The Outlander

I don’t remember my first Sabres game very well. I was three or four and my uncle, a Buffalo firefighter, had been offered four or five tickets from his neighbor for a game. Like most people when recalling memories of such a young age, it’s just a snapshot; first row right behind the net on the glass at the Aud. I remember the awe I felt at the speed, the brightness of the ice, the size of the players, the noise- especially the noise- the excitement of sharing something not just with my family but with so many strangers of all ages.

As I got older and attended more games, my grandfather went from having to briskly pull me along with him by the hand to just waiting for me to catch up to walking side by side to waiting for me to stop and let him catch up to having to taking my hand as we headed down the stairs. By the end, when he couldn’t go to games anymore, our conversations about the team were abstract, about how yes, they did have one fantastic player but that someday soon they would be back to the team we knew, the team I grew up with.

It’s 2018. My grandfather is gone and the uncle’s been estranged from the family for a decade. It only makes sense that my relationship with the Sabres has deteriorated to a point I’m unsure I can get back from.

There really is no other way to coin the 2017-2018 Buffalo Sabres except for the worst team in franchise history. Points-wise, it may only be the third worst of the 82-game era, but you don’t need to masturbate over @ineffectivemath to fully understand the scope of what just happened here. There may be those who did not expect them to challenge for a playoff spot this year- I would have said those people weren’t expecting enough from their no longer inexperienced roster. This is a league where teams go from the lottery to the playoffs on an annual basis, where Edmonton is an aberration not an excuse. Eichel was healthy, Okposo was back, the defense had been shored up, there was a slew of prospects ready to take the next step and they even brought back someone who’d actually won a bunch of playoff series’ in this city. The coach blamed for the late season car crash was gone as was the GM who’d whiffed on most of his drafts. The tank was over, it was time to demand- and frankly, expect- wins.

Five games into the season, they had one point. I’d traveled out to New York for the second game of the year against the Islanders and left my seat after the first period. I drank beer in the concourse for a period then left, embarrassed. They were 3-7-2 at Halloween and by Thanksgiving, at 5-13-4 the season was already over. The Bills played competitive games a month and a half longer than the Sabres did this season; whereas the Sabres were always what rescued us from caring about the Bills after November, the Bills rescued us from the Sabres.

The entire season from that point on was a miserable slog that only a sadist or an asshole could enjoy. During 2014-15 I purchased gamecenter and watched nearly every game, asking for it on at bars, still rooting for wins well into March before “okay, time to lock it down” took over for the last couple weeks. The two seasons after were the same thing, despite the growing pains and long stretches of uninspired mediocrity, I couldn’t not watch, it was a routine I’d been in since high school. As I said before the season started, the Sabres were to be a reprieve from the mundane slog of adulthood, through the anxieties and fear that today’s world brings on a daily basis. They were to be something to kick back with over a beer and to get excited about and perhaps, to once again enjoy watching once it became shorts and t-shirt weather again. There were rivalries that were going to reignite, rivalries to be born and this was to be a time of resurgence, to remember why we’d stuck with them so long.

Instead they exacerbated the daily horrors around us, showed us that they too would not bring solace, that our lives are indeed better without them playing such a role in it. Before this season, the longest I’d gone without watching them was studying abroad in 2004, pre-smartphone and without internet in our apartment and even then, every morning when I got to campus I’d scour the TBN website for stories of the previous night’s game, chat with my friends from home on AIM about what was going on. This year I canceled gamecenter before December, caught them when I was home visiting and sat through two periods of another blowout, this one in Washington. On February 10th I was at Cole’s and had to actually ask for the game to be put on the television; when it was, we were the only ones watching it.

The team itself is toxic. Shifts, periods, games, weeks on end of uninspired, defeated play. The coach has effectively ruined his legacy as one of the best defensemen in franchise history, doomed to be remembered as one of the most ineffective, timid and befuddled coaches in franchise history. The GM that was supposed to add the final pieces to a playoff contender is now woefully out of his depth and tasked for a rebuild, and for no other reason than “idk, it seems rash,” they’re both going to be back next year. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no cause for hope, there is no silver lining.

The problem is larger and runs deeper than I think anyone at Seymour Knox Plaza comprehends. The tank, which was really nothing more than step one of a rebuild, cutting dead weight and attempting to replenish the farm, was the correct move and that cannot be reasonably refuted, no matter how hard Bucky Gleason thinks Lee Stempniak was the missing piece. The problem was…everything else. The guys brought in were the wrong guys, the leaders were too weak the lead, the goalies were trash and 80% of the draft picks were useless. The roster ended up being a bunch of replacement-value or worse cannon fodder. The players brought in to fill holes ended up not being big enough to fill the hole, creating an even larger hole. The amount of dead cap space as well as the amount of cap space wasted on garbage players skyrocketed.

This isn’t even to speak of the collateral damage, which may be reach farther than even the pending rebuild. Why would anyone subject themselves to this product moving forward? The ancillary things Sabres Twitter complained about over the years are largely still there except now the product on the ice is even shittier. I’m willing to guarantee everyone reading this turned down tickets this season, perhaps even free tickets. It goes far beyond noise and puck stoppage gimmicks, it’s a matter the Sabres being a poor use of anyone’s time. This season I was happy to knock out a slew of shows with my fiancé, socialize more with friends when not feeling compelled to constantly check my phone. I was able to see more people when we were home because no longer was gathering tickets and taking up an evening at the arena an appealing option. Fellow lifelong fans have checked out, at the very least saying “call me when you’re good,” a call that frankly might never come.

At this point the only feeling I can muster towards the Sabres is resentment. I’ve been asked by multiple people recently if I still care about the team and the answer is grudgingly, yes. I will probably purchase gamecenter again next year, though like this year, their games will not play a factor into any other plans that may come up. I resent them wasting my time, I resent them sullying fond memories with their incompetence, I resent players who say the fans should be behind them more, players who martyr themselves because golly-gee, playing hockey just ain’t fun anymore. I resent the lip service to “the best fans in the league,” I resent Harrington articles telling me to like a shitty player like Josh Gorges and I resent fans telling me to be more of a friend than a fan over Ryan O’Reilly’s crippling case of the sadz. I resent them for acting like it’s understandable that this should be so fucking hard with Vegas, Colorado, and New Jersey hosting playoff games.

