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

Five days out, I’m still in enough disbelief that putting thoughts to type seem silly. I just know that after writing sporadically at best for nearly six years here at DGWU, what the hell is the point if I don’t at least put something together for the greatest Buffalo sports moment in a decade? It was something so incredible, so cathartic, so confounding that it brought emotions to me and many that we thought had been killed off long ago. Really, most of us had no comparison as adults, nothing to point to and say “if the Bills pull this off, it will be unforgettable.” Sure, it would have been the playoffs for the first time, and as I touched on a couple weeks back, after such a shitty year as 2017, such an end would undoubtedly be special. But tears? Below zero airport trips? Six figure donations to the charity of a guy that beat us this year? Unfathomable.

Last Sunday my fiancé and I woke up hungover from going out with friends for the Penn State win in the Fiesta Bowl. Our plan was to celebrate New Year’s at her cousin’s place in Baltimore, so after purchasing the requisite rolaids, iced coffee and Excedrin we hopped in the car for the 80 minute drive. My plan was to go to the Baltimore Bills bar in the Canton neighborhood to take in the game; I’d first gone there in 2014, the Bills OT win over the Bears being my first game. Since then I’d watched plenty with them, done massive tailgates in DC and Baltimore for Bills games with them, watched the EJ horror show in London at 8am with them, and now, despite having not taken in a game with them since the 2016 opener, I had to watch this one.

I pulled up to the bar about 4:15, zubaz, Tyrod shirtsy, Bills hat. My fiancé, a die-hard Ravens fan and native Marylander gets out, kisses me goodbye and drives to her cousins while I head upstairs, post-up against the bar and order a bucket of Blue Lights, downing two before kickoff due to nerves and the need to kick the hangover. I see familiar faces, including the guy who wears shirts featuring each week’s opponent- today his is the Dolphins logo, except it’s a dick. The Bills Backers have the upstairs three rooms of this bar, and after taking an early lead you can constantly hear someone yelling out Bengals, Raiders, Jags updates, which solicit groans or cheers. There is t-shirt guy standing on a bench leading us in the shout song, and blue and red touchdown shots. Me or one of the guys on either side of me will say something regarding the Bills game to no one in particular and the others will answer. One of the guys is a little too hard on Tyrod for my taste but it’s okay because across the bar there’s a guy in a Tyrod color rush jersey. People pour down the stairs at halftime to smoke, a tradition I partook in during my time here but now as the only vice I kicked for good in 2017, I work on the second half of my second bucket of blue lights.

The crowd has swollen as we get to the second half. More people are arriving upstairs, mostly 20 and 30-somethings, jerseys of McCoy, Sammy, Mario and Kyle Williams, winter hats and gloves, those Bills shirts with sequins on them. They came to see and share in the moment with the other ex-pats, the ones who will truly understand if it actually happens.

The Dolphins make a game of it, but after Kyle scores at 19-0, people are constantly clamoring for the Ravens game to be put on. The score updates of Oakland and Tennessee have long since stopped and it’s become apparent that we need the Bengals to play very unlike the 2017 Bengals. Poyer’s pick seals the win and soon after the Ravens take their first lead of the game.

It had been a good run, really. 9-7 from a team that I had contending for the first pick in the draft is pretty damn good in a vacuum. But the Peterman game, I’m already fretting that the Peterman game is going to be what keeps us out. Sure, the Bengals can score, but they’ve been outscored 17-7 in the second half and Andy Dalton is spraying throws all over the field. It’s fine though, we know what missing the playoffs is like, and hey, I did have fun for a little while there. Plus I can just root for Missy’s team in the playoffs; I’ve long rooted for the Ravens to do well, just as she texts me in the fourth quarter to say she understands why I can’t do so here.
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The dagger INT is called back and there’s life but it’s 4th and 13. I have one blue light left, as I know I’m going to want to call an uber soon. My arms are folded in skepticism, not unlike what video shows Kyle Williams doing, standing impatiently with his hands on his hips.

My first thought when Boyd catches it is “first down! Field goal range! Don’t fumble!” I actually thought for a split second the cheering was premature but then- THEN- he sees the Ravens overpursuing, then trying to tackle high for some reason and he scores!

Pandemonium. Grown adults, large and small hugging, high fiving, screaming. I black out, film a brief snap that is nothing more than me screaming “oh my god” into my phone, the biggest idiot smile on my face. We do another round of touchdown shots, and another when the Ravens come up short on their fourth and long and it’s official. Another round of cheers, hugs, screams. The shout song is done multiple times, led by multiple people. I find myself resting on my elbows, brushing tears from my face, stunned beyond belief not at just what happened but at the visceral reaction it had.

