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 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 Barrister, who isn't spending much time on this today

I despise being right. Particularly so when the manner in which I was right was the result of (a) self-protective pessimism (that shit actually does work no matter what Apologist says; PSA that he's a delightful idiot), and (b) everything that was supposed to be good about the godforsaken syrup-less pancakes of a Bills team was actually bad whilst the things that were supposed to be bad were actually completely decent. 

Losing a game like yesterday's - a game that was completely within reach due to a pretty poor opponent on the other side of the ball - is a thing that this particular football club does very well. Not just the football club owned by the Pegulas; the club in the midst of some big PR effort to convince the fans that the sale of the team acted as some sort of metaphysical squeegee, wiping the grime of the playoff drought from our collective dashboard; the club, that we're told, was resetting the Drought Clock to zero when Terry and Kim assumed full control, that made splashes with coaching hires and shake ups and all of it. Losing a game like they lost yesterday is quintessentially Bills, hearkening back to Gregggggg Williams and Jauron and Gailey and Marrone and, yes, everything we know about Rex Fucking Ryan. All the highly polished viral videos and memes and stellar tweets and hope and whatever else this team is selling cannot change the fact that the Buffalo Bills traveled to Baltimore and laid the same kind of turd they've been laying under every coach, every GM, and both owners since I was in college and drinking a volume of alcohol that ensured I wouldn't notice for a few years.

Make no mistake about it: the loss yesterday, the way they lost yesterday, puts a lie to everything we've been told for the last few months and, yes, since the Pegulas took over. 

Does that sound harsh? Good. 

Engendering hope among a fanbase is certainly part of the job of running a football team, and when you're looking at a 16 year shit sandwich that isn't even old enough to have watched MTV when it was still pretty ok, there's a portion of that hope-farming that will always be a risk. Talking meekly about your chances doesn't help put butts in the seats, and talking big about your chances risks that those seats will be chock-full of butts and assholes screaming for your head when that big talk blows up in your face. 

The Bills don't owe us anything, in any event. Their promises of wins and success and progress didn't form some sacred contract no matter how much we'd like to take their chump asses to court and air out the putrid crotch rot of their failures. That's not how this works, nor should it be. Thing is, neither do we owe them - not Rex not Sammy not Roman not Tyrod not Shady not Terry not Kim and certainly not Russ "Burns When He Pees" Brandon - the kind of allegiances that would be required to look at a game like yesterday and declare "it's just the first game, they have time to turn it around." It doesn't matter that the team is likable, it doesn't matter that there is talent arguably waiting to be uncorked and powerbombed onto the NFL. I mean, God bless you if that's where your head it at; I'm incredibly jealous and interested in the xanax you've been pilfering from [insert personal relationship here].

Of course they have time to turn it around. And of course I have a shot at sitting on the Supreme Court later in my career. Possibilities are just that, and they're not doing it for me anymore. I'm simply not there. "It's just the first game" implicitly disregards what this team has specifically shown us, both yesterday and myriad times prior, and from an outsider's perspective there's just no evidence that this particular club - these players, these coaches, these executives and managers - have the stuff to fix what ails it. 

Could I be wrong? Sure. Absolutely. I'd be thrilled if I turn out to be a ball of acid reflux and hyperbole (both true) that doesn't know shit about shit (likely true). I'd be thrilled to look back at this pessimism and laugh at how silly it all was because just around the corner was the Big Turnaround that we were all promised. Things change, and I'm only seeing the surface of the product; if this was just a bad game on the road to a winning season, great, sangrias for everyone. I'm the guy the kept forgetting the game was still happening every time I got up from my laptop to snag another beer and inevitably started chatting with the horde of Giants fans in my buddy's backyard; I have no claim to a higher plane of understanding on this, though if you need to discuss comparative religion or financial markets while watching me roll a cigarette, I got you. 

But, after watching the Bills' final drive, positioned to snatch a win against a Ravens team that had basically been a rotting drainpipe on offense for the entire game, only to see them fizzle in the exact same way as every team that's come before them? We really buying their hope this week? Get the fuck out of here. Sure, they'll snag some impressive wins and they might even do it soon. That's what they do in between shooting themselves in the foot for the millionth time. This team once again, directly and with blessed immediacy, made it impossible to view them through any lens than the same one we started using sometime between Music City and Sammy's drop. At a certain point this club has to stop simply restarting the Effort Train with moves that have amounted to little else than shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, only way sadder. At a certain point, who the fuck knows when, someone at this club has to make themselves accountable for the kinds of games like yesterday; games that reveal scant character among the players and the coaches, and leave fans marveling at the disconnect between ambition and production out of One Bills Drive. 

Games that all the PR in the world can't wipe clean. 
​

The Barrister

Anything. Write any fucking thing about this team

Most words about this squad, right now, bum me out. Not because the team isn't fun or pretty good or promising. The team is all those things. Yet it is impossible to love with any semblance of sincerity. It is entirely too racked with frustrating moments and massive disappointments. It is a franchise, in no small measure, that will bite your fucking leg off as you sleep, leaving you to wake with an unshakable disbelief that no fucking way is it possible that they've duped us once again. 