I’ve defended ownership for a while thanks to creating Penn State’s hockey program, keeping the teams in town, the canalside development, and TBN’s reckless and immediate attacks. As Harrington has always said, access is a privilege and ultimately it is up to the subject to provide that access. Demands for him to speak about the Penn State Sandusky/Paterno scandal was in remarkably bad faith given his lack of affiliation with the football program. Demands for him to speak about the tank were also in bad faith; whether the vendetta was an eagerness to tear down someone who had saved the franchise in 2011, animosity towards the existence of a female owner, or a general campaign to prove that TBN is not as impotent as they seem in local sports, I don’t know.

However, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have to speak now. What he strove to convey upon the purchase in 2011 was that he was also a lifelong fan of the team, that he was determined to bring a cup to Buffalo, that he understood the pain of losing in the playoffs and the joys the team can bring. If this is true, the performance has to not only be infuriating as an owner but embarrassing and humiliating as a fan. Millions of fans are looking to him to fix this and now not once but twice, it has been completely destroyed on his watch. He may be just as lost as I am as to the next steps but what he needs to show is that he understands that this is rock bottom; that the franchise has never been as much as a collection of incompetents and as embarrassing to the fans as it is right now. And also, what the fuck is Russ Brandon doing there?

For years I’ve written previews and postmortems here; the previews were always generally too optimistic but that’s how I’ve gone into every season, excited, hopeful. The postmortems have generally been filled with disappointment but there was always the general thought that improvement was both inevitable and reasonable to see. The kids would be older, the locker room would gel, the befuddled coach would be gone, the dead weight would get lopped off. This time? I have absolutely no idea where they go from here and no idea how they fix this. All I know is I want a lot of people gone that probably won’t be gone with the puck is dropped in October. There are exciting prospects sure but when was the last time one of those panned out as more than a third liner? This team is FILLED with bottom six scrubs. There isn’t a goalie on the roster that elicits confidence for carrying the load for a full NHL season. The backline is an Ypres field hospital. No one can design a special teams gameplan to save their life. The KBC is going to be less traveled than a wake for someone nobody particularly liked very much. The roster is immensely unlikeable and they don’t seem to care about their jobs or each other. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever again care about the Sabres as I did the first thirty years since I sat between my uncle and grandfather at the Aud or if like those two men, that’s just gone forever.

Enjoy the offseason. It’ll only get worse from there.

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

There I was, sitting on my sister's couch north of Boston with a houseful of family largely apathetic of sports but for their preference that I am in a good mood after I watch a game in their proximity. I was ready, takes lined up, takes that had been forming for weeks, months, years, ruminating in my gut and on this blog with its name and aesthetic of yelling into the void about sports failure. Takes that are, objectively, as uncontroversial as I can manage, yet ones that seem to elicit some such scorn from too many fans of this team, fans with whom I find association for the most arbitrary of reasons, maybe - we love a stupid, idiot football team from Western New York. It felt good being pretty much alone as a fan at that moment, able to put down my phone and just sit in frustration with no one else there to amplify it with their own.

Alas, truth be told, it hasn't stopped feeling good.

Everyone has their own tales of woe and sorrow and heartbreak and frustration and anger over these 17 years. As fans of this team we're forced to annually engage in some sort of 12 step program from start to finish - my personal favorite are the yin and yang of denial and acceptance, for the record - and when people ask about the raucous tailgates and table bodyslams and sweatpants lit ablaze by equal parts ABV and the blessed energy of hometown love, I often find myself scratching my head. How could it be any different at this moment in time? Bundled up denizens of a town left behind by crippled industry, a town that's propensity to be covered by ice has become as famous a point of interest for national attention as any part of its identity except maybe its dumb football team's epic parade of failures. Quite the horrible status quo for a town that led technological innovation, architectural innovation, and yes, sports innovation. We had gorgeous, near-perfect Olmsted parkways, we had progress in electrical power, we had architectural marvels, and we had the K-Gun, and then we had the view of all those things getting ruined, ceasing to be, and we were left with something different if not desperately unfulfilling.

That the Drought came to personify our regional anxiety and inferiority complex was sad, but no less true. Focus in on ESPN coverage of the NFL in 2007 and be a fly on the wall of a Richmond Ave apartment teeming with Bills fans wringing their hands over how little respect the national media gave the Bills. Change the year, change the street. The Drought has been a vehicle by which we've been able to really exercise our inner Dangerfield as we've whined about calls that went against us, conspiracies wrought in the favor of other teams from other cities, visiting players insulting the small-town that we love so much that we're willing to call Tom Brady a fucking bitch boy because he made fun of a fucking Adams Mark. This football team that had given us all some weird, certainly misplaced yet nevertheless entirely understandable hope for the future during those Kelly years had morphed into a shell of that former self, replacing hope with something between despair and nihilism, with a sprinkle of spiteful jealousy. Hell, if you're younger than me, you may not have even gotten that beautiful preamble to the Drought, just the suck.

The reality of these last 17 years has, in football and in the rest of our shared realities, been something of a shitshow while the meaning of things we've come to depend on have morphed into things grossly undependable. The meaning of Justice, for instance, or even Truth, Facts. The absence of playoffs for our preferred football team reached peak metaphor last year as the Rex Ryan's squad hobbled to a losing season and Rex Ryan's presidential candidate of choice sprung to power. Ryan departed Buffalo a confirmed failure, Trump took office amid of a cascade of mounting lies about matters frivolous and material, and as white supremacy got a leg up on civilized society and the government's support of billionaires became far more open and notorious, it was admittedly tough to see this Bills season as anything other than a continuation of the metaphor. A vapid, troop-loving conservative Christian who probably also voted for Trump took over as head coach, Betsy DeVos remains Education Secretary, great players were shipped off to be replaced by virtual unknowns, the EPA and other corners of government including the fucking White House began publicly denying climate change, Anquan Boldin split town as quickly as he arrived, billionaire donors received a massive handout that will bankrupt social welfare programs, and the Bills fan base tripped over itself to make sure that everyone knew that Tyrod Taylor was no good while he quarterbacked the team to fun-as-fuck wins pretty regularly. Also, Peterm5n happened and Kim Jon Un called Trump old. L-O-L.

