any predictions are entirely unable to account for the dumbfuckery of the NFL and its dumbfuck rules and the dumbfuck officials that enforce the aforementioned dumbfuck rules in a way that makes me wonder about the meaning of life and my impending death;
- #becauseitsbuffalo we will revert to the mean of sadness in substantial measure;
- The Patriots are developing a plan to thieve the DNA of Buffalo’s skill players and replace it with the genetic code of the morning show guys on WEEI;
- Tim Graham is bound to snap and murder me or someone I love someday, which is I suppose only sad for me, but fuck you for bringing that up;
- Paul Hamilton is going to give the team swine flu;
- The GOP’s insistence on banning stem cell research has stymied UB’s research into curing the Losing Disease, sucks to be us; or
- Carl Paladino is Buffalo’s version of Adrian Veidt (Watchmen references two weeks in a row, deal with it, chump ass motherfuckers), which means he is (a) creepy as hell with an ugly face, (b) a fucking idiot, and (c) going to send a massive [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS) to [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] us all.
Onto the recap!
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