About twenty minutes after it ended, after assuring a few fellow fans that we’d once again be there for the big Bills-Ravens party next season, we sauntered downstairs. I sidled up to the bar, ordered a natty boh to decompress, took a joyous phone call from my buddy, hugged one last Bills fan and climbed into my Uber, gushing to the driver about what had happened as he smiled, perhaps not understanding what had happened but knowing whatever it was had been big and made me VERY happy. When I arrived to the party, instead of catching flack everyone is just happy for me. I’d packed two outfits for the evening, one for making the playoffs and one for not; the zubaz stay on, the jeans in my bag upstairs. Missy says it’s the happiest she’s seen me since our Europe trip because it without a doubt is. We’re the last ones to go to bed in early 2018, long after catching the videos of the Bills fans greeting the team at the airport.
Looking back, the only thing I can compare that evening to is Pominville. For anyone under 30, even that is somewhat tempered by adolescence so for them there is no reference point. Really, over 11 years after that night, there’s no reference point for us either. There’s been graduations, relocations, long relationships starting and ending, marriages, kids, mortgages in between, before even addressing the rapid decay of all ideals and institutions that would allow us to provide a world to our children that isn’t completely and irreparably fucked.

As the godforsaken hole that is Jacksonville is inundated with Bills fans across the country, I don’t know what to think for Sunday. They could win, though I don’t expect them to. Since the Peterman game, they’re 4-2 with their only losses against New England. Fournette is very good, though Blake Bortles is not. The Bills run defense looked stout last weekend, which is a thing. I know a fanbase of yokels serving crappy teal food to their fans Sunday certainly seems to be begging the gods of good taste to put an end to this. But seriously, it’s the definition of house money. Not only is the drought finally, mercifully dead and buried, it was done in a manner that elicited the most raw and spontaneous joy that this region- and those scattered across the land who call it one- has seen in decades. So I won’t ask for more.
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But I wouldn’t mind it. Go Bills.

The Barrister

​One of the things we like to tell ourselves, whether we live in Buffalo or have expatriated to some predictable metropolis on one coast or continent or another, is how great we are at the task of sticking by each other. It's the Scarlet Letter emblazoned on our identity as a community, as individuals. Related: I'm terribly shitty at metaphors, a bumbling frontal lobe addicted to adjectives that I stuff into a crack pipe stinking of emotions, so just pretend that the Scarlet Letter is less a letter than a standing Buffalo, less an indictment than a badge of honor; pretend that Arthur Miller didn't need to write that play and that American ancestry can't be tracked to fucking witch burning.

I think about that kind of self-characterization often. From my perch in my Times Square law office, from McFaddens and Kelly's and all the Buffalo bars we choose to squeeze out of the stone of New York City life, it can feel incredibly accurate, that self-congratulatory superiority arising from the combination of Buffalo's Midwestern neighborly charm and its New York ego, because so much of that identity from this perch of mine is restricted to the high fives and Shout! call and response that litter sidewalks outside of games, on trains and in traffic, wherever two or three are gathered and things of that nature. We can stick by each other in those moments because the job of doing so is so so easy, so so straightforward. So time-limited. We can ignore the bullshit parts of Buffalo, the moments where Buffalo falls tragically short, the moments Buffalo reveals itself to be the kind of place willing to turn its back on its own, to decide that certain parts of Buffalo are actually Other, are actually deserving of exclusion.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published an article by Kim Martin, a reporter none of us knew all that well because she's only been writing for TBN for a couple months. Martin had interviewed Tyrod Taylor, and the substance of what they talked about was incredibly important. The piece, if standing alone in a national and historical context, is as uncontroversial as one can probably get at this American moment, as is Taylor's identification of a the unmistakable Truth of the impossibly high standards placed on him as a mobile black QB, specifically, and as a black man, generally. It's a Truth that needs to be cried out from the rooftops as much as possible; a Truth that, frankly, is the kind of thing we should have gotten right with over a century ago. Longer, probably. Football fans see the disparity every. fucking. weekend, and even more so of late. The coin in play has many sides - slavery is prison labor is Jim Crow is denigrating marchers in Selma is killing Emmett Till is killing Trayvon, Freddie, Tamir, Sandra, Kalief is the evolution of the prison industrial complex is the idea that black folks don't actually deserve success is the idea that white people are the arbiters of fairness is the idea that playing the game the right way is some static, knowable standard is the idea that black bodies cannot have agency, cannot speak, cannot protest, cannot demand anything for themselves and for their lives without being told that they ask for too much.