It's been shitty and joyous and frustrating and no small amount of maddening to be a Bills fan this season, much like many years really, and while it felt just like the others more often than it didn't, while nothing seemed to indicate that this Bills team would be the one to shatter the drought, they did.

Hope is what this sport is built on for those of us in the stands and bars and family rooms, and the hope we feel for these Bills is now the stuff of reality rather than flimsy dreams. This fucking drought - sorry, that fucking drought - has been tossed in the bin, our faces are glued into grins, and a fanbase known for losing and table jumping and insanity has with a flash been transformed into one massive expression of joy. A fanbase that has squeezed fun and charity and community out of a 17 year old stone for all these years has been given the gift of something more. Honestly, and this is wholly without sarcasm, imagine what kind of fun, what kind of good we can achieve, now that this godforsaken monkey is off our backs. A day on, the buzzing feeling that was ignited yesterday is still kicking around in our guts, if you're like me, and is being channeled into 26shirts sales and $57,000 for Andy Dalton's charitable foundation; it's being channeled into plans to get down to Jacksonville, to gather together again in bars and homes across our nation of expats. As one would expect, playoff bound, Bills fans are doing what they do best, but better.

Suddenly, for a region, its diaspora, and a football team that continues to bind them, much that seemed impossible now seems almost likely. Maybe. I hope. Buckle the fuck up either way.

Let's go Buffalo.

The Outlander

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

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

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

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

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

The Barrister​

Sometime not long ago, I used to get super hype at the opportunity to drag some faceless internet jabroni with my own faceless internet potshots, crank my head back and pat my belly as I laughed at my personal brand of pointless animus, and publish FJM-styled diatribes here on DGWU Sports. I always knew it was sophomoric, and the normie contingent of the Buffalo sports twitterati and commentariat used to revel in telling me and my friends here as much. My family was ashamed of me, I was ashamed of me but for my utter lack of shame receptors in my brain, but it was fun and my penchant for dumb metaphors and run-on sentences brought me some amount of joy whilst our teams decidedly did not. 

Now, I can't say I'm hype for it, but sometimes a Deeg Emeritus challenges you to throw down on a Koch Brother cum-Bills blogger, and sometimes you're high on cough syrup and sanctimony and your ego can't refuse. 

So, well, here. This guy has been spamming Bills Backers facebook with his blog posts despite living in Western New York, so I is about to fuck him up in a justified roundhouse kick of expat reciprocity. I timed myself and this came out to about 23 minutes of actual effort and then a quick proofread for typos, so apologies for anything that you might think merits an apology I guess.

Oh man, it's already teeming with possibility just based on his own description here. "Their own agenda" <chef fingers> elicits such heartwarming feelings that it's almost like I'm about to watch Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally held within the first year of his Presidency. I can already tell this is going to be good. 

By Brandon J. Koch

I would bet all the money in my pocket (zero dollars and twenty cents) that this guy only started using the middle initial when MAGA became a thing. The only people that willingly publish their middle initials in their byline are: Hunter S. Thompson; cops; fascists. WHICH IS BRANDON I WONDER.

The national media knows absolutely nothing about small market teams, especially the Bills. That the Bills are a small market team is entirely irrelevant to everything that follows here, but it's a useful clarion call when you want to be lazy and pretend that the national press is somehow bad at analysis of a football team because it happens to exist in a small media market that is also incredibly touchy about being reminded of how good other places are in comparison.

NOTHING. And it shows.

They are so out of touch.

I have a feeling Brandon here has above his kitchen table a framed picture of Bucky Gleason holding hands with a woman but her head is cut out and John Wawrow​'s head is scotch-taped on. Admittedly, this a weird feeling to have but something about the lede here is terribly derivative of some of the worst writing in Buffalo sports media.  

When it comes to the Tyrod Taylor benching, the national media wants to push their own agenda, a false one that is: Tyrod Taylor being blackballed by McDermott, Bills.

Eat shit. Putting aside the syntax fuckery in play here, the Bills have consistently shown through their actions vis a vis Taylor's contract renegotiation, the offensive scheme chosen for this team, the decisions to let Goodwin, Woods and Watkins play elsewhere, that they have no significant love for Taylor. Whether this is justified or not is a separate question, and you can argue about the semantics of whether it's blackballing him, assuming any national writer actually used that word and not that Koch chose to use it since it's hyperbolic, but arguing that they've been happy to give him a fair shake with an approach that would maximize his success at QB is as heinous as it is silly.

That couldn’t be more wrong. 

The national media once thought there were WMDs in Iraq and that the aforementioned Brain Worm Reality TV star couldn't be President, so I believe they are capable of being more wrong yet I DIGRESS. Give me your bulletpoints, BJK. 

1. Since day one, Sean McDermott has said he will make decisions that is [sic] best for this football team to win games. Yet Rick Fucking Dennison is the offensive coordinator and Sammy Watkins is a Ram. And Mayo McTroops hasn't even really said that this is his goal; instead, he has said he is making decisions that are best for the football team, whatever that means. Homie has been entirely torn on whether he actually wants to win football games now, or whether he's trying to put together a team for the future, entirely built in his image, that is a team full of players that love Jesus but hate being asked to explain away the many inconsistencies of the Bible; players that love camo but hate being asked to explain Department of Defense policy regarding taxpayer-funded military displays at sporting events; players that love winning, but somehow hate Marcell Dareus pulling two blockers so that Kyle Williams can eat.

