Category: Rex Ryan

It Can't Rain All The Time - A Very DGWU Recap of Bills at Patriots, Week 4

10/2/2016

Absolutely bossed it.

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.

I feel like a little worm on a big fucking hook: a quasi-moratorium on these Bills

9/20/2016

The Barrister

Not that you deserve any excuses, but here are some that each partially explain is letting the home opener go with little mention here.

First, the less obvious... I worked a 12 hour day on Friday, plus caught Liverpool's away match to Chelsea at the newly minted 'The Team,' Carragher's new little brother situated next door on West 39th. Between the work hours and the elation at a sports team winning an improbable game away from home against recent champions and likely title contenders, gearing up to write about the Bills' loss to the confusing and unironically shit Jets was a non-starter. A busy weekend of varied personal and familial tasks kicked the can further down the road.

Second, the obvious. Yes, they were bad. Yes, the idea of heaping on scorn was both appealing and nevertheless unsavory after waking up to Buffalo twitter's commendable implosion. All true things. All reason enough to take a few days off, but not the whole story.

Third, the practical. This team became impossible to write about in a compelling way for a few days. Not for everyone, obviously; I didn't but read a smattering of the takes on the loss and everything that came thereafter, but it was clear that at least some of those takes were worth writing and having other people read. Slam dunk subject matter of a completely indefensible pro sports franchise, for sure. But not for me, I guess.

Partially because I wasn't interested in bringing a tired perspective to the table (though I'm good with doing that now), partially because I knew the people that read us here do so out of a voracious appetite for #content, meaning they will already have read others with actual circulation give a serving of fair takes reflecting the altogether consistent hatred of this fucking football team among the fan base and local media, and partially because suddenly the landscape of the Bills kept changing over the course of the 3rd quarter and then on through the rest of the weekend, I let it lie for a few days. It was hard to gear up with a well-balanced take when it seemed likely it would be mooted by some forthcoming report we'd inevitably be given a few hours later.

Ok, so there's the background, and it's that last point I want to take up for a little two-step.

I watched the second half of last week's game on DVR at 1 o'clock Friday morning. My body gave out around 10 Thursday night, during halftime, and I went to take a "nap," waking up diligently to finish the game in about 30 minutes. For all intents and purposes, I'm sitting right in the beginning laps of middle age, and maybe I need a Red Bull or five to stay up late and pound beers like I am wont to do, but I can rally with the best of them. Even for a football team I love to hate and hate to love.

At first, it was gravy. Man, the start of that second half was fun as balls. These motherfuckers had me scribbling notes about the good things I was seeing - Sammy drawing coverage away from secondary targets; Tyrod making it work despite his weaknesses and the play-calling ruts; the way the defense was attacking the ball; Tyrod calming the bench down after his TD to Salas, like he knew there was a lot of work still to do (there was); Sammy getting hyped as hell for his fellow receivers; the kickoff coverage; Leodis and his fumble recovery. There was a lot to bemoan about the first half (which I watched on mute hashtag marriage hashtag billing hours) - failing to make Fitz pay for early mistakes, weak play calling (again), and curiously poor coverage in the secondary, for starters - but for a little while in the 3rd quarter the team had me drawn back in. I was exhausted and parts of my brain were probably still asleep and accordingly much of my memory of how everything went down is unreliable, but I found myself sitting there all "man Hartman was right, this team can be fun and that's good."

Haha, what an asshole that guy is.

Nearly as quickly as the bug of "shit are they really going to win this, fucking awesome" got caught, the Bills scorched the hope with a glazed malaise of prototypical Buffalo Football and all momentum fizzled with a muted squelch. A quick useless drive after Robey-Coleman scampered into the endzone with the kind of purpose that fuels the legs of a middling roleplayer, forfeiting the team's best (only?) opportunity at solidifying a two possession game; cornerbacks asked to do too much while being far too gassed by the abbreviated time that the offense possessed the ball; a pretty bad team's dream playing out through the Jets' night; a similarly bad but persistently worse team facing a reality we'd been assured would not come.

Even for those of us who never really bought what Rex has been selling, the clarity of the failure was shocking.

With the tech assist from my DVR, this failed denouement lasted no more than 12 minutes of real time. Though my tired eyes had a hard time comprehending the new depths of garbage that this team insists on wading into, it's ultimately nothing more than an inevitable shoe drop these days.