That black Americans are required, by (white) communal fiat, to be a certain way: perfect. Whatever that means.

If you wake up every day with the knowledge that this Truth is woven deeply into the fabric of our national and local identity, that it's shaped every year of American life, well, the comments made by Taylor, the piece published by Martin, it all goes without saying. Obviously we all don't wake up every day giving a shit about that Truth, and many of you have stopped reading because hell if you're going to listen to my run-on sentences wax on about the fundamental unfairness of the heightened expectations - the expectations demanded at end of a sword or a gunbarrel - that continue to persist in this grand American experiment we were born into. Hell if you're going to listen to me go to war for social justice, or whatever.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published Kim Martin's article on Tyrod taylor and less than a week later, with scattered rumors of unhappy Buffalo writers gracing group chats and DMs and tweets, with sports consumers in Buffalo and elsewhere scoffing at the idea of racial bias against Taylor, Martin announced she was leaving TBN for WaPo where she will be covering Dan Snyder's Washington Football Team. This decision, I must imagine, had less to do with bias in her work environment than the fact it's the Washington Post. All the same, by Friday, as I drove up to Buffalo in advance of the Bills game against Tampa, the rumor mill had doubled down in response to the news of her elevation to a national publication, and it became clear that, to many, Kim Martin was not welcome in Buffalo. Her work was deemed awful, devalued by members of the Buffalo media elite (lol) and sports fans alike; she was accused on twitter and elsewhere of having not earned her job, of having taken work from other writers more deserving of column inches and page views. In just two months, a writer that had given us a phenomenally truthful look into what it's like to play under center in Buffalo while being black, was equated to just another person of color who took what was rightfully whites'.

She isn't perfect, you see.

Buffalo is a place where we have each other's backs until it isn't.

The idea that Martin isn't a perfect writer is a hill no one need die on because we have no perfect writers; we only have the best that writers choose to give us. She need not be perfect to have value to our discourse, to the product that the Buffalo News puts out, particularly insofar as Buffalo continues to insist on getting its discourse served almost exclusively through the mouths of white men. Surely, given the quality of the work TBN produces sometimes, it shouldn't be required that she even be particularly good, though she is that. She's not a perfect writer but for many she was a necessary one; necessary because no matter how woke the men she's leaving behind might try to be, the proof is in the work they've done and haven't done; the proof is in Tyrod Taylor being in his third year as Buffalo's starting QB and it taking that long to be asked the right questions by a reporter he was willing to give truly truthful answers, questions that have been apparent as fuck to those of us paying attention. And, even if we like the guys that remain in Buffalo sports media, that interview, that topic ain't getting covered as well, if at all, by Jerry Sullivan or Howard Simon.

A week and a half ago, The Buffalo News published Martin's piece on Taylor, Martin announced her departure from TBN less than a week later, rumors swirled about animosity in the media ranks, I drove to Buffalo and watched Taylor pull off some GD miracles, and drove home Monday morning listening to people call WGR to express their displeasure with Taylor, asking for Nate Peterman to get playing time. This happens after every game, no matter if Taylor wins or loses. A player good enough and exciting enough to be put on a box of off-brand frosted flakes in my dumb hometown, a player who gave a stadium full of people everything he had on Sunday and got the win, improbably, got derided instead, got called out instead. A player whose flaws are somehow amplified by his melanin, who is likely taking his place in a long line of brilliant yet flawed players of color who have been run out of town on a wave of mostly white criticism.

Because he isn't perfect, you see.

Buffalo is a place where we have each other's backs until it isn't, until that other is other, is black. Then? All bets are off.

(Note: an earlier published draft neglected to make clear that Martin's move to WaPo was likely unrelated to the animosity she apparently elicited amongst her media peers. Apologies for being more vague than intended.)

The Barrister

In some ways, this blog and others like it are as simple as a negative proof of the product we've all set out to digest on a daily weekly annual basis. Where the Bills sell hope and change like they're running for something other than Regional Fuckboi, this space sells despair. There's a surplus and we'd like to unload it off our books, I figure, and it's a goddamn bargain for those interested in investing in distressed emotional debt.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention, while we're still processing my brutal metaphors, that my mission here is to write about our Bills in spite of myself and in spite of our Bills, that my brain is mush and can't possibly be asked to form coherent takes, and that here, by the grace of God go I, is where I am basically because Apologist said "hey write that recap" while we parted at a lonely midtown street corner some time ago.