2. Yes, it back fired. [sic] But McDermott was looking for a spark, what's wrong with that?  The problem with cliches is that they cover all manner of sins. WHAT'S WRONG WITH LOOKING FOR A SPARK? NOTHING, EXCEPT HE LOOKED FOR IT IN THE HANDS OF NATE "DRESSES LIKE 18 YEAR OLD DUBS AT A 745 AM RELIGIOUS STUDIES CLASS BUT HEY HE'S WHITE" PETERMAN. Peterman is trash. He's the Barron Trump of NFL QBs - sure, it's not his fault that his dad decided to thrust him into the spotlight too early, but that doesn't change the fact that he sucks. Nate Peterman can't even accurately spark a joint, which is surprising since he loves Popeyes. Taylor against the Saints threw for 56 yards in a brutal performance. WHY DO YOU HATE GRAMMAR, DID GRAMMAR FUCK YOUR MOM IN FRONT OF YOU OR SOMETHING FUCK. Of course it wasn’t all his fault, he’s not playing defense. But, he’s gotta be better than that. Thing is, Taylor has been better than that, was better than that just this past weekend, and the aforementioned replacement QB was WORSE, which was actually hard to do BUT HE DID IT BY GOD HE DID IT. The only thing Nate Peterman is good at is writing shitty country music [not true] and playing abysmal, historically awful, worse-than-Tyrod-Taylor-on-his-worst-day football at the quarterback position. HE has to be better than THAT. 

The national media believes that mediocrity is good enough for the Bills because they haven’t made the playoffs in 17 years. Mediocrity is literally not making the playoffs for 17 years but never being so bad as to get the first pick in the draft. Making the playoffs is quantifiably better than mediocrity. So the Bills can’t try and be better? I like Taylor, he’s good enough to make it into the playoffs, but that’s it. The "I like Taylor" line needs to be dropped into every defense of McTroops' move to Peterman these days because the argument is indefensible. "I like Tyrod, but" is the "I have black friends" trope that lets the speaker feel like he can openly wonder why black people are just so violent. As it is, sadly, even if you say "I like Tyrod" and then proceed to defend starting Peterman against the Chargers, you still look like a shitheel who dips kale chips in Franks and calls himself cultured. Bills fans, like me, want more than just mediocre play. THEN WHY ARE YOU A BILLS FAN AMIRITE. 

For instance, John Clayton was on Schopp and the Bulldog a couple of weeks ago and said this: “Is it that big a deal in any city to be able to make the second wild card, lose by 2 touchdowns… in Buffalo it’s huge.” The City would drown itself in hops and Crown but fans are going to pretend they wouldn't enjoy it. “I know that in the big picture it’s like ‘OK a wild card loss isn’t great’, but for Buffalo it’s fantastic.” 

Now, I ask you this: How much in depth does Clayton really watch and study the Bills? I dunno, I'd say a reasonable amount since he willingly goes on WGR to talk about them. He lives in Seattle covering the Seahawks. Just because he’s the “insider,” doesn’t mean he’s right when he says just making the playoffs and losing by two touchdowns is “Fantastic,” for Buffalo. That’s settling for just being mediocre.

John Clayton has been a football analyst for as long as I can remember. He has the face to show for it. "He covers the Seahawks" is a serious thought? Did you just look him up on Wikipedia or something? Fucking hell, Clayton is one of only a handful of people who have been in the game long enough to look like Lou Holtz fucked a Fraggle but not to have been fired along the way for some sexual indiscretion and/or racist comment on air.

A journey begins with a single step or some such idiom. The idea that Bills fans are regularly jumping on twitter or WGR's airwaves or a new, totally necessary sports blog to express the thought that "playoffs aren't enough" is fucking bizarre. We have been desperate for playoffs for so long that not only can that desperation drive, but that desperation can drive drunk, get pulled over by the Erie County Sheriffs doing 80 on the 400 and get threatened by a meth cook in a holding cell in Elma. I keep hearing how folks aren't bagging on Taylor because of he's black, or that they don't want Peterman because he's white, but fucking hell, I see jabroni after thundergunt after jabroni rock out with "I don't want the playoffs, I want MORE" like some perversion of Veruca Salt meets Ralph from Tonawanda and I have to wonder - IS THIS BECAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THE BLACK MAN SUCCEED? The playoffs are, fate would have it, the way a team gets to a Super Bowl, so these newfound aspirations coming from the fanbase don't pass the smell test. We're on the verge of 18 years of Drought now, thanks to McTroops trying to light a fucking spark by giving the ball to Football's Ted Cruz last week, and folks are pretending it's justifiable to scoff at a wild card berth. 

After the Kansas City win,  Jonathan Jones wrote a piece at MMQB SI.com

He acts in this piece that Taylor is being a victim. What the fuck does this even mean? How can a writer "act" in a piece of written commentary? "Being a victim?" What are words, even.
 
[quoting Jonathan Jones] In Sunday’s 16-10 win against Kansas City (struggling with its own problems), Taylor proved once again that he’s good enough to win his team games and maybe good enough to sneak into the playoffs with just one fellow star on offense in LeSean McCoy. How many times must he prove his worth at this sport’s most important position?

Apparently, many times. Even though Buffalo is threatening to make its first postseason since 1999—which would end the longest active playoff drought in the NFL (yes, longer than the Browns)—Taylor, a wholly decent seven-year veteran, will still likely not play for the Bills next season. Buffalo went so far as to give rookie QB Nathan Peterman the chance to unseat Taylor last week against the Chargers, and, well, we all know how that went. Peterman is clearly not the Bills’ answer at quarterback, and never should have been considered to be so. 

Not for nothing, but Jones nails it here. Koch, well, disagrees.

“Good enough,” and “Decent.”

Yes. As in, "Tyrod Taylor is good enough to quarterback a team to the playoffs, and is decent when compared to the dreck that the NFL insists on marching out under center and also when compared to the parade of horrors that have played the position for the Buffalo Bills over the course of the last two decades."

He wrote in a tweet: “Tyrod Taylor is now 20-18 as a starter for a team with 1) the longest active postseason drought and that 2) doesn’t want him”

What 20-18 is something to be proud of? Yes, particularly for a team that was 103-143 in the years between their last playoff appearance and Tyrod Taylor taking over. Also, it's 21-18 if you count that 2015 Colts opener, which I do because I was in attendance and saw each of those touchdown passes in between drunk napping on strangers somewhere in the upper bowl.