And now, the Tuesday after, the shoes haven't really stopped dropping. Maybe that's the only positive to find in the landscape of this moment: at the very least, the club's near-instant reaction to the pair of spectacularly Bills losses confirms that what we watched was, yes, really bad; so bad that the organization's track record of artful PR and head-in-sand management was no match for the clarity of this recent run of Suck.

Of course that positive has its limits, and the last four and a half days have seen the local sport punditry try to make sense of the doubly fucked scenario, asking "why is this team so shit?" and "even if the club recognizes that it's shit, are the people in charge equipped to right the shit?" This second question arguably deserves to be first, and it's probably an easier question to answer: Nope. No evidence that anyone - from top to bottom, from Terry and Kim to Russ "Burns When He Pees" Brandon to Doug to Rex to Rob to the entire coaching staff to the trainers and the room full of jamokes just waiting to throw someone under the bus - has any real competency in the area of making this a good football team. Roman was by no means the top of anyone's list of most culpable, and so long as his remains the only head to have been severed against the chopping block, his firing will remain a move nakedly futile on its own.

When the ship is sinking and remains so in perpetuity, everyone is accountable and no one accountable.

Maybe that changes soon, and again, that's the optimistic angle if you want one: someone pretty high in the ranks got kicked to the curb, meaning the Pegulas do not like owning and watching a shit Bills team. And, frankly, that's no small thing when compared to the Odious Taint ownership that we lived with for so long. Even so, it's just not enough. Now that the prism of our consumption of this team isn't bound to the fear of it leaving Western New York, now that #OneBuffalo has been branded onto our subconscious and that prism of fear replaced with a marketed commitment to success and community through this team, it's right to expect more from the Pegulas. If these teams of ours are going to claim to reflect the best of us as a community of neighbors and friends and sports fans, it's right to look at Roman's firing and exclaim "great, good, what's next?"

All the same, it's exhausting as hell to be at the familiar crossroads where the best we can hope for is a quick road to abject failure, draft picks and yet another One Bills Drive reboot, each more pathetically distant from that 90s small screen magic as the last. No amount of optimism or #OneBuffalo corporate circle-jerking can cure that in the short term, with the best case scenarios hitting pay dirt some years down the line.

The sooner the Pegulas wash their hands of all the terribly milquetoast football management talent in their employ, the better. So, what's next?

"Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things." - An Optimistic Approach for the 2016-17 Buffalo Bills

9/8/2016

Harry Scull Jr./Buffalo News

The Apologist

Football is hard. Absurdly hard. Hard to watch, hard to play, and hard to justify. It's become easier for people to explain why they're not getting their kids vaccinated than why they continue watching football. St. Louis is still paying off the debt on their now unoccupied football stadium. Every team only just figured out they should stop paying Greg Hardy to play football (but apparently the Pats should kick the tires on Ray Rice ... good God, Lupica). Teddy Bridgewater's career might have ended while pretending to play. And if his career is over, he'd be considered LUCKY by most NFL retirees' standards. Calvin Johnson just quit at the peak of his powers because of course he did. But it’s become like complaining about your taxes. Yours are too high? Join the club. Pay ‘em and move along, you’re holding up the line. The NFL is everything that's wrong with humanity and capitalism? Sure, but you're still gonna keep watching.

So all existential crises aside, the hard part of football I'm here to discuss is winning and, more importantly, it's correlation to our enjoyment of the game. For better or worse, that's what makes all the other parts of football tolerable. Calvin Johnson might still be playing football if the Lions weren't, well, you know... the Lions. But as fans, complaining about wins, or the lack thereof, has become a competitive sport in its own right. Who has more to complain about? 31 teams end every season disappointed. Yeah, sure, but look at THIS bullshit team I have to deal with. Hell, even the people who cover the league are creating storylines to complain about.

Simple math says the teams we root for are more likely to fail at their ultimate goal than succeed. But who REALLY has it worse? Is it worse to be at the bottom of the barrel looking up? Is it worse to float in middling mediocrity, missing out equally on big draft picks and big moments? Or is it truly worse to come this close to your goal only to have it ripped away from you?