To be a sports fan is to be a sucker. A patsy. A fool unable to see or feel the hand in your back pocket as you are distracted by some shiny promise purposefully set in front of you so you don't notice what's happening behind. Incidentally, this is what I learned from the 10 minutes of the classic Will Smith film Focus I watched the other night. Figured snagging one metaphor for the pointless existence of my life as a fan was enough of that awful awful fucking movie.

Of course, sometimes it's not that at all. Apologist texted me sometime Sunday night / yesterday morning (unable to check my phone which is FUCKING SIX INCHES FROM ME HASHTAG LAZINESS HASHTAG FAT) and said "just write the Bills recap like you're talking about the Mets." Man, is that a difficult ask. Conflating the most joyous part of my sports-watching life with the most milquetoast is not an exercise I want to get to. Nevertheless, the suggestion illustrates a crucial point - sometimes we aren't asked to be patsies, we aren't asked to fork over our money and time and devotion in exchange for absolutely no return into our existential personal cash register of feelings. Sometimes we give all those things and get back something substantial, a series of unforgettable moments paired with actual, real, visible success. Sometimes we get a return on our investment that isn't the result of our rationalization; isn't a construction of our eager need to turn force a shit sandwich down our throats so that we might be able to salvage some pride. Sometimes teams give you enough actual victories that you aren't lining up to the lunch counter at Eataly or some such nonsense place for a helping of moral ones. 

Obviously, we can't tell at the outset whether we'll be rewarded for our enthusiasm and optimism or whether we'll be left to make what we can out of an awful sports product. 

The Bills, our Bills, make it pretty easy to bet on the inevitability of failure. Luckily, it's all second nature at this point, so I'm not about to let these assholes strip away the fun this year ... I've gotten pretty good at making do. 

Let's recap this turd burger and then talk about beer and stuff:

​The Barrister

UPDATE: We recorded a carcast en route to the bar to watch the game and Scizz just sent me the audio file from his phone so here it is! Bonus points for listeners who can decipher what's playing on my car radio at any given moment.

That was a fucking splendid afternoon of Buffalo Bills football we got yesterday. Unfuckingreal.

With a season as short as that of the NFL, generally a full week between games, every outing becomes a narrative-guiding metric even if we know it shouldn’t be. We should be able to relax and remain patient while we wait for a more reasonable sample size to come in for evaluation; we should be able to wait to see just how successful our particular squad is and, perhaps even more crucially, how good or awful the opponent really is, before putting much stock into any one week’s result. The Week 1 win against the Colts seems a little less impressive given how poor they’ve looked since; last week’s loss to the Patriots looks a little more forgivable now that we’ve seen another week wherein they dismantled their opposition (albeit to the most dismantle-able team in the league); and now yesterday’s win, well, it is both heartening and devoid of meaning given how good the Bills looked and how bad the Dolphins have been in their three games. 

So, what to make of it? The sample size went up a game, the Rex Ryan-led Bills showed us something new by bouncing back from a brutal day and parlaying their fourth quarter would-be heroics into a massively dominant afternoon against a division rival, and the Dolphins are a dog shit football team that most halfway decent teams should be able to beat. So the Bills are at least halfway decent. Maybe even pretty good since they won by thirty. Maybe stacked with enough talent both on the field and on the sidelines that they can make a true run at a Wild Card. Predictions are dumb in this sport, we’re still talking about less than a quarter of the season in terms of available data, and I’m most certainly wrong due to any combination of the following factors:

1. Any predictions are entirely unable to account for the dumbfuckery of the NFL and its dumbfuck rules and the dumbfuck officials that enforce the aforementioned dumbfuck rules in a way that makes me wonder about the meaning of life and my impending death;
2. #becauseitsbuffalo we will revert to the mean of sadness in substantial measure;
3. The Patriots are developing a plan to thieve the DNA of Buffalo’s skill players and replace it with the genetic code of the morning show guys on WEEI;
4. Tim Graham is bound to snap and murder me or someone I love someday, which is I suppose only sad for me, but fuck you for bringing that up;
5. Paul Hamilton is going to give the team swine flu;
6. The GOP’s insistence on banning stem cell research has stymied UB’s research into curing the Losing Disease, sucks to be us; or
7. Carl Paladino is Buffalo’s version of Adrian Veidt (Watchmen references two weeks in a row, deal with it, chump ass motherfuckers), which means he is (a) creepy as hell with an ugly face, (b) a fucking idiot, and (c) going to send a massive [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS) to [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] us all.  

But seriously, it looks like they’re going to be a good football team and bring us all the happiness we’ve so desperately craved because life always works out and I'm sleep-deprived and a little baked out so really I'm bound to believe anything right now. There's no way (read: every way) this can end badly!
 
Onto the recap!

