The Outlander

A few weeks back our office FedEx guy came by. Our Operations Manager usually handles them; there’s numerous packages arriving daily that need to be exactly what he expects not just for our sake but the sake of our customers and the various third party agencies that run communications between those customers and ourselves (very Office Space, but that’s advertising). Occasionally the Ops Manager is out in which case the FedEx guy comes to my office for a quick signature and confirmation of my name to cover their ass.

The guy was probably late-40’s to mid-50’s and while I signed the tiny screen with the matching tiny stylus he said “I think I have that exact same pennant.”

I wheeled around as if I have multiple pennants behind my desk but no, still just that one, a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl XXV champs one purchased off eBay for in the early to mid-aughts. I was in school and didn’t have a credit card at this point so I called my Mom, explained to her that no, eBay wasn’t going to rob her account for this $6.99 relic to an era that never existed and she assented. It’s been in various offices and apartments throughout the northeast before landing here in my office in Rhode Island in my mid-30’s.

While I’ve always had a little “no, you don’t have this one but ok” response in the past I decided to let this fellow Bills fan have his moment (besides in the years since I’ve found more than a few of these "Norwood makes the kick" bizarro penants around). I smiled and asked how he felt they were going to do this year.

He didn’t miss a beat. “Oh I stopped watching them after they benched Flutie for Johnson in the playoffs.”
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At a time when the foundation of everything we were taught- at church, at school, by parents, professors, colleagues and cops- has been shown to be nebulous at best, the Buffalo Bills are a zeitgeist petri dish. At times this seems to be due to an organized effort from the top down to implement a franchise that represents specific subgroups and entities that elicit goodwill and hero-worship from the demographic of “Buffalo football fan,” while at others it appears to be an organically cultivated shift from the fanbase themselves, saying the quiet parts out loud at the realization that not only are they not alone in their groupthink but there’s enough to change the very fabric of what America is in 2019.

This blog is as close to “writing for fun” as I get these days- in a cliché of mid-career average guy I too have a novel I need to get back to- though writing and communication is also my career. I work in real estate negotiation, hashing out leases with folks that run the gamut in education, income, business type and location (with a noticeable skew of nearly all being white males of course). Over the past few years I have seen a shift; one that was barely perceptible at first but has snowballed into the status quo in business discussions to the point where what was once the rule is now the exception and vice versa. It is abandonment of fact, abandonment of reason, abandonment of the mutually beneficial agreement. Not long ago I could sit down with a property owner, explain that we’re offering X because our profits are Y and while there may be hemming and hawing and some movement in one direction or another, discussions would be amicable because everyone deals in facts and figures and we want a partnership as opposed to an adversary. Deals would move quickly because they existed in a vacuum devoid of emotion and were conducted professionally because after all, we’re both just doing our jobs the best we can. The best way I can summarize this is quite simply that words meant things.
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Emotion has replaced reason. Where lessors previously saw a partner, they see an adversary. The concept of mutual benefit, of win-win has been replaced with zero sum antagonism. “Let’s crunch the numbers and see what we can do” has been replaced with “fuck you, pay me.” Every negotiation, every cent to claw is a symbol to them, a symbol of what they deserve, of who they are as people. They can only feel good about something if someone else feels bad about something. It’s not enough to have something; no someone else must go without in order for them to feel fulfilled and even then, only for a moment. Nothing is “just business,” just like nothing is “just football.”

I think by now we can admit that the Buffalo Bills as an operating business entity have placed an onus on symbolism not as a football team but as a civic operation espousing the meaning of what it is to be not just a good Buffalonian but a good person. This is a problem because what I want is a well operating *football team* that succeeds at *playing football,* which is not something that has occurred very often, arguably not at all during my adult life. They are not subtle about this, not with their talks about culture or handing out literal lunch pails to corporate sponsors who aren’t eating their lunch on steel beams in the sky but in air conditioned conference rooms.

They are not subtle about this, not with their flyovers, not with their weekly troop worship, not with their revolving door of mediocre players whose faith is stronger than their field awareness. They are not subtle when they draft not the most talented quarterback on the board but the one most malleable to fantastical brand speak, to say with a straight face that a Sabres Stanley Cup is the sporting event he’d most want to witness, fifteen months after learning what the Buffalo Sabres even are.