Fuck the Bills and Love the Bills, alas and so on and so forth.

If time is a flat circle, as some claim it is, we're blessed to experience this kind of Bills team only once but also infinity times, so it's an open question whether that 3 point loss in Miami should be eminently shrug-off-able as 'just a thing that happened' or emotionally paralyzing as 'the thing that just happens every fuck-all time.' We're somewhere in the middle, most of us, and it's frankly just as dark a corner of cerebral sub-consciousness as sports can get. The cruelty of belief is that it's is a massively marketable phenomenon to attach to any given team, and many of us have been all-too-willing to hitch ourselves to the hope cultivated and farmed for the benefit of our preferred clubs, irrationality be fucked.

The cruelty of belief is that it is equal parts goodness and elusiveness, the treasure at the end of the rainbow, sight unseen.

Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of Billschausen syndrome, you either got all in with this team recently (Hi!) or were on the precipice (or you billieve unconditionally, in which case why are you here?), and depending on where you fall, you're either out now, huffing and puffing about the uselessness of it all, or at the very least have a foot in the door open while you consider things like whether you left the oven on and, if so, whether it might be more useful to stick your head right up in it on Sundays because why let this team suck the life out of you when you're fully capable of killing yourself all on your own.

In the same way that people are drawn to comments sections and cable news out of morbid curiosity at the train wreck humans involved, being a fan of this team is very much about the allure of something so earth-shatteringly shitty that you sort of need to crane your head to look. Besides, there's virtue in learning to repackage the experience of watching a terrible football team into a fun exercise in schadenfreude and moral superiority. So long as the team is going to trip over its own putrid tendencies towards failure, we may as well alight our hearts with ideas that we deserve better and that we have answers that would fix what ails our Bills, if only if only if only. So long as this team is going to struggle through another fall as if it's the harvest and they're farming melancholy, we may as well pull out a dictaphone and assemble a cacophony of sarcasm and derision as tribute to the Wagon-Circling Buffalo Bills, the only team that would consider it a badge of pride that they left home without a map, keep taking the wrong trail and have yet again stumbled upon some band of horsemen or patriots or birds or marine mammals or whatnot, thereby necessitating wagon circling from the get.

tl;dr: When you live in Chump City, it's no consolation that you've been elected mayor.

Don't get me wrong: I'm *still* hopeful, and therein lies the annoying and inestimable rub. All they gotta do is win this weekend and they'll show us they really are the team we hope them hahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.

Fuck it. Let's do the damn thing, I guess.

The Barrister

I'm finally flying back home from Buffalo (EDIT: this was yesterday; I had to work and nap after getting back to New Jersey) and, like every trip to the Mother Ship of My Aching Heart, the weekend afforded little in the way of time for introspection after - without any real competition - the most interesting day of Bills football I've experienced in my 25 or so years as a fan. The unbridled hype of last year's opener (my last trip to Orchard Park) was replaced with a patient optimism about this godforsaken team and a lingering, uncomfortable buzz surrounding something completely unrelated to football. A day that gave all fans something to smile about, from ear to fucking ear, gave many of us in attendance an unshakable disgust with the parade of horrors on display. Death threats emblazoned on t-shirts. Tackling dummies playing the part of vague Muslim effigies. Fathers and sons screaming at an American citizen to stand when he prefers to kneel; screaming at an American citizen while the first verse of our National Anthem rang out. Chants of USA! raining down upon an American citizen and those who support him. Chants of USA! covering all manner of uniquely American sins.

I'm a bleeding heart. I'm an aspiring pragmatist above all else. I'm a venomous blogger who has been told not to use this space for this kind of commentary. I'm a Bills fan who left New Era Field feeling very apart from this new era of Buffalo Bills football. Sunday made it abundantly clear that I hold a minority opinion dwarfed by the rage of those who believe patriotism is a concept over which monopoly control may be exercised, who believe "American" is a one-size-fits-all panacea, and who believe dissent entitles you to nothing more than a one-way ticket back *there* (wherever that is) on the horse you rode in on.

All the same, I left New Era Field and its tailgate wasteland environs knowing that I'm not alone and proud of the pockets of dissent that sprang forth regardless of the un-American brand that would be seared onto their efforts by those who would sooner silence disagreement than attempt to understand it. They were outmanned and outflanked by those who opt to speak against black lives and against advocacy civil liberties; who opt to speak in support of unquestioning devotion to uniforms and badges and authority under the heel of a boot. But they were present all the same, and the peaceful, non-violent advocacy from people of color and white allies alike was something to celebrate. It was the best of Buffalo on display, and more than many other cities would show in similar circumstances.