The Barrister

Annnnnnnnnnd, we're here. Yet another proctologist's appointment appearing before our eyes despite our firm belief that, no, this can't be right, we actually scheduled a pleasant $45 Chinatown rubdown, what the fuck happened?. 

As if it was ever going to be different. 

We Bills fans love storybook scenarios. Of course they always end up falling apart in a fiery blaze before our increasingly weary eyes, but we love them all the same. We love wins, but we won't be buying those wins dinner and some over-priced gelato unless the wins follow a pre-selected script and satisfy our need for that story at the same time they toss another game in the W column. Sometimes I wonder whether the win is secondary to the story; whether we like the story because we can live it out for a full week before kickoff and we can enjoy that week without remorse, regardless of outcome. Whether we like it most because it's more within our control; because we can live five or six days with the agency that we so lack when it actually comes time for Sunday afternoon. 

Last week was one of those weeks - a week where fans were so convinced that the corner has been turned and is firmly in our rear view, where fans got the national media on board and some jamoke that even the #BillsMafia couldn't stand raised eight grand and got Guinness in the house because we weren't just convinced of our team's forthcoming success, but also of our own unflappable superiority as a gathered mass of frantic noise and endless, unceasing devotion.

And, of course, yesterday was one of those games - a game that stuck to the script for only a few fleeting minutes, that cultivated hope only briefly, and that left us to watch with bloodshot eyes that familiar dance of fire and metal and anger and fat, drunk men passing out at their seats as the Hindenburg of our hubris came crashing down, exploding the narrative for all the world to see. 

The fact that we haven't realized that the only plausible story when this team of ours plays a Belichick-coached, Brady-quarterbacked Patriots team is a story of death and destruction is a curious bit of trivia destined to be the topic of a short segment in the History Channel's series Sports: The Lower Dose Opiate of the People, which is reportedly set for production in 2025.

Anything good we can take from the game gets snatched up and re-purposed for this week's story. Anything good we can take from the game had little utility to the game itself, so we recycle and reuse and manufacture hope that our Bills can reduce their unshakable, ongoing propensity for moments of moral victories and little else.

So, shall we? 

The Barrister

Sometimes it's really hard, inexplicably hard, to tell whether a moment in our lives really feels different than the ones that came before it, or whether we just want to believe it does for sanity's sake; whether it feels different because of objective facts available to us, or because our subjectivity refracts the available facts to such an extent that we can't help but believe; whether, right here right now, this past Sunday and the forthcoming autumn of 2015 was and is and will be actually, really, truly, objectively different than the morass of turd we've waded through this millennium, or whether we've simply begun yet another another revival of the one-act play we've written in the collective think tank of Bills fans incapable of not simply squeezing the most fun out of whatever it is we got.

We've been here before. Or at least somewhere close enough that a healthy serving of worry isn't necessarily unreasonable. 

Alas. I always go the other way when it's September. 

Objectively, we have a lot of facts available to us that can't be dismissed. The team's ownership is now vested in a new family with vision and resources that haven't been available to the club, well, ever. Their ownership was enabled by one last redeeming act of the club's previous owner, a man so entrenched in days-gone-by that we could not escape the fact that our Bills were always going to be a dozen steps behind as the NFL modernized into its current form of capitalist, monolith juggernaut; a man whose last mic drop was to ensure the Bills stayed in Buffalo and the wealth gleaned from the team's sale would be charitable in its purpose. 

Those facts aside, we remain in a place all-too-familiar: a place of hope without complete reassurance; with optimism based on small sample sizes; with the feeling of progress and the belief in enough rain to end the godforsaken drought we've had. All of it so fucking familiar and very possibly driven more by our persistent need for the sensation of belief than the team's actual capacity to sustain it.


Then again, maybe not. 

Belief ran deep in Orchard Park on Sunday. It was infectious and inescapable, thriving in the early-morning tailgates, reunions with old friends, hugs and high fives and, thankfully, in the stadium itself. It was a feeling like nothing I've felt in years, fuck, like nothing I've dared allow myself to feel.

Holy shit was that belief rewarded. 



THINGS I LIKED:

The Barrister

....

YO. Did anyone really see that coming? It was a fucking terrible game - a TERRIBLE GAME - that had the markings of what 2014 Buffalo Bills football seems to be all about: amazing defensive efforts wasted by awful lack of offensive production. It was looking like what the Chargers and Texans games looked like, to varying degrees, and on a day when the Bills were missing a key cog in the defensive line, the effort we saw on that side of the ball was more than we could have hoped for. The game was bad. It was all but lost. That is, until Alex Henery took things into his own hands, er, feet. 

Tough beat. At least you have a sweet bike.

I suppose it was meant to be, what with the new mustachioed QB who appears to barely bathe, the game in our now-deceased owner's hometown, and the return of the former Lions coach and current Bills DC. Al (we should call him Al now) Henery was just doing his part in following the predetermined course of fate, however doomed it would ultimately make him. Personally, I think Stu Holden should be the Lions kicker. Would be safer for him, at any rate. 

Bad game or not, it was a win and an excuse to make ebola jokes....