Josh Allen was drafted because he is a facsimile for what those who run the franchise thought Buffalonians want from their franchise Quarterback, of what they thought Buffalonians would identify with. He was not drafted based on his accomplishments but in spite of them. He was drafted because even if he didn’t work out, the fans would like him so much they wouldn’t blame the powers that be for wasting their time or missing an opportunity to turn the franchise around. Evidence (four years of Mountain West Conference play that resulted in merely an Honorable Mention), reason (accuracy is largely at its end stage of development by the end of college), facts (completion percentage, INT figures, passing yard totals) have been disregarded in favor of emotion (he signs autographs for kids and wears shorts in cold weather).
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If Josh Allen was drafted as a representative for what Buffalonians want and identify with then most should be offended. They believe you identify with someone who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. They believe you identify with someone who is style, not substance. They believe you identify with someone who has never succeeded at any meaningful level in their career getting an opportunity over those that have proven more worthy of the opportunity. They believe you identify with a loser because that’s what you are. 

Those who make the decisions for this team do not identify with you, they laugh at you. Sure, it comes behind closed doors at One Bills Drive but make no mistake, they do not identify with you and they do not respect you. They tell you how blue collar you are despite the fact you were the first in your family to get a degree. They tell you how bad the weather is despite the fact you only needed a light jacket for those December games. They tell you a player’s failures are secondary to his faith because they don’t believe you ultimately care about results. They tell you all about how *tough* the area is, despite the fact that when you think about it you grew up in a pretty safe suburb with non-descript doughy white friends and have a pretty successful career. They tell you how someone is a “Buffalo” guy when all you know about the guy is how he’s a replacement level nobody cast off from some other franchise he couldn’t succeed with. Is that what you want to identify with? The team may call themselves the Buffalo Bills but they have formulated a roster and culture that would be better off called the Tonawanda Bills; a culture of mediocrity, of entitlement over merit, of emotion over reason where success is defined by vague terms such as “values” and “effort” and not results. They are a team made for people who have given up, for those sitting at the bar at 3am on a Wednesday, for those who think winning is too much to ask.

It does not take very long for an objective mind to identify massive red flags around those running the franchise from top to bottom. The owner is on tape calling one of his own former players by the wrong name and fretting about losing advertising dollars for his shitty hockey team. The GM drafted the current quarterback. The collection of dunces before his arrival felt Patrick Mahomes wasn’t worth as much as “draft capital,” used to later select the inaccurate arm the franchise has pinned its future on. The coach came aboard talking about “faith-based winning” yet still can’t summon up the courage to go for it on fourth and short. The offseason acquisitions are verifiable improvement based on their performances elsewhere but based on an offense averaging less than twenty points a game it’s debatable whether that improvement is meaningful. An objective observer would likely come to conclusions similar to what appears to be the overwhelming majority of national media: they may be better, they won’t be good.

There is one place seemingly devoid of anything resembling these fact-based predictions from the media: Western New York. Specifically, the gaggle of bros who find themselves covering the team on a daily basis. As someone who grew up during the halcyon days of Bucky, Sully, Harrington it is disorienting to see the problem not be pessimism but blind optimism. These aren’t weathered old men spewing out resentment that they’re never getting a bigger gig than The Buffalo News, but millennial chuckleheads playing the content game where being bullish, where being optimistic (*cough* where toeing the line for management) is sure to be shared throughout social media and result in a cacophony of likes and shares.

Perhaps these people are genuinely bullish on the Bills; I’ve had people who know some people I bash consistently speak to their goodness and value as individuals. I don’t doubt those assessments from people I trust, what I do assess are those whose jobs revolve in sports coverage refuting, disregarding or denying facts in favor of what will make their audience feel good. These are guys operate as a collection of sports Ben Shapiros, making bad faith arguments and using words with zero substance behind them, posting gifs of swirl routes and eight yard outs as evidence of growth, who push the Mad Money button and fire off confetti guns any time some guy with ten concussions talks up the Bills on NFL Network. The fastest growing non-corporate entity covering local sports seems eager to play the role, buying into the cult of agro-idiots that run the team, the goofy never-will-be’s that wear the uniform, mugging for the cameras and lobbing meatballs the second they hold a microphone to the face of someone with any actual influence or power. They make a town that was always a fishbowl become less a fishbowl and more The Truman Show, where reality is manufactured and Truman is hundreds of thousands of Bills fans.