But seriously - what in Christ is preventing Bills fans from displaying any modicum of perspective rather than these weird delusions of grandeur that they've been on about these past couple weeks. NONE OF THIS SHOULD MAKE US PROUD. But, you compare Taylor to the available QBs in the draft, the available QBs that the Bills are actually possibly going to get, the backup QB who broke records of ratfucking QB play against the Chargers, and what choice is available? To watch fans disregard the context that Taylor's play exists is to watch a fanbase waiting on unicorns. Pop quiz, hotshot: you are managing an historically bad franchise that has been coached into rabbit holes of failure, the options for future QBs are speculative at best, and you have a QB with a winning record as the team's QB. WHAT DO YOU DO? Bills fans: "I LIKE, TYROD - CAVEAT - BUT HE ACTUALLY SUCKS, I WANT MORE GIVE ME ALL THE SPICED HAM." Ask that to the Bills front office who is trying to build a something bigger. They traded Dareus for nothing. Stop pretending that this front office is in any discernible way special. 

And then of course the two that know all! The PTI guys! Do you think they watched one quarter of a Bills game all year? Doubt it. I do, for the record, since the Bills have often been pretty fun to watch this year, particularly if you're a neutral and not absorbed in this weird routine of WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN CAN THIS PAIN BE OVER NOW?

Mike Wilbon said if he owned the Bills, he would’ve fired McDermott and doesn’t know why he’s still employed. He also called McDermott: “dopey.” 100% agree. He is a mayo sandwich but with less flavor and more calories. He said with a straight face that he thought Peterman gave the Bills the best chance to win and then Peterman went and threw five interceptions and somehow Troops is immune from criticism because he is a serious man with serious devotion to something or rather. 

Then of course there are sarcastic Twitter people who act like they have never made a mistake. I have never made a mistake on par with thinking Nate Peterman was a good football player. Accidentally leaving a browser tab open on pornhub at your mom's house or forgetting you left a bong on the table when the police came over to play cribbage - these are totally hypothetical mistakes that I totally never did but even if I had done they are not as bad as what Troops did when he benched Taylor in favor of a walking talking Family Circle cartoon. Fuck Family Circle and fuck you. I saw something Sunday about Paxton Lynch starting and there were multiple tweets saying, “The Bills would’ve benched Tyrod Taylor to start Paxton Lynch.”

Really creative. What. are. words. even. 

I get it, that’s how sports work, McDermott’s move ended up being terrible, so he got the criticism,  [sic] But know why he made that decision. Because he's an idiot. Be informed. I have just informed you that Troops is an idiot. This is just all overreaction and being blowup by national media who barley [sic] watch the Bills. BARLEY YES YES YES I think this is Joe Buffalo Wins younger self traveling through time and fucking with me. I am incredibly moved by Joe's devotion to the craft, frankly. Debortuary. 

Taylor is not the victim (correct, Bills fans and grammar are the victims) this is the other side of how sports work. WHAT OTHER SIDE? The side that makes awful decisions and values the contributions of Nate "Never Misses an Episode of Young Sheldon" Peterman? Count me out. The Bills want to be better than 19-for-29 for 183 yards. They want 6-for-14, 5 INTs and losses. And White Jesus. 

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 Outlander

If there’s one thing about adulthood it’s that it’s interminably boring. To say this comes as a surprise would be somewhat disingenuous; after all we know from a young age that the adults around us operate on a continuous loop of work shifts, errands to procure items to satisfy our need to stay alive, television and sleep. Hell, it’s the general awareness of this looming tedium that drives people to have so much fun in college and their early twenties, the concept that what lies ahead is its own kind of death, a death of spontaneity, a death of new experiences. When that time comes- and it does, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise- it’s not just that it makes the 8-5 routine so crushingly dull, it’s that it makes your life before that tedium seem even further away, make it feel that it happened to another person.
​
It’s what makes seeing Jason Pominville back on the ice so strange. Despite hanging around in a Sabres uniform until the lockout season, it’s the goal, the president’s trophy, the winter classic that I remember him from, the years where I was in school and anything was possible not just for the Sabres but for the world, for one’s future. To see him back on the ice when everything is just so static- go to work, come back from work, go to the gym, cook dinner, shower, go to bed- and not unspecified is strange. I look at him like a relic despite being only a year older than me, which probably says just as much at how I view myself as how I view him. 

It’s why sports are still needed. Not simply as a distraction- though believe me, we’ll get there- but because you don’t know what’s going to happen. All day you may discuss your thoughts on twitter, one result may be more likely than another but ultimately you don’t know what you’re going to see, which is a hell of a thing when you’re about to watch Jack Eichel play. It lends the opportunity for something you haven’t seen before, something that provides a surprise in a world where the only surprises are the rotating taps at the bar down the road or finding that salad is buy one get one free at the supermarket. In short, it’s nice to have hockey back again.

I think it’s fair for fans to feel robbed about last season. Year Two AT (After Tank) was supposed to be the first opportunity to enjoy the rewards of the suffering, the trades, the worthless free agents, Andre Benoit, Torrey Mitchell, Ted Nolan, Coyotes updates, Trending Buffalo. It was supposed to include a playoff push at least and that was almost secondary to getting to see how Eichel took hold of the league in his second year. He came back right at the perfect time to serve as a distraction from the anxiety that comes with being made a prisoner of your own country but by that time the team was right back where they’d been every year of the decade before the tank, 8, 10 points back with the season practically a write-off.

January 20th I called in sick, turned off twitter notifications, threw on the Ken Burns Civil War series at around 11am when I started drinking. There was an aura of nihilism, hopelessness, dread that months later hasn’t dissipated so much as settled over the country like the Denora Smog, and struggling to breathe is just how we exist now. As they’ve always been in bad times there was a Sabres game that evening, won in overtime against Detroit by a goal from Okposo. The next night they were in Montreal, trailing late. As my inaugural bender continued they tied it up, Lehner made the save of the year (likely bolstered by a fellow white supremacist being in office) and Bogosian won it again in overtime. They’d provided a brief moment of joy after years of darkness.
​
Two nights later Eichel makes the play of the year and suddenly a few weeks later I’m watching from the bar at the golf dome with my parents as the Sabres climb one point out of a playoff spot. That was the tease, the brief run that made us think about what could have happened with a full year of Jack, wonder what could happen if they were managed by a coach whose style encouraged players to use their speed to force the opponent into capitulation and not simply hang around and hope for a timely goal. We have all of those things now and as we get ready for the season I must say, it’s terrifying.