Also the Star Spangled Banner sucks, Francis Scott Key was a questionable human, and America the Beautiful is the absolute jam.

​And then there was the game, and like I said, it's shitty that I'm left feeling like I gotta speak out about a player doing something as harmless as kneeling - the ultimate sign of respect and fealty - during the NFL's ongoing commercial use of America's anthem, but it's monumentally more shitty that police wearing the badge of the State, cloaked in the authority of our collective promise to each other and ourselves through adherence to our nations' laws, are killing Americans with the kind of arbitrariness and lack of oversight endemic of the Empire from which we declared independence in 1776. So I guess I'll deal. As will you.

The game, though? Apart from the heat that Kaep continually got for daring to be a black man with an opinion? It was dope as hell. The best game I've ever seen live, and that's saying something because I went to the Bills' last two games in New Jersey against the Jets (combined score 65-40), and the opener last year. When the Bills beat Arizona four weeks ago and it looked like there was a chance there'd be something to cheer for when I headed up to WNY for Week 6, I knew that the game was going to be the one that sealed my Sundays for the foreseeable future. A loss and the start of hockey season would have seemed a blessèd relief. A win, and I knew I'd be be left buzzing about what's still to come.

And here we are. 

The game was hilarious in its arc - from a close nail-biter to a thorough walloping in the matter of just a few series. When the floodgates opened in the third quarter, it suddenly became a party. The edge of fans' anger at Kaepernick (or each other) was dulled in the face of such impeccable play from our Bills. What a weird sentence to write. It was the kind of win that binds us all together for our love of this stupid team, suggests we may have more that keeps us coming together than that forces us apart, and gives us some small hope for coming together and making the most of this shared world of ours, even if it seems impossible at present.

Sports, man. Maybe.

The Apologist

​I thought about not using the above image. I thought about not discussing Colin Kaepernick's protests. I thought about not writing anything at all. I think a lot about lots of stuff, most of which is trivial, but this feels important. The following are my thoughts on this and no one else's.

Gun violence is bad. Police brutality is bad. Racism is bad. I know, I know. I'm really going out on a limb here. These are things that many young Americans believe. Kaepernick is sharing this same belief. That is why Kaepernick is taking a knee during the national anthem. Not because he hates cops or America. Because he knows they can be better and he wants us to talk about it. The fact that he is willing to jeopardize his career and his personal safety to do something that he believes will improve this country for his fellow man is brave and commendable. 

What gets tricky is when beliefs clash with symbols. The American Flag is a symbol. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a symbol. What they represent and how they make you feel is entirely yours and yours alone. You may know a great many people who feel similarly to you, but no one can possibly feel EXACTLY the same way that you do when they look at the stars and stripes and hear the words of our nation’s anthem. Your idea of these symbols and how they represent America can be completely different from someone else’s idea. And that’s ok. THAT idea is what this country was founded on. That two disparate sides can find a way to compromise and coexist for the betterment of all.

I grew up in Buffalo, NY, in a middle-class white family with all the perks and #priveleges that entails. I have no idea what it must feel like for an African-American to see yet another story of an unarmed black man being gunned down in the streets. No one in my immediate or extended family has ever served in the military or policed the streets of a city, county, or state. I don’t know what that sacrifice makes you feel when you look at the Stars & Stripes and listen to the story of conflict that symbol survived. But to me, that song and that flag and the country that it represents is an idea that we are constantly, all of us, striving to be better. That no matter our disagreements and our struggles, we will listen to each other and work together and make compromises and keep trying. Our nation is not now, nor has it ever been, perfect. But as long as people are willing to talk to one another, we’ll keep improving. It’s only when we ignore each other and make our neighbors out to be enemies that we lose what makes us special.

I don't like bringing politics into this environment. I'm sure it's not why you come here. I'm guessing Colin Kaepernick feels the same way. I'm sure he'd like nothing more than to not have to do this anymore. It'd be easier not to do it. But some things are worth the struggle. Some things have to be said.

The Barrister

If you'd given me the option to take 2-2 before the season started, I probably would have taken 2-2 before the season started - putting aside my not insignificant pipe dream of a world ablaze with a nice 1-9 run, of course. I would not have been able to predict the breakdown of wins and losses that have come with the 2-2 start, though; such is the nature of this particular football club at this particular sixteen-year-long-moment in human history. 

