You know what? I've fucking enjoyed not writing for this site. It's the off-season for the Bills and Sabres, the English Premier League ended with a whimper for my surging Liverpool Football Club, the Mets are meats, and the rest of sports news is on my simmer setting while I look ahead to a World Cup in which the US team has a better chance of scoring zero goals than it does of pretty much anything else.
Everything is pointless. Everything is lost.
Why the check-in, then? Obligation, I suppose. Not to you pissants, mind you. To myself and my own need to get up to speed on our beloved teams and get myse..... fuck it I can't lie to you. I love you too much.
It's because of dick jokes. I want to make some dick jokes and call someone a douchebag and I wanted to do it in long form. Fuck off.
Who first?
Rich White Guys Who Want My Football Team.
The steady beat of time marching on has ensured that each passing week brings another notch of excitement - or something we want to call excitement but is more akin to watching our skin sear under the heat of a hot iron skillet - regarding the future of our Buffalo Bills. Specifically the ownership of the team and not anything else in the future, since we all are painfully aware that the future of the team is written in the stars right next to God's most recent memo to us wherein he requests, again, to stop sticking our dick everywhere. To love the Buffalo Bills is to love an unknown destiny that we can only guess will be outrageously shit.
Ownership, in the grand scheme of things, is irrelevant when compared to the cosmic forces of sadness that have been working so diligently all these years, spinning us on the back of giant elephants standing on a turtle, elephants and turtle all equally intent on watching just one more Johnson/Losman/Edwards/Fitzpatrick/Tuel/Manuel/Lewis pick six.
At this point, it seems pretty certain that the second component - the Bills staying in Buffalo - is at the forefront of people's minds when assessing which owner seems to be the right fit and which owners can be crossed off our wish list. Almost to the point that we've forgotten what it feels like to hope for anything other than the team just staying put.
That. Is. Not. Enough.
It wasn't enough when Ralph was alive and it sure as shit isn't enough now. I once mused how the nightmare scenario is that the team moves and then wins a title in Toronto or LA or wherever, and we're left holding a bag full of shitty memories and regret and wishing we could have kept them just that much longer so that title could be ours.
Fuck that. The nightmare is the team staying and Ralph Wilson's legacy of absolute fucking SUCK - the one that people have been sugarcoating into "he brought/kept Bills in Buffalo and, nope, that's all we're going to talk about" - continuing to be the omnipresent theme of the Buffalo Bills.
So I'm going to move past the ownership talk, admit I don't give a shit, and hope we get a winner this year. Like I do every year. Because there's nothing else.
I am totally fine with this, by the way. Drugs are pretty ok sometimes and the NFL shouldn't be concerned America's draconian drug laws and the glacial pace at which they change. About time we had a front office more concerned with keeping and getting the best players, regardless of whether they had trouble with petty drug offenses and/or use. Fuck it, this is progress.
What's that? The Bills let Jairus Byrd and Stevie Johnson go? But but but those... were their ... best players?
It's a good thing I'm a dumb piece of shit. Otherwise, I'd get real confused and ornery when trying to make sense of this fucking team. I am unbelievably desperate to like and enjoy the Bills team now that the Sabres have been utterly unwatchable for well over of a calendar year, but watching Stevie go was tough as hell and, frankly, the amount of things that have to go right for the team to make the playoffs seems to get increased as soon as you remove two quality, high-performing starters like Johnson and Byrd.
Oh and everyone got surgery over the offseason and it's really unclear whether anyone will be healed by September and that is AWESOME.
I don't personally know Doug Marrone. I don't personally know Doug Whaley. They both look goofy in visors and Marrone has this weird fetish with wearing sweatpants all the time, I don't know, but fucking hell I hope they know what they're doing because it's altogether possible that their players will all be drugged up on painkillers and/or weed and/or synthetic weed and/or mediocrity. The Dougs have to be on point. I am deliberately choosing to believe that they are and will be, but that belief, like most of my beliefs, is based on nothing more than my preference for happy beers and whiskey over sad beers and whiskey. It's the little things.
Oh and I love Sammy Watkins and dear god please help the Bills not fuck him up.
The NFL blows.
I'm typing this here because it'll be worth referencing in a few years, but does anyone else have the distinct feeling that the NFL has run itself like an evil villain might and, now, with lawsuits lingering and real exposure possible, there is a serious risk that it might not exist in ten years?
From covering up and ignoring evidence of the long-term effects of head trauma to patently endorsing illegal pain management to not paying cheerleaders in violation of labor law to the ever-present possibility of a labor strike by players or officials .... I know they're a big pocket for plaintiffs to dip into but, GOD DAMN, those are some strong and disturbing claims clicking around.
I assume there's merit in the concussion lawsuits - a huge settlement agreement of $765 million was already approved by the NFL for one of the class actions and thereafter rejected by the presiding judge because ... wait for it... it wasn't big enough - and it's only going to get messier for the NFL. The new illegal drug administration case is probably on a smaller scale in terms of actual damages (though it's early), but the allegations are so outrageous and so incredibly plausible that the league's biggest risk might be in punitive damages since it was all so plainly fucked up. The cheerleader case is the dark horse because no one died and no one was hurt physically, but I'll say again what I said on twitter a few times: if NFL cheerleaders are determined to be, in a legal sense, employees, then teams will owe damages equaling: (1) back pay; (2) damages under federal statute that equals back pay; (3) damages under state statute (at least in NY) that equals back pay. These are not exclusive. A cheerleader found to have been an employee will be entitled to her wages times three.
This could get interesting.
So win now, Bills. We may be running out of time on multiple fronts.
The Sabres? Woo boy, if we have to.
Nope. Can't do it. Here's a great video of dogs fucking instead. YOU'RE WELCOME.