I've been asking myself this because, from my vantage point, Bills fandom has reached a particularly masochistic level this offseason. My friends have been competing to see who can expect less from this team than the other. A recent text exchange raised the question of what their record would be this season and I was the only person who thought they would win more games than they would lose and it wasn't even close (the "best" prediciton was 7-9). This might seem like an obvious, understandable sentiment to some people, but it really got me thinking. It feels like enjoying the game and not enjoying the game are on equal footing now. And to be fair, watching the Patriots so you can talk shit about Tom Brady does sound like more fun than watching whatever it is the Tennessee Titans are going to try and accomplish this year. Particularly when it comes to your own allegiances, I understand where this instinct comes from. If you think you’re going to be let down, why not lower your expectations as far as possible so that the let-down is more tolerable?

The problem is that this hypothesis has been proven false again and again and again. We can tell ourselves all we want that they’re going to lose this Sunday, but if they jump out early and take a lead into halftime, we will get excited. We will have hope. We will also have that knot in our stomach, but that’s the whole point. That’s why we watch. As soon as I stop feeling things during these games, I’m not sure why I’d watch them anymore. If all I wanted to do was have a logical, measured experience of football, I’d drop all allegiances and tune into whatever game is being called by Joe Buck. Sad!

So if I’m gonna have my heart ripped out and my mind turned into a scene from Falling Down, then I’m gonna go into it with the best of intentions. Or to use a different hacky reference, if we’re all going to wind up in the Pit of Despair, then damnit, I’m gonna expect the best on my way down.

I mean, this IS supposed to be fun right?! For fucks’ sake, remember when we weren’t going to have a team at all anymore?!? By the grace of God, fracking, and Terry Pegula, the Rams are in LA and the Bills are talking about a downtown stadium. But like a real one this time. Our team was saved, but somehow our doomsday expectations stayed six and a half feet under. I’m not saying everyone should be expecting a record over .500 like I am, but where is the proof that we’re one of the worst teams in the league? Seventeen teams finished last season with worse records than ours. One of the ones who finished above us, our divisional rivals the LOLJets, spent the entire offseason trying to convince others that they had convinced themselves that they could do better than Ryan Fitzpatrick. Hell, the Super Bowl champions TRADED for Mark Sanchez. (Seriously, how many teams would cut their quarterback in a heartbeat to get their hands on Tyrod Taylor? If the Eagles were able to get a first round pick for Sam Bradford, a quarterback whose ceiling we’re all painfully aware of, what could the Bills have gotten in exchange?) Somehow Raiders fans have more faith than we do! For the life of me, I can’t understand it.

I know it’s a somewhat weak argument to make: Being optimistic is more fun. But that’s how I feel. If you want to wallow in self-pity and disappointment, don’t let me stop you. In fact, maybe stop reading right now, because it only gets sunnier from here. Translation: DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE, GOD DAMNIT! THE BILLS ARE BACK AND I’LL FUCKIN' SHOUT IF I WANT TO!

“Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is” – A Pessimist's Primer for the 2016 Bills

9/7/2016

The Barrister

(NB: Apologist will follow this with something more upbeat for the "has yet to succumb to crippling angst over their preferred sports teams yet" crowd, so feel free to skip this, but in the meantime it's time to flex some muscles and get a little stretch in. It’s been a while. Clear eyes, full hearts, can definitely lose it's actually likely.)

At a certain point after I left New York City to inexplicably put down some roots in the Garden State, after I decided to scale my day-to-day to a new place and new routine, new people and new options, I started thinking a lot about the legacy that our interests and priorities leave with us. This is often little more than self-indulgent introspection, for sure, but when you have some extra commuting time on your hands and most of that is sitting down on a regional train service that makes the NYC subway look like a frenetic cattle car complete with all the physio-fecal smells you come to expect, it's not the worst thing to make an effort to use the time to your advantage. It’s a pretty dumb habit in a lot of ways, most notably because I’m liable to get hung up on certain problems or anxieties at inappropriate times, including times when I'm by no means alone, which makes the whole exercise self-defeating sometimes.