The rad thing about this Sunday evening reality is that no matter if you are buying in on the possibility that these two improbable wins are the start of some great run (I have not bought in, and am a ways off yet, my hyperbole herein notwithstanding), these two improbable wins are nevertheless really fucking improbable. This Bills team was left for dead by this fan base, and quite fucking right that they were. Dreadful is not a strong enough word for it when it was a thing we've seen enough before; enough big talk during off-season PR pushes and enough capable rhetoric paired with highly suspect play. The Bills team we saw through Weeks 1 and 2 were fucking bad and deserved all the scorn they got and more.

And now they're, well, not bad at all. At least not now, not yet, not still. They were so bad and then with a token firing and a drastically scaled down offense relying on proficient execution of straightforward concepts, they've moved the pendulum far enough the other way to make even the most jaded fan (read: all of us) give a polite golf clap and tip of the cap.

As with everything, as for always, the salient question is "how long can this possibly last?," and the joyous answer is "we can't tell, but this team suddenly looks capable of beating a lot of squads." At worst, our resort to the fallout shelter of pessimism has no immediate justification beyond "because it's Buffalo" and, perhaps more relevantly, "because most teams fail." Which is all well and good. Four weeks in, for this particular football team in particular, it feels pretty ok. 

​As with everything, I want more. Gimme some more. 

The Barrister

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.

The Apologist

How is it that this team still looks flabbergasted to be trailing late in a football game? Seriously now. How is it that in the 16 years since the Bills played football in January that no offensive coordinator has had a specific plan laid out for “what to do in case of trailing by a touchdown”? Are we not considering this possibility? Do the Bills opt not to run through the two minute drill because they think they’ll definitely be leading when they reach the last minutes of the 4th quarter?

I’m not kidding. How can we possibly not be ready for this scenario? Last Thursday, with the clock winding down and the Bills down by one score, what did we see? Shot after shot after shot of Tyrod Taylor staring at the sidelines with his hands in the air, clearly unable to grasp what it was that Greg Roman wanted him to do next. Did we think there was no way we’d be trailing the Jets by the end of that game? Did we take any plays with the words “no-huddle” on them and set them on fire? ANSWER ME!!!

Alright… alright… I’ll be fine.

Thanks to all of these questions and more, I’ve reached the acceptance level of grief over the firing of Greg Roman. I have not, nor will I ever, watch film or scour through player quotes to get to the bottom of this, because it’s pointless. That’s what ESPN is for. Also, none of that ever really tells you anything. Would anyone like to look at old footage of Belichick coaching the Browns and see if there are any correlations to what he’s doing now? I didn’t think so.

Of course, I am in no way trying to compare Belichick and Roman. All I mean is every time a coach is fired, we rarely ever find out what the true cause was and it's always difficult to say who was really at fault. What we do know is that magically a bevy of stories will emerge about how people didn’t get along with them or their playcalling was too complex or they were simply in over their head. It doesn't matter if it's the coordinator, the head coach, or the ball-boy. Whatever the reason, everyone still left on the team will point at the guy walking out the door and say in unison, "There goes the source of all our troubles."

Coordinators, specifically, are always fired because their gameplans were too complex. And the person who is replacing them is going to get “back to basics.” Always. Whenever a new plan is installed, midseason, it’s about simplifying things. To be fair, it would sound ridiculous if Lynn had come in and said, “These guys better get ready for some homework because I’m adding 50 new plays to our playbook.” But you’re definitely gonna hear a lot of quotes like, “We just need to get back to having fun” and “Coach (Insert name of guy who’s probably going to get fired soon too) is just letting us go out there and do what we do!” This, of course, is total horseshit. If you’re lucky, you get a boost for a game or two, but it never lasts. Remember when Dan Campbell was maybe the guy to turn the Dolphins around? Exactly.

Messing with coordinators has become the easiest knee-jerk reaction for head coaches or general managers when the spotlight is getting its hottest. I’ve lost track of how many times Mike McCarthy has relinquished and retaken the job of play-calling for the Packers. And somehow people like me still fall for it. Oh yes, dear reader, I say all this, but my optimism has not left me completely. Within two days of finding out Roman was gone, I was on the phone with my Dad saying things like, “I meeeeean, if Lynn can get the running game going again and take some of the pressure off Tyrod…” I’m hopelessly hopeful. Let’s do this.
​