So how will they do? I suppose I should say, as this is called a “preview” post and I did talk about word usage earlier. The easy answer is I don’t have the slightest fucking clue as I watched 1.5 games last season but I think there’s more than enough out there in 2019 to give a reasonable look at the roster and attempt to peg their upcoming season. The defense is going to be pretty good- when McDermott isn’t in a prevent defense that hasn’t worked since the 40’s. The receivers are better but I wouldn’t say good. The line is better but I’d also not necessarily call them good. The backfield is old as shit and unless the drafted kid thrives or McCoy and Gore do a bros trip to Europe for some stem cells, they won’t save us. The inaccurate QB that can run well is still the inaccurate QB that can run well; I’ve watched and rooted for that guy before when it didn’t cost us two first round picks and people couldn’t stand him. I guess this inaccurate QB that can run well throws more picks but since he can throw them farther downfield I should be bullish about his development.

There’s little more I love than being right but I’d like to make this clear for the sake of clarity: I’d LOVE to be wrong far more when it comes to Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills. Maybe accuracy can be taught. Maybe you can go from Mountain West Honorable Mention to above average franchise QB. Maybe. If this happens I’ll own it; it’s more fun to be wrong and high fiving fellow fans at the Bills bar than it is to be right and spending Sunday napping because the season was lost in October. I’m really excited to watch Ed Oliver, the first draft pick I actually liked in years.

While we’re on the topic of truths, while most of my online followers and real-life friends know, I am a Bills fan. I’m looking right now at the hat I wore to work and shelled $40 out for last month. I have a Bills magnet on my car. I used a Bills koozie when visiting in-laws last weekend and will have Bills stuff on at least one of the days on our honeymoon at the end of the month. The fucked up thing is I won’t be surprised in the slightest if someone else is doing the same thing at the same resort in the Adriatic Sea. The Bills got me back with the fun season of 2014 after a decade of ambivalence and for better or worse as an ex-pat they serve as that symbol of where I am from. As we get older and dreams begin to die we cling tighter to those entities and symbols that have remained constant throughout your life as educational benchmarks approached, as jobs came and went and as people who mean the world to you come crashing into and then suddenly drift out of your life. As calculating and rational as one professes to be, there is a connection there that lingers in site of itself.

And yet it is hard to believe the Bills are for me anymore because they have mutated into something that is recognizable on the surface but underneath is filled with more carcinogens than the deepest wells Terry and Kim reaped their billions from. They are a symbol of all that is malignant and twisted about the world around us. They are a billion dollar gaslighting apparatus and shockingly, after decades of failure, a million sad simpletons throughout the region have bought in because the team makes them think that they’re part of something when they’re nothing more than pay pigs to a billionaire. This happened at astonishing speed with the assistance of those paid to talk and write about them. 

It makes me miss my grandfather, an actual blue collar fan who spent decades toiling away at Spaulding Fibre with a real lunch pail, watching and listening to the Bills every week from their inception. He would have smelled the shit and seen through the transparent yammerings of these rich interlopers before Beane and McDermott finished their first offseason. He would have been offended that these slick nobodies thought they could strut in here, talk about faith, culture and process and pretend to be one of them. He’d have seen through their cynical use of a fan dying from cancer to advance their status as a civic entity as opposed to a football team. He wanted a Super Bowl, not a mural for a Texan in a Mexican wrestling mask. He didn’t need to be part of “something special,” he had a family for that. He just wanted to see some fucking wins and know the team was working their best to do so.

That said, on a grand scale this era is about the death of community, the death of concern about your fellow man and woman. It’s about using the law to justify physical, financial and emotional horrors despite the fact that “the law” has quickly shown its fallibility as a human construct. It’s where wanting to make the world better and enriching those suffering has fallen out of favor under the guise of “personal responsibility.” It’s a world where people go to the trouble of running and winning election on the school board so they can tell parents they’ll have their kids taken away if they can’t afford to pay for their child’s lunch. It’s where every undeveloped piece of wild land on the continent is for sale, where Supreme Court seats are for sale, where the weak, shattered and lost are to be mocked, not healed. It’s an era where the Today show reviews bulletproof backpacks as if they were air fryers. It’s an era where sports are about everything other than and at the same time nothing but sports. It’s an era of committing the most unchristian acts in the name of Christianity, of monorail salesmen at all levels of government and an era where no one anywhere has the power, the money and the decency to bother fixing it.