By way of example - which is not needed to illustrate the point but since when is necessity a prerequisite? - this past weekend I went to a small wedding with some old friends and as I navigated the evening with my too-good-for-me wife, the pitfalls for an extroverted over-sharer like myself were everywhere. By the time the after-party kicked into gear, my BAC checking in at a respectable clip and my six foot two inch frame questioning its close relationship with me given my inability to sit still during a Bruno Mars song, I was in a really good place. And when I say good, I obviously mean that I was telling way too many stories about shenanigans both past and present, talking about work way too much and making new best friends that I most surely will never see again. As my too-good-for-me wife is bound to remind me, frequently, people don’t really care about my shit. The friend of the bride did not love me hijacking a conversation to talk about markets and self-interested fucks who ruin our economy, but that’s where my head was at after the handful of Finger Lakes Rieslings, I was having a moment and needed to work through it, and also I totally apologized later and we ended up having a hilarious night and homegirl is on that list of great humans and new best friends that I will definitely forget to keep in touch with.

To put it a different way, introspection is not really a team sport, by its nature, but man do I like to triage my bullshit out in plain view. I totally get that people aren’t necessarily on board, especially when they’ve known me for all of twenty minutes, it’s just that I don’t really care.

You shouldn't smoke these. They'll kill you

In the midst of these indulgent bullshit problems I let consume me as I seek a less arduous, more interesting way to get through each day without feeling some vaguely defined weight on my shoulders, constructed by a job that delightfully lays waste to my health and well-being and a home I feel like is being held together by duct tape and hasty prayers to no one in particular, the decisions about how to cut through that bullshit to prioritize the to-do list I have on my plate become a matter of imperatives.

Me? I like to put down markers in my memory, emphasizing what’s important and what experiences get earmarked for consideration at some later date. It’s entirely hokey to discuss, yet nevertheless plainly true for me that life is far easier to manage when you place markers into the dirt along your personal timeline and attempt to categorize information in some useful way. Whether laid down in hindsight or in real time, those notches in our history provide a point of reference within the series of stored memories, making it easier to look back and make sense of the progression of time; easier to lean forward with some degree of well-defined perspective on how our past is prologue.

So, I suppose, we choose what matters to us and we likewise choose to put down those markers to help us make sense of those valued portions of our life. We power rank the fuck out of our varied interests and dreams and the varied people and places and institutions we consider our own, and in the end we sort the information into buckets and probably power rank the buckets as well. In the first one you get all the non-negotiables, the stuff you can’t live without, and in the last bucket are the frivolities and dreams and luxuries, and somewhere in between is where the shit gets really complicated.

A bunch of nonsense, non-formative moments can be swept under the rug of our subconscious: the time you chatted up someone at a bar out of boredom; the passing moment on a dance floor during yet another wedding reception of yet another friend/cousin/sibling/child; the 18th time you watched a team you love play a milquetoast field-goal-riddled game against some milquetoast squad from some (as it turns out) usefully pathetic city.

A career, a friendship, a love affair, a family? Your list will be different than mine, but when we rank our priorities, when we decide to carve out space in our journey (or not) for those things and let them impact our days in the short-term (or not), the way we sort through our experiences and internalize a memory or a feeling takes on varying degrees of importance. We remember names of family members and concepts necessary for our jobs and how our spouse smelled the first time our kid fell asleep with us on the couch; we probably don’t remember the name of the guy we bump into sometimes on the train, or the way a friend we see twice a year takes her coffee.

And then we have football.

(And yes, I’m aware that I overthink things. If you’re new here, a hearty welp to you. Welcome to the Jungle, we’ve got fun and games and our teams are basically gout. If you’re not new here, settle the fuck down, and yes that means you Joe Buffalo Wins. I’m sure you have some amazing tweets to ping me with soon, bud, and I’m sure they’ll be really well-phrased.)

“You can call me Susan if it makes you happy” - Your Week 7 Bills Preview - Bills "at" Jaguars

10/23/2015

The Scizz

Greetings and Salutations Berls fans! After a three week hiatus from the Bills previews I have returned more confused than ever! What is this team? To me right now, they seem like another 8 – 8 team that will show a glimmer of hope here and there, juuuuuuuust enough to keep us invested, yet ultimately breaking our hearts. Same old song.
It’s been an early season of “What If’s?” all around. What if Buffalo had all their weapons like Sammy, Shady, and Los Williams for every game? What if Tyrod was able to go last week? What if the offensive line could learn how to play football? What if defensive “genius” Rex Ryan sent his front four to destroy the QB more often? (Which any human with even a minuscule knowledge of football knows should be happening by the way.) Hell, what if Fred Jackson was never relea….GOTCHA!