The Barrister​

I won't take much of your time but wanted to take a moment to drop the lulz. The Jets, god bless the Jets ... they punted. Down 9, 4 minutes left, facing the feckless turds from Orchard Park? PUNT. 

It's never a surprise but my brain can't process it all the same, how much professional football coaches are goddamned cowards. Unreal decision-making for hire, the prerequisite for being a coach in this league appears to be a pleasant enough jaw line under a curved-brim hat and/or visor. It certainly isn't a requirement that a coach be competent. We Bills fans know that as well as anyone.

Never change, New York Jets. Never ever change. 

Anyway, yeah, so I watched. What of it. Last minute invite to watch multiple games at the bar - I am generally incapable of making rational decisions and you aren't clever noticing how much of a hypocrite I am. Mazel tov. That shit was always happening. I literally cannot resist Week 1 and my efforts at staging some sort of ceremonial cleansing of my football-liking soul are always some degree of mirage. This sport, and to a larger extent me, are really, really dumb.. 

Tyrod played ok, made some reasonable throws; Shady was solid, served as the workhorse McDermott et al. will require him to be this season; Jordan Matthews has some wheels, so that's nice; and the defense shut down a team specifically manufactured to be a dreadful, dry and cracking squeegee awash in caked-on failure. The Bills avoided being complete embarrassments, at least for the moment. Hurrah.

Onto the next as we await, not a drop of the other shoe per se, but simply the way things are. Perpetual shoe-dropping, I suppose. 

Let's Go Buffalo.

The Barrister

Well, hello.

​At the outset, I make no promises. I talk no big game about this being a grand reboot of this blessedly sardonic weblog (it would make it, what? four or five of those now?). My firm is entering a busy period this fall, I'm working 60 hour weeks if I'm lucky, my only child just started Kindergarten to a cascade of tears and apprehension and then, relieved, endless excitement. I was having beers with Apologist sometime back, sweltering heat enveloping us as we threw some Skeeball on the roof of a Manhattan craft beer bar, the sound of bus traffic from Port Authority interrupting our conversation in the spirit of my coworker who never shuts up ever, and we got to talking about this site in the way we often do when we have beers in each other's company. This site, some eight years old, home to hot takes and aggrieved takes and over-emotional takes and disproportionate takes, has become not a little bit like your favorite shirt you keep forgetting in the back of a drawer, squished back by newer additions to your reckless excuse for a wardrobe. You keep finding it every fall, or ever mild early spring, or some other time altogether, and you're reminded of how great it is, how much you missed it, how much your affection for it is shaped by the fact that it keeps getting lost in the messy rubble of your life. Sam and I talked about the site with the kind of brash optimism, not for the teams we follow of course, but for what we might do with it, what we might choose to make of it in this the 18th year of our drought. 

And to that, I don't know. Maybe it will remain frequently silent, the takes reserved for twitter and bars, the priorities of our ever-demanding lives taking their right and good place at the top of our respective to-do lists. Shit, I hope that remains the case for an expanding and contracting crew of writers with fiancees and wives and kids and hopes for kids and jobs and hopes for better jobs. 

Today, though, I suppose the itch has gotten me. The Friday night before a Bills season opener can do that. Still. 

Make no mistake about it, though - the Bills are going to be bad. Terribly bad. I may watch one full game this year and I doubt it'll be this Sunday's. If I watch more, it's likely I'll be an intolerable fucker on twitter, will mock those fans publicly displaying glimmers of hope, will get drunk enough to not feel feelings, and will remain blissfully empty of any real insight into why this team remains bad. At a certain point, you gotta throw your hands up and blame the football goods, blame Russ Brandon, blame Ralph and Terry and Kim and the Dougs and Gregg and Leodis and Buddy and Chan and fucking Thurman and #BillsMafia and hope and loyalty and literally everything and nothing. If the panacea to the Bills' problems was determinable, it would certainly have been discovered by professionals by now and not some overtired lawyer who rarely watches the full 4 quarters of any given game. 

The Bills are going to be bad and they've been bad for literally as long as I can remember. Sure they were good when I was in grade school and in high school, sort of, but those memories are fictions in a real sense, reconstructed from box scores and snapshots of moments and guesses as to what I was probably thinking or feeling during some game or another. The memories are feelings at best; an allegiance to a past I knew was better than we deserved and better than we've gotten since; that allegiance substituting for any real recollection of what it was like to love a Bills team that actually loved us back. 

This is a logical year to bail, in a way. A camo-cap-wearing, Troops-loving jabroni has roled into town to coach this bad football team, the GM tucks his polo shirts into gym shorts, we traded two great starters and got back mere opportunities at landing good players to replace them, we can see public financing for a downtown stadium on the horizon, our country is being assaulted by forces fascist, ecological, meteorological and apathetic alike, and Russ Brandon remains employed when justice demands he be pilloried. We should, each of us, bail. Fast. Maybe take Sunday afternoon painting classes, you know, the ones where you drink wine and pretend you could get paid to make art. 

And yet.

I wasn't born into being a Bills fan like so many of you. If my dad hadn't been offered a job with the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York when I was six, I'd probably be a Patriots fan now, a thought that plagues my thoughts way more often than I'd care to admit because, truly, it's disturbing to consider how much (more) of an asshole I would have grown up to be. This never came naturally to me. My parents, New England transplants turned Buffalo boosters, were never much into sports to begin with, I was a fat, shitty athlete, and by the time I figured out what Bills football was after being in town for a couple years, I already felt well behind the curve. It never mattered much, though; the teams were too fun to worry about the occasional misstep in social cues. And the teams remained fun, even when they weren't, actually, because part of accepting that new identity I slid into after we moved to Winston Road in 1988 was accepting that keeping the Bills a part of my life, keeping them a source of fun, keeping them a touch-point in my consciousness, was a key part of how I could start calling Buffalo home. House parties with my family turned into house parties with my friends turned into house parties with my college classmates turned into tailgates into Bills Backers into reunions with old friends into new friends into this blog that I love too much about these teams that I love too much. And Buffalo remained home.

