These fucking guys.
In the sense that yesterday's game was very different from the first two exhibitions this season, yes, things have changed and hooray I guess. In the sense that the probative value of the win against Arizona is limited AF, giving us little real sense of which Bills team will show up for the next four, eight, fourteen games this year, and that the prejudicial tendencies of the game are high AF as it threatens to elicit a too-familiar and unwelcome optimism in even the most jaded sports fan, fuck this win.
This team is fucking bullshit. Winning capably a few times a year is their recipe for the bait-and-switch, and even if they don't intend to, giving us performances like Sunday's does little else than give us a glimpse of winning football, a confirmation that the Bills can manage to play winning football here and there, and Exhibit A for why we shit bricks when winning football proves elusive as it always does eventually.
Good god this team is fucking bullshit.
Harts called this in his preview, and this Week 3 win was literally the best case scenario after an OC gets canned and the team gets an unmistakable spark as it [insert cliché regarding getting back to basics and/or getting the ball to playmakers]. Part of The Apologist's piece was poking fun at that clichéd predictability of the narrative wrapped up in throwing an assistant coach or coordinator under the bus when the HC is under fire, but this time the clichés ended up being prescient, which makes sense because sometimes that happens and those times are what keeps coaches believing that token firings can help a bad team become suddenly good.
What we had yesterday really can't be viewed through a lens other than one that recognizes the likelihood that this game was a blip; a fun blip, for sure - the kind of serendipity-laden result that permits lazy and/or blissfully hopeful consumers of the sport talk of Any Given Sunday as if the NFL was all about parity and wasn't a place where nearly half of the teams have not won a title and probably won't be sniffing one any time soon - but a blip all the same.
That all said, what we had yesterday - set against the paradigm of 74% of Super Bowls being won by 28% of the NFL's teams - was enjoyable and glorious and about all we can hope for under the soon-to-be sun-scorched and/or flooded earth. Eat at Arby's.
So let's revel in the afterglow a bit, y'all. Even in the struggle to 3 to 6 wins, a few Sundays will feel damn good.