What this all leads back to is that the one game I was the most confident about winning this season, now seems like it has the potential of a disappointment akin to last year’s loss to the Raiders. How has this happened? I have no real answers, but what I can say is that I don’t give a fuck how they do it, but they need to win Sunday morning in London. Maybe they need to sign Bullet Tooth Tony to start shooting players in the knee caps during warm ups. I’m just spit balling here.

I think I'd better come clean with you about this. It's not a virus, I'm afraid. You see, a virus is what we doctors call 'very, very small'. So small, it could not possibly have made off with the whole leg. - A Week 6 Recap - Bills vs. Bengals

10/20/2015

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:

"And you think life takes more than it gives, but not today. Today it's giving us something. It is giving us a chance ... to give a shit." - A Week 1 Feelings Recap - Bills vs. Colts

9/15/2015

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, surely, but the past informs our present and while it may be foolish to think too seriously about how this feels different than other teams and other hot starts to a season, here we are on a September Monday with a palpable sense that a change is gonna come. Indeed, it already has. - Me, September 15, 2014

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.

Good luck not letting your jaw drop watching this PERFECT 51-yard Tyrod Taylor TD pass to Percy Harvin. #INDvsBUF http://t.co/5HKrqNd8Q9
— NFL (@NFL) September 13, 2015

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:

Back for another installment of Happy Endings with Barrister and Scizz! The fifth one, in fact.

8/2/2015

Y'all, we recorded this four nights ago but then a whole hit load of life happened and fuck you for asking. But seriously. Work, a mass of yard work, summer hangouts and loads of Lagunitas chased by spliffs. Here we are.

It's the offseason of most things we talked about so nothing is all that out-of-date apart from some baseball talk - the Mets swept those Nationals shut the front door. Delightful. Life filled with delight.

Podcast featuring rants about Russ Brandon, Tom Brady, born-again Bills fans, Uber-less Buffalo, our plans for Week 1 tailgates and a few other things that I can't remember since I haven't actually listened to this and just hastily tossed in some musical selections without worrying about the propriety of taking on American Methodists, among others.

Good to be back, kids.

Music by way of Bleachers, Oddisee, Fitz and the Tantrums, and Priory.

Download here or here. RSS here. iTunes below and a streaming boxey box below that. Old podcasts, and there are a bunch of them, available at deargodwhyussports.libsyn.com or the Deeg Podcast Industries tab at the top banner. Gooey gooey aural goodness.

Go Bills.

The Tables, They Have Turned

1/16/2015

The Outlander

I was sitting in my office yesterday morning and frantically refreshing my Twitter feed; not simply because I am way too reliant/addicted to modern technology but because, as I have been for the last several days, I am craving, demanding more Rex Ryan #Content. Last Saturday I stood in a bar in the Federal Hill area of Baltimore (think Elmwood) with my girlfriend and several friends, mowing through buckets of Bud Light and the occasional round of cherry bombs, watching what, for a while at least seemed to be the funeral for the Patriots season. Sometime during a lull in the second half I pulled out my phone and absently began scrolling through Twitter only to find news that Rex Ryan had been brought back for a second interview. Suddenly, inexplicably, the Bills had seized my focus from the fantastic playoff game in which the rest of the bar was so wholly wrapped up. That focus remained the rest of the evening, through the anguished screams consuming the bar that sounded so familiar, through slipping on sidewalk ice on the way to the car which also felt so familiar (seriously, salt your sidewalks, Baltimore), to Sunday morning when I hacked through the haze that was my hangover, grabbed my phone and let out what can only be described as a joyous squeal upon seeing Mr. Ryan would be the next coach of the Bills.

I have read everything about the hire; I’ve read national writers, New York City writers, Buffalo News writers, all writers (except Paul Hamilton, who writes as though he handled downed power lines in a storm). I scrolled through photo galleries on the Bills website, watched the news conference in my office, and listened to any reaction that wasn’t phoned into a WGR switchboard. And now I sit here, refreshing Twitter as the hype begins to subside and I am still craving my Rex content, so I guess I will simply create my own.