Fast-forward to tonight, through this summer, last summer, through the Rex Ryan years and the Marrone years and the years that came before, and a not insignificant part of me can say that it feels different, that it feels less necessary, that the dried well of optimism has forced my hand into taking some sort of logical step towards releasing my cold, darkened heart from loving this team. The table is set for a clean break, for a cancelled blog subscription and podcasts lost in some server archives out west, for friendships to transition to non-partisan affairs in which we talk about other things, other sports, things that reward us as consumers of life's pleasures. 

And yet. 

They remain a thing that we do, as Sons and Daughters of Buffalo, as fans who loved them through the Super Bowl years, or later, or earlier; who hate them often but can't step away; who value them for what they can mean on a blustery tailgate with some of the best friends you could imagine; what they can mean when you see a standing Buffalo logo across the street in New York, in Boston, in D.C., in London, in Japan; what they can mean as you hug every stranger in sight while Shout! blares over the PA and part of your physiology tells your brain that what you're feeling is the absolute fucking best.

It's the Friday before a Bills season opener and I have the itch, not because of belief in this godforsaken team and its godforsaken capitalist enterprise, not because a sports version of Pascal's Wager is in play and I don't want to miss the turnaround as it happens (lol), but because it's what we do. 

Let's Go Buffalo.

The Bartfister

Dropping in to say hello. You know the drill. Let's get weird.

. 

​



I hate writing this because I am a fan and proponent of women’s sports.

You do not have to write this. You are not passive observer in what’s about to happen. You are a participant. As am I, for the moment.

Big fucking deal that you’re a self-proclaimed fan and proponent of women’s sports, chief. You’re a GD paid sports columnist. Your lede here is “I do the bare minimum for my job.” It is painstakingly accurate.

Minimum support of women athletes having been proclaimed, all manner of sins can now be cloaked. You’re a regular Frodo Baggins, Smallwood. One cock ring to rule them all, one cock ring to bind them.

I understand why the members of the United States women’s hockey team have threatened to boycott next month’s International Ice Hockey Federation women’s world championships over a wages-and-support dispute with USA Hockey, the governing body for ice hockey in the United States.

See, I get that you’ve know said this but I get the feeling that you’re gonna say a bunch of shit in just a minute that will make readers wonder “Does he?”

Still, I cannot side with the players in their demands that USA Hockey pay them an annual salary of $68,000, plus child care, maternity leave and other benefits.

He CANNOT. It’s impossible, you see. All the rest of us that side with the players here in their negotiation for some bare modicum of professional salary, we’re doing the impossible, you see. We’re the Big Fish of third-wave feminism or something.

What are you going to do with your newly recognized super powers? Me? I’m going to grow weed out of my coffee cup using mind bullets. Beat that!

I agree with the players that it is pathetic that they are only guaranteed $1,000 a month for six months leading to an Olympics.

I agree that USA Hockey’s offer to raise pay to $3,000 a month prior to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea won’t make that much of a difference.

I fucking hate fucking sports fucking writers. This is classic bullshit. An industry that rewards jabroni (pl.) who stand up on the take less traveled; the take that seems, dare I say, impossible based on the facts available.

It’s like Woodsmall thinks recognizing the basic facts before taking the conclusion a different way gives him some sort of credibility here. It does the opposite.
 
But the players are asking USA Hockey to pay them as if they are full-time employees, and I agree with the organization’s stance that it doesn’t do that for players – male or female.

Up until recently, much of the white collar industry of the U.S. has built itself on the work of unpaid interns. If you’re Darren Rovell or even Wood Smalljohn, you probably point to the availability of internships that don’t pay as the logical first step for any entrepreneuring young professional.

Unpaid or underpaid work is foundational for the continuation of centers of economic power, regardless of the whether the result is fair for labor. Consideration of how economic power metes out the scraps from the proverbial table to the dogs working the floors has some value in assessing fairness, as does the question: “can workers actually fucking eat?”
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That USA Hockey “doesn’t do that” is all well and good, but it has no place in this argument. Of course they don’t do that. That’s why women are striking. The centralized monopoly of American hockey has no interest in paying any fucking body as a full-time employee until it is made to care.

Since the International Olympic Committee changed its rules in 1986 to allow professional athletes to participate, there has been a growing misconception that all athletes who compete at events like that should be paid as if they are professional athletes.

The belief that women should be “paid” here is not a misconception, it’s a GD belief, you ornery toad fucker. The fact that USA Hockey *makes money* off these athletes suggests that they should be paid.

That simply is not how it works.

THAT IS WHY WE ARE HERE. THAT IT IS "NOT HOW IT WORKS" IS THE WHOLE REASON THE WOMEN'S TEAM IS STRIKING. CHRIST. 

Athletes are compensated for competing in events the Olympics or a world championship based on the financial power of the sport, the country and the governing bodies of a sport in a country.

They’re compensated based on whether the organizing body chooses to pay them. Market factors don’t magically create a contract-for-compensation when there’s a certain profit margin achieved. There are choices here.

It’s misleading to say men get paid millions of dollars to represent the USA at the Olympics so women should get the $68,000 they are demanding. To repeat, USA Hockey does not pay the men millions of dollars. It doesn’t even pay them $68,000.

This is hot steaming bullshit.

The question of “should women hockey players get paid” is not answered in reference to the fact that men get paid. It’s answered in reference to whether USA Hockey actually values having the best women players compete. If they do, they will shell out the cash here, and they should. If they don’t, at least we can see an honest answer here. Hell, we’re already seeing it.

Referring to the fact men get paid by the NHL is a red herring. Men’s hockey in America has received support from USA Hockey – support when they provided negligible infrastructure for women to play – for generations. As it turned out, that support did not take the form of employment contracts because the IOC said players had to be amateurs. Fast-forward generations and USAH doesn’t need to pay players on the Men’s team because these players already make good money. Fair enough.

