The Outlander

A few weeks back our office FedEx guy came by. Our Operations Manager usually handles them; there’s numerous packages arriving daily that need to be exactly what he expects not just for our sake but the sake of our customers and the various third party agencies that run communications between those customers and ourselves (very Office Space, but that’s advertising). Occasionally the Ops Manager is out in which case the FedEx guy comes to my office for a quick signature and confirmation of my name to cover their ass.

The guy was probably late-40’s to mid-50’s and while I signed the tiny screen with the matching tiny stylus he said “I think I have that exact same pennant.”

I wheeled around as if I have multiple pennants behind my desk but no, still just that one, a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl XXV champs one purchased off eBay for in the early to mid-aughts. I was in school and didn’t have a credit card at this point so I called my Mom, explained to her that no, eBay wasn’t going to rob her account for this $6.99 relic to an era that never existed and she assented. It’s been in various offices and apartments throughout the northeast before landing here in my office in Rhode Island in my mid-30’s.

While I’ve always had a little “no, you don’t have this one but ok” response in the past I decided to let this fellow Bills fan have his moment (besides in the years since I’ve found more than a few of these "Norwood makes the kick" bizarro penants around). I smiled and asked how he felt they were going to do this year.

He didn’t miss a beat. “Oh I stopped watching them after they benched Flutie for Johnson in the playoffs.”
​

At a time when the foundation of everything we were taught- at church, at school, by parents, professors, colleagues and cops- has been shown to be nebulous at best, the Buffalo Bills are a zeitgeist petri dish. At times this seems to be due to an organized effort from the top down to implement a franchise that represents specific subgroups and entities that elicit goodwill and hero-worship from the demographic of “Buffalo football fan,” while at others it appears to be an organically cultivated shift from the fanbase themselves, saying the quiet parts out loud at the realization that not only are they not alone in their groupthink but there’s enough to change the very fabric of what America is in 2019.

This blog is as close to “writing for fun” as I get these days- in a cliché of mid-career average guy I too have a novel I need to get back to- though writing and communication is also my career. I work in real estate negotiation, hashing out leases with folks that run the gamut in education, income, business type and location (with a noticeable skew of nearly all being white males of course). Over the past few years I have seen a shift; one that was barely perceptible at first but has snowballed into the status quo in business discussions to the point where what was once the rule is now the exception and vice versa. It is abandonment of fact, abandonment of reason, abandonment of the mutually beneficial agreement. Not long ago I could sit down with a property owner, explain that we’re offering X because our profits are Y and while there may be hemming and hawing and some movement in one direction or another, discussions would be amicable because everyone deals in facts and figures and we want a partnership as opposed to an adversary. Deals would move quickly because they existed in a vacuum devoid of emotion and were conducted professionally because after all, we’re both just doing our jobs the best we can. The best way I can summarize this is quite simply that words meant things.
​
Emotion has replaced reason. Where lessors previously saw a partner, they see an adversary. The concept of mutual benefit, of win-win has been replaced with zero sum antagonism. “Let’s crunch the numbers and see what we can do” has been replaced with “fuck you, pay me.” Every negotiation, every cent to claw is a symbol to them, a symbol of what they deserve, of who they are as people. They can only feel good about something if someone else feels bad about something. It’s not enough to have something; no someone else must go without in order for them to feel fulfilled and even then, only for a moment. Nothing is “just business,” just like nothing is “just football.”

I think by now we can admit that the Buffalo Bills as an operating business entity have placed an onus on symbolism not as a football team but as a civic operation espousing the meaning of what it is to be not just a good Buffalonian but a good person. This is a problem because what I want is a well operating *football team* that succeeds at *playing football,* which is not something that has occurred very often, arguably not at all during my adult life. They are not subtle about this, not with their talks about culture or handing out literal lunch pails to corporate sponsors who aren’t eating their lunch on steel beams in the sky but in air conditioned conference rooms.

They are not subtle about this, not with their flyovers, not with their weekly troop worship, not with their revolving door of mediocre players whose faith is stronger than their field awareness. They are not subtle when they draft not the most talented quarterback on the board but the one most malleable to fantastical brand speak, to say with a straight face that a Sabres Stanley Cup is the sporting event he’d most want to witness, fifteen months after learning what the Buffalo Sabres even are.