It’s about desperation, desperation to save our waterways, our coastlines, save our ideals that were espoused by imperfect men and then twisted until those words were used to justify the exact opposite of their intention. Desperation to find that sense of community again, to find a group you can believe in, take pride in, believe you are making the world better with. It’s an era where literal, actual deaths are occurring daily at the hands of policies championed by millions of people who look just like you. It’s where we worship the powerful and vilify the powerless.
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It’s an era where words and results don’t matter so long as you can contort yourself enough to appear to be for whatever your audience thinks is good and just at a given time. It’s an era made for failures to become kings, for cowards who project strength, for people who look not play the part, for style to replace substance and an attention to community that only embraces a caricature of community. THAT, is the Buffalo Bills “culture.” The tragedy is that this is the perfect and really only time for it.
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Go Bills.

The Outlander

The role of the Buffalo Bills in my life is one of those odd things that became larger when I lived away from WNY. Their descent into the league’s also-rans coincided with a parade of new and exciting things to devote ones time to- the Sabres had the best player on the planet, my mom got us our first computer, there were dances, dates, practices and games to focus on. All those Sundays in high school, I can’t think of a single Sunday spent gathering friends together for a Bills game. Sure, there was a Super Bowl party at someone’s house every year where we would root for whatever random ass team we felt like (Remember Giants-Ravens? Woof)- we even rooted for the Patriots to beat the Rams which I promise made sense in January 2002. When it came to the Bills there was just no real enthusiasm, not when our childhood memories were filled with Super Bowl parties where the stakes and the extravagance were much higher. However, the Sabres were a different story. 1999, 2000, 2001 we’d find ourselves at someone’s house for playoff games, yelling at the television and having our first experimentations with the host’s father’s liquor cabinet (I can still taste vodka and Pepsi whenever I think about it).

This dynamic rarely changed in the years that followed. Sure, the 2004 playoff push brought things back slightly but how much of it was assisted by the NHL lockout? My only Bills-related memory I have from college took place my senior year in 2005; I was eager to sleep off the previous night during the game as usual when my roommate knocked on my door. He was regretting the girl he brought home the previous evening and dismayed that she not only had not yet left but that she seemed to be showing all intentions to watch the Bills game with him; he wanted me to join so he could have someone else to talk to. So I trudge out and we watched yet another terrible game in a terrible season while having 4-8 beers to dull the previous evening. By the fourth quarter he had revived his beer goggles to the point that he brought this girl back to his room, still the only mid-afternoon occurrence of beer goggles that I have ever seen. Point is, as a lifelong WNYer by that point the Bills were always an afterthought.

Here’s a weird thing when you leave the area: if you are from a town with an NFL team, that is oftentimes the number one thing people will associate you with. On fall Mondays at Penn State, classmates would greet me with Bills talk. Working in Vermont, Maryland or Pennsylvania, coworkers often did the same, almost requiring you to pay more attention to the Bills, lest you seem aloof (which I am at work anyways), weird (why would you hate a team from where you’re from), or un-relatable. At the same time, outside of WNY the Bills serve as a conduit to connect with people from home in whatever strange new town you find yourself in. I made friends in Baltimore, ran into a college friend in D.C., shared a crushing loss in Burlington and enjoyed $5 blue light pitchers in Harrisburg. Most notably I shared the moment that ended the drought with a bar full of Bills fans in the very city where the drought ended. The Bills provide a sense of community that is almost stronger outside the 716 than it is inside and if you don’t believe me, head down to Baltimore for opening weekend.
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The Bills play a more prominent role to me now than they did then (the Sabres sad state certainly plays a role in this); I’m marrying into a family and friend group of NFL fans and in a place as economically depressed and socially backwards as the 717 having a bar full of 716ers as an option every Sunday is a relief. It’s also what makes what the current administration of regressive, short-sighted, arrogant hacks have done to the franchise so unforgivable.