While USAH was supporting the talent pool that allows its best players to get their payday, Women’s Hockey globally had to fight for any recognition by the national governing bodies. It’s been less than 20 years since it was even part of the Winter Olympics. Unlike the Men’s game, the Women’s team hasn’t had the generations of support growing the game into a top-class money making enterprise. USAH has that role to fill now, and they should. Hiding behind “we don’t pay the men” is fuckery. They don’t because there’s no need to; they don’t pay the Women’s team players because they don’t want to.

If the men want to get paid, too? Let them negotiate for their own damn selves.

Either USA Hockey gives a shit or it doesn't.

In 1998, 12 years after the IOC allowed professional athletes, the NHL decided it would benefit from interrupting its regular season and sending its players to the Olympics. Though they still haven’t won shit at the senior team level. USA Hockey certainly benefited from having NHL players at the Olympics, but the players’ multi-million-dollar salaries come from their contracts with NHL teams. In the United States, governing bodies such as USA Hockey, do control the professional leagues.

Unfortunately, there is no high-paying professional hockey league for women.

Not that the ladies here are asking for a “high-paying” league to be financed by USAH here. They’re looking for a middle-class income to play at the sport’s highest level.

The National Women’s Hockey League is a four-team league with a salary cap of $270,000 per team. Players get a share of the home gate after 500 tickets are sold.

Does anyone think Teenyrod here actually gives a shit about the NWHL? A quick search of his bylines suggests this is actually the first time he's written about women's hockey. Not that this matters because he's totally a big proponent and fan of women's sports. Just not this one, in particular, which is why he's here to correct the record on why these athletes should just learn to eat their effort for breakfast.

Because they can’t make a living wage as full-time professional hockey players, the players want USA Hockey to supplement their income so they can live as full-time hockey players.

No: because they provide a valuable labor service to USAH, they would like compensation.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the median household income in the United States for 2016 was $53,889. DID YOU REALLY GO THE CENSUS BUREAU, FUCKBOI? Basically, the players want USA Hockey to pay them nearly $15,000 more than the median income, plus benefits, for a nine-day tournament once a year except for an Olympic year.

NAHHHHHHHHH.

They want what they want. They are negotiating. It’s their bargaining position and they’re bargaining with their own participation in a tournament that I assume is one of the highlights of their careers. THIS. IS. THEIR. RIGHT.

Professional sports are businesses, not charities.

Wait. Either this is a professional sport or not. If it’s a professional sport, then these people deserve to get paid at least as much as the senior manager of some local HVAC outfit. 

An athlete’s income is directly related to how much revenue he/she can generate, individually, or as part of a team and league.

This is another piece of fuckery. Athletes are paid the bare minimum that an owner chooses.

Choice.

Revenue-generation may go into it, but all you have to do is look at NFL player salaries vs. NFL revenue to know that players are boned to the extent ownership wishes to bone them. It’s the same here.

Choice.

Either USAH cares.

Or it doesn’t.

WNBA players make a fraction of the minimum salary of NBA players because the women’s game only generates a fraction of the revenue that the men’s game does.

This is a great example because the WNBA started as a way to build the game of women’s hoops and pay women a decent wage to play. It has never been a great revenue generator, but ownership decided – chooses – to give a shit and keep it going. Call it charity, call it optimistic pseudo-capitalism, whatever. It’s a choice to give a shit and try to create something that hasn’t been here before.

Conversely, female tennis players successfully demanded equal prize money at Grand Slam tournaments because their competition is as profitable as the men’s.

Nope. This was but one of the justifications for Grand Slam payouts to be equal; also included in the conversation was equal effort and, yes, the cynical cyclical impact of arguing that less popular sports deserve less funding when less funded sports are always less popular.

Unfortunately for the women hockey players, they can’t even make an argument like the one that women soccer players have made in their dispute with the United States Soccer Federation.

The argument that equal effort and equal participation means equal pay? Yes they can.

Although they’ve cherry-picked the numbers in their claim for equal pay, the women soccer players do generate significant money for the USSF when they host friendlies and participate in the FIFA World Cup.

Cherry-picking arguments? You mean like referring to revenue-generation as the only factor in athlete compensation?

Or like making points in a vacuum whilst ignoring the historical nuances of misogyny-in-sport and its impacts on the financial viability of a sport featuring women?

USAH brought in $41.9 million in 2014, a year when the U.S. Women’s team won a silver medal. They generate income. Players looking to take a fraction of that is a non-starter? FOH.

Women athletes work just as hard and train as hard as their male counterparts. In a perfect world, they would be paid like their male counterparts.

Eat my increasingly shriveled balls, you feckless human earworm. The world doesn’t get perfect by accident. People choose to be the change they want to see, or they sit behind their word processor spinning some ridiculous yarn about how women totally deserve more money except not actually.

But it isn’t a perfect world and most athletes – male and female - don’t get rich or even earn a living wage for competing in their chosen sport.

THERE IT IS.

First of all, no one is looking to get “rich” here.

Second of all, Woodslittle here finally gets to the point. After all of the pontificating on how much he really does support women’s sports, he drops the hammer.

Tough shit, ladies. The world is hard and y’all can get fucked if you deign to ask for enough money to survive.

Dear God, what a C-O-C-K Cock statement.

Is the best you got - “ladies, life is hard?” This is your point? The literal last line of your thesis here? In what fucking universe do you live in, Monsieur Tiny Forest, where you think any woman needs reminding that the world isn’t perfect and doesn’t give a shit about them? This is, guaranteed, the thing that virtually all women understand to be true without needing a reminder from a walking talking "well actually" reply.

Where the fuck do you get off, you dirty ass of a feral cat, thinking you’re providing some epiphany that settles the debate here?

Women’s Hockey Team: “We want to get paid a living wage.”

USAH, looking up from a blog written by James Little Dick: “Well, you see, he brings up a good point. Life isn’t perfect. Now fuck off and make me a sandwich.”

Fuck you.