Josh Allen was drafted because he is a facsimile for what those who run the franchise thought Buffalonians want from their franchise Quarterback, of what they thought Buffalonians would identify with. He was not drafted based on his accomplishments but in spite of them. He was drafted because even if he didn’t work out, the fans would like him so much they wouldn’t blame the powers that be for wasting their time or missing an opportunity to turn the franchise around. Evidence (four years of Mountain West Conference play that resulted in merely an Honorable Mention), reason (accuracy is largely at its end stage of development by the end of college), facts (completion percentage, INT figures, passing yard totals) have been disregarded in favor of emotion (he signs autographs for kids and wears shorts in cold weather).
​
If Josh Allen was drafted as a representative for what Buffalonians want and identify with then most should be offended. They believe you identify with someone who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. They believe you identify with someone who is style, not substance. They believe you identify with someone who has never succeeded at any meaningful level in their career getting an opportunity over those that have proven more worthy of the opportunity. They believe you identify with a loser because that’s what you are. 

Those who make the decisions for this team do not identify with you, they laugh at you. Sure, it comes behind closed doors at One Bills Drive but make no mistake, they do not identify with you and they do not respect you. They tell you how blue collar you are despite the fact you were the first in your family to get a degree. They tell you how bad the weather is despite the fact you only needed a light jacket for those December games. They tell you a player’s failures are secondary to his faith because they don’t believe you ultimately care about results. They tell you all about how *tough* the area is, despite the fact that when you think about it you grew up in a pretty safe suburb with non-descript doughy white friends and have a pretty successful career. They tell you how someone is a “Buffalo” guy when all you know about the guy is how he’s a replacement level nobody cast off from some other franchise he couldn’t succeed with. Is that what you want to identify with? The team may call themselves the Buffalo Bills but they have formulated a roster and culture that would be better off called the Tonawanda Bills; a culture of mediocrity, of entitlement over merit, of emotion over reason where success is defined by vague terms such as “values” and “effort” and not results. They are a team made for people who have given up, for those sitting at the bar at 3am on a Wednesday, for those who think winning is too much to ask.

It does not take very long for an objective mind to identify massive red flags around those running the franchise from top to bottom. The owner is on tape calling one of his own former players by the wrong name and fretting about losing advertising dollars for his shitty hockey team. The GM drafted the current quarterback. The collection of dunces before his arrival felt Patrick Mahomes wasn’t worth as much as “draft capital,” used to later select the inaccurate arm the franchise has pinned its future on. The coach came aboard talking about “faith-based winning” yet still can’t summon up the courage to go for it on fourth and short. The offseason acquisitions are verifiable improvement based on their performances elsewhere but based on an offense averaging less than twenty points a game it’s debatable whether that improvement is meaningful. An objective observer would likely come to conclusions similar to what appears to be the overwhelming majority of national media: they may be better, they won’t be good.

There is one place seemingly devoid of anything resembling these fact-based predictions from the media: Western New York. Specifically, the gaggle of bros who find themselves covering the team on a daily basis. As someone who grew up during the halcyon days of Bucky, Sully, Harrington it is disorienting to see the problem not be pessimism but blind optimism. These aren’t weathered old men spewing out resentment that they’re never getting a bigger gig than The Buffalo News, but millennial chuckleheads playing the content game where being bullish, where being optimistic (*cough* where toeing the line for management) is sure to be shared throughout social media and result in a cacophony of likes and shares.

Perhaps these people are genuinely bullish on the Bills; I’ve had people who know some people I bash consistently speak to their goodness and value as individuals. I don’t doubt those assessments from people I trust, what I do assess are those whose jobs revolve in sports coverage refuting, disregarding or denying facts in favor of what will make their audience feel good. These are guys operate as a collection of sports Ben Shapiros, making bad faith arguments and using words with zero substance behind them, posting gifs of swirl routes and eight yard outs as evidence of growth, who push the Mad Money button and fire off confetti guns any time some guy with ten concussions talks up the Bills on NFL Network. The fastest growing non-corporate entity covering local sports seems eager to play the role, buying into the cult of agro-idiots that run the team, the goofy never-will-be’s that wear the uniform, mugging for the cameras and lobbing meatballs the second they hold a microphone to the face of someone with any actual influence or power. They make a town that was always a fishbowl become less a fishbowl and more The Truman Show, where reality is manufactured and Truman is hundreds of thousands of Bills fans.