Ownership and management were handed a team that broke the drought in a season they hoped to pick top-10 and instead of building upon that set them on a course that will inevitably end in disaster. There is no debate about what will happen, there is no process deserving of trust, there are no developments that will cause any different result than what is going to happen:

-Brandon Beane will be fired in the next three to four years
-Sean McDermott will be fired in the next three to five years
-Josh Allen will unceremoniously become a free agent when his rookie contract expires and will likely never play in the NFL again

These are set in stone and all three were avoidable. These men will leave the franchise at a lower point than at any time during the drought and will leave a fanbase trudging along, only closer to death than they are right now, hoping the same incompetent, befuddled owners can somehow, someday hire the right people. The only course of action for us to do is hope it plays out as quickly as possible so we can get it over with and hope the next team of dunces is somehow better.
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Brandon Beane can be admired for having a plan and refusing to deviate it in the same way people like Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld can be admired for doing the same. His hubris will serve as a cautionary tale in the same way hubris destroyed the reputations of the above men and in a football sense Beane will be inextricably linked to the disaster he is about to lead, no different than George Pickett. He will be remembered in Buffalo as a misguided fool whose arrogance wrecked the Bills closest return to relevance in twenty years. Sean McDermott will be remembered as a well-meaning simpleton whose humility smacked of disingenuousness, who tried to piece together a team of projects, busts and players who are simply not good enough and lead it to actual success. The Western New York media and the more naïve and pathetic portions of the fanbase are spinning this as an underdog team. This is not that, this is a terrible team. This will not be exciting; this will be a massacre. All goodwill that could be mustered from a team dragging their coaching staff and DISAPPOINTED General Manager to the playoffs will have long dissipated after years of McDermott’s tepid gameplans, regressive field position strategy and incompetent challenge acumen. These men wanted full control to prove what they can do and you better fucking believe they are about to show their what they can do.

The Outlander

On November 29th, 2010 I was doing what I typically do on Sundays late in the Bills season: running errands. On this day, that meant the laundromat down the road from my apartment in Barre, Vermont. The Bills were 2-8, the Steelers 7-3 and in my mind, there was far too much bullshit in my life to let the Bills be part of it. I’d graduated law school a year earlier, entering the workforce with literally the worst graduating year in post-war American history, and my situation at the time reflected that. My 650 foot studio apartment was above the homeowners, a batshit Christian family who homeschooled their kids, one of whom seemed almost certain to commit a mass murder one day. After bringing a girl home one night, I got a call forbidding that in the future (I was 25). I’d made up excuses when my parents would ask to visit, embarrassed that, to my dismay my hastily thought out plan of filling my Buick with my shit and driving 8 hours to take a $14 an hour job wasn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. I’d been the first in my family to go to college, fulfilled the plan I’d had since I was in middle school to get my law degree and in the months following that I’d had an engagement fall apart, found only a $10 an hour data entry position as firms implemented hiring freezes, been put in the hospital from a viral heart infection and shared the tiny apartment with my mom that I’d lived in since I was five. Completely out of ideas I’d hopped in the car to the most isolated place I could think of and only four months in it was becoming apparent that I’d miscalculated, again.

What I’m saying is, I really didn’t need the Bills in my life that day. But it was the laundromat and it was back when you could stream the radio feed for free so there I sat, listening to the game to drown out the sounds of the small child and large dog that also found themselves spending a Sunday afternoon in a miserably boring situation.

They’d been down 13-0 at the half but had made it 13-10 when they forced a turnover and suddenly the idea of missing a comeback upset win for laundry of all fucking things was unacceptable. Eschewing the second load, I headed to Mulligan’s Pub, my go-to since it was both walking distance from my place and the only joint in town with the NHL package. On the way I tossed on the authentic Poz jersey my ex had gotten me for my 24th birthday and eagerly sidled up to the bar where a gaggle of fans rooting for various teams had gathered at tables behind me to watch their games on the bank of televisions.

You probably know by now that this was the Stevie Johnson game. It’s something seared into my brain, staring absently at the television, thoughts skidding down the slipperiest of slopes, turning this Billsy moment in a lost season into something much larger, something personal and more sinister, an indictment of my decision making that went far beyond driving the half mile to the bar. I heard the voice from one of the tables behind me, a woman’s voice. I hadn’t said anything since the drop, hadn’t turned around, interacted or barely moved aside from taking pulls of my blue light.

“That guy in the Bills jersey looks so sad.”

The World Cup starts this week (or has started, depending on how long this post gets/where it falls in the shuffle because invariably the only time deeg posts come is when they come in bunches), but since the Group draws I haven’t been following it much, mostly due to the fact that it seems very unlikely that the US will play more than three games. Normally I’d still be very excited about my backup team (well, 2nd backup since Ireland didn’t qualify) the Netherlands, but two things have dampened that: one, I have been unable to find my Holland track jacket I bought in a haze on the streets of Amsterdam ten years ago (really as safe an impulse buy one can have in such a state in that city) and two, it’s come to my attention Jeremy White also roots for them, which isn’t as bad as sharing the Red Sox with Pats fans but is damn well close. Either way, I like to leave the soccer writing to the more capable.

For me that leaves the Bills, Sabres and Red Sox. I think there’s four or five of our readers that root for the latter, and as the tightly wound machine from last season unspools, I can’t bring myself to get mad at them. I mean, not as a team anyways, of course there’s individual players that are easy to hate (Pierzynski for one, who for a guy who I’ve always heard described as “I hate him, but I’d love him on my team,” is actually really easy to hate when he is on your team), but are really just showing how improbable last season was and how much I should enjoy that. See, occasionally I’ll wonder what we would all be like not just when the Sabres or Bills reach the promised land, but how we would be the year after, after the parade, after the hangover, free agency, the draft, training camp and the preseason. I’d like to think I wouldn’t much care how they did defending their title, or if I did, that I would continually remind myself of the memories from the previous year and to be thankful. This year’s Red Sox team is a perfect example of why that should be the case. It’s a slog again, anemic hitting, a tire fire pitching rotation, a manager that seems completely befuddled on an almost nightly basis. But last season happened, it was glorious, it was more than so many baseball fans have gotten to experience in decades, and to be angry that Gomes and Buchholz suck now would just be kinda dickish, right?

So yeah, that just leaves the Buffalo teams. Don’t worry, this will only be tangentially about one of them, and also don’t worry, I’m not going to go on another “what does this all mean” post about the talent slowing ebbing away from Western New York; I may be in the- what, my town has THREE FUCKING AREA CODES?- but I still try to be as attuned to the Buffalo sports scene as I can without popping facial capillaries in an icy rage. All seems quiet with the Sabres, although that might simply be because half the fanbase woke up a month ago and decided being a Kings fan would kick ass. I don’t know, the draft is soon, plus there’s whatever washed up corpse the Sabres decide to sign in free agency and inexplicably make captain. There’s also the imminent Scott and Weber re-signings because the front office is so insecure in the team’s shittiness they need to make it obvious. Trust me, they’re shitty, you don’t need to push more Scott shirtsies on us to make us aware. Also, it appears the monkeys who run the marketing department at least figured there was no need to put out a “best games of the season” re-run series this summer because there were only two good games, one was on NBCSN, and the other is Miller’s last game which more people would remember as Steve Ott’s last game because again, half the fans of the team need not only a lobotomy, but a full brain scrambling with those tools from the end of Shutter Island.

The Barrister

In the wake of such a joyous victory, it’s probably no surprise that it’s taken a little longer to get a recap up.  Words are simply insufficient to express the happiness with which I take every step throughout the Tri-State knowing that my beloved squad has vanquished such an annoying and petulant team from the nether regions of Douchebagistan, New Jersey.

Either that, or the Apologist offered to do the recap and then got burnt out by over-thinking it and now I am diligently picking up his fucking predictable slack.

Hashtag friendship.

That really was a great game. The first of its kind this year:  a convincing win by the Bills; the result never really in doubt beyond half time. Sure, many fans, including a few in my living room, expected the game to fall apart when the Jets finally put a touchdown on the board, but those efforts by Gangrene, excuse me Gang_Green, were woefully insufficient compared to the kind of day Buffalo was having. Fucking unreal, totally unexpected, and still has me tingling from head to toe a day and half later.

Bullet points await!!

The Barrister

That may have been overstated. 

It's Saturday night, the Bills still haven't named a starting QB for tomorrow, and in about eleven hours they're playing the sole remaining undefeated team in the National Football League. Some miracle ass shit will have to go down for events to combine into a Buffalo victory, so that's what we're going to hope for. An against all odds win pulled from the depths of asses throughout Ralph Wilson Stadium. Bring lube. 

If this is going to happen, it will be equal parts ridiculous, painful and beautiful. 

From where I sit, on a throne of bedazzled hyperbole, the Chiefs have to lose. Articles about how stupid lucky they are to be 8-0 have been frequent this week, the consensus being that Kansas City has had an incredibly easy schedule etc etc... the kinds of rationalizations that play ever-so-well into the psyche of a Buffalo Bills fan base eager to count their chickens before natural selection even establishes what a chicken the fuck is. America wants the Bills to win to right some assumed wrong in the football universe. So, whadya say, Bills? Get it.

Mind you, again, none of this is really possible. Miracles, man. They give no shits.

Scizz usually does these. I'm filling in again because the asshole is traveling out to Happy Valley to watch the Nittany Lions get eaten alive by the eminently more powerful Wolverines. We hope he has fun and drinks as much as is humanly possible and doesn't start picking fights with strangers. Oh to dream.

The Barrister

The Buffalo Bills are a car and we fans are a giant, hairy beast that got hit by the car and taken into captivity only to be tricked into loving it there despite the fact that he had complete freedom before being run over and was probably fucking mad hairy beetches in the woods. 

Wait, no.

The Buffalo Bills are the hairy beast, living blissfully in the forest until the NFL drives into it, ceasing the beast's existence in the naive world of the woods, replacing said existence with the harsh reality of (1) people knowing it exists, (2) people knowing it's head would look good stuffed and mounted on a wall, and (3) people wanting to shoot it in the kidneys (does Harry have kidneys?) at the earliest possible moment. In this scenario, we are the Hendersons, except the only way we know to protect the beast is with some stupid fucking hashtags like #TheLegendOfKikoAlonso, #RockTheRalph, #LeadTheCharge or some other such bullshit.

And the role of John Lithgow's character in this morality play goes to The Outlander because of the hair thing. 

These Bills went from "ok, let's go" to "Jesus H. this is not good, let's go home" in the blink of an EJ Manuel trying to get an extra couple yards and being a big fucking idiot. This subject has not been discussed enough. You make us love you, Erik James, and then you prove to be a stupid kid. I know you're a kid, but I really don't care. That was unavoidably asinine. Step out of bounds, you prick. Because of you I can't justify going to bars for games anymore this season and soon I'll probably have to go shopping with my wife on Sundays since she'll inevitably use her crazy lady mind powers to discover what I already know... this season is a goddamned waste. 

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

During the 2013 Buffalo Bills season, the Scizz will be writing weekly game previews that will ruin your entire weekend. The last two seasons saw him using quotes from The Big Lebowski and Super Troopers to convey his feelings for this crapfire of a franchise. This year he'll be choosing quotes from many of his favorite films to get the point across. As always, it's 25% football, 70% useless garbage, and 5% luchador gambling picks. Here we go.....

The Scizz

First and foremost, go here and buy a shirt for #SupportSally if you haven't already. In fact, even if you have go buy another one. The support we have seen from Buffalo and the blog/twitter/facebook universe has been incredible. Keep it up. On to the foosball.

Where do you even begin with this offseason? My mood towards this team has changed so many times I can't even remember if I was excited after the draft or was certain of a 2 - 14 season. The good? The Bills are rid of the football herpes known as Chan Gailey & Buddy Nix. They hired young, motivated coaches in Doug Marrone, Nate Hackett, and Mike Pettine. They confidently reached at the draft for a future QB1 in E.J. Manuel. The bad? Potential shutdown corner Stephon Gilmore is out 6-8 weeks for an already thin CB squad, Jarius Byrd appears to hate the idea of being anywhere near Buffalo, and although E.J. Manuel appears to be healthy, the QB situation over the last couple weeks looks like something out of shitty ABC family T.V. movie. 

But you know what? I'm sitting on the Yachtsman's couch in Buffalo right now, we're going to the game Sunday, and dammit all football is back. So similar to what my fictional idol Peter Venkman says in a time of fear, uncertainty, and almost certain death, "I love this team! I'm excited to be a fan! Let's do it!" 

After the jump I ramble some more

Guest Contributor, @jambrones

I don’t get fired up about things enough to violently berate them on the internet very often.  In fact, I only have done that once.  And it was a private matter.  Hashtag Bills Mafia is no exception.  I am not fired up, offended or even the least bit anxious about this hashtag and its wake.   This is exactly why I must write about it.  I am completely centered, here.  I am in #BillsZen.

The Barrister


So last Friday, I ventured down to Fredonia to drink with a bunch of friends, old and new, and we all got a little loaded. 

Understatement.

At some point, while standing in a delightful alley next to the bar, I decided - probably stupidly - to unload some of the hate that's been welling up inside of me. It felt awesome.

As much as I really do like some of the guys involved in this fan-driven movement, and as much as I love and appreciate the charity work they do, my animosity about a few certain things is inescapable. So I post this both out of frustration, as well as catharsis.

I imagine this will piss more than a few people off. Good. Get on my level. Kisses.