So how will they do? I suppose I should say, as this is called a “preview” post and I did talk about word usage earlier. The easy answer is I don’t have the slightest fucking clue as I watched 1.5 games last season but I think there’s more than enough out there in 2019 to give a reasonable look at the roster and attempt to peg their upcoming season. The defense is going to be pretty good- when McDermott isn’t in a prevent defense that hasn’t worked since the 40’s. The receivers are better but I wouldn’t say good. The line is better but I’d also not necessarily call them good. The backfield is old as shit and unless the drafted kid thrives or McCoy and Gore do a bros trip to Europe for some stem cells, they won’t save us. The inaccurate QB that can run well is still the inaccurate QB that can run well; I’ve watched and rooted for that guy before when it didn’t cost us two first round picks and people couldn’t stand him. I guess this inaccurate QB that can run well throws more picks but since he can throw them farther downfield I should be bullish about his development.

There’s little more I love than being right but I’d like to make this clear for the sake of clarity: I’d LOVE to be wrong far more when it comes to Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills. Maybe accuracy can be taught. Maybe you can go from Mountain West Honorable Mention to above average franchise QB. Maybe. If this happens I’ll own it; it’s more fun to be wrong and high fiving fellow fans at the Bills bar than it is to be right and spending Sunday napping because the season was lost in October. I’m really excited to watch Ed Oliver, the first draft pick I actually liked in years.

While we’re on the topic of truths, while most of my online followers and real-life friends know, I am a Bills fan. I’m looking right now at the hat I wore to work and shelled $40 out for last month. I have a Bills magnet on my car. I used a Bills koozie when visiting in-laws last weekend and will have Bills stuff on at least one of the days on our honeymoon at the end of the month. The fucked up thing is I won’t be surprised in the slightest if someone else is doing the same thing at the same resort in the Adriatic Sea. The Bills got me back with the fun season of 2014 after a decade of ambivalence and for better or worse as an ex-pat they serve as that symbol of where I am from. As we get older and dreams begin to die we cling tighter to those entities and symbols that have remained constant throughout your life as educational benchmarks approached, as jobs came and went and as people who mean the world to you come crashing into and then suddenly drift out of your life. As calculating and rational as one professes to be, there is a connection there that lingers in site of itself.

And yet it is hard to believe the Bills are for me anymore because they have mutated into something that is recognizable on the surface but underneath is filled with more carcinogens than the deepest wells Terry and Kim reaped their billions from. They are a symbol of all that is malignant and twisted about the world around us. They are a billion dollar gaslighting apparatus and shockingly, after decades of failure, a million sad simpletons throughout the region have bought in because the team makes them think that they’re part of something when they’re nothing more than pay pigs to a billionaire. This happened at astonishing speed with the assistance of those paid to talk and write about them. 

It makes me miss my grandfather, an actual blue collar fan who spent decades toiling away at Spaulding Fibre with a real lunch pail, watching and listening to the Bills every week from their inception. He would have smelled the shit and seen through the transparent yammerings of these rich interlopers before Beane and McDermott finished their first offseason. He would have been offended that these slick nobodies thought they could strut in here, talk about faith, culture and process and pretend to be one of them. He’d have seen through their cynical use of a fan dying from cancer to advance their status as a civic entity as opposed to a football team. He wanted a Super Bowl, not a mural for a Texan in a Mexican wrestling mask. He didn’t need to be part of “something special,” he had a family for that. He just wanted to see some fucking wins and know the team was working their best to do so.

That said, on a grand scale this era is about the death of community, the death of concern about your fellow man and woman. It’s about using the law to justify physical, financial and emotional horrors despite the fact that “the law” has quickly shown its fallibility as a human construct. It’s where wanting to make the world better and enriching those suffering has fallen out of favor under the guise of “personal responsibility.” It’s a world where people go to the trouble of running and winning election on the school board so they can tell parents they’ll have their kids taken away if they can’t afford to pay for their child’s lunch. It’s where every undeveloped piece of wild land on the continent is for sale, where Supreme Court seats are for sale, where the weak, shattered and lost are to be mocked, not healed. It’s an era where the Today show reviews bulletproof backpacks as if they were air fryers. It’s an era where sports are about everything other than and at the same time nothing but sports. It’s an era of committing the most unchristian acts in the name of Christianity, of monorail salesmen at all levels of government and an era where no one anywhere has the power, the money and the decency to bother fixing it.

It’s about desperation, desperation to save our waterways, our coastlines, save our ideals that were espoused by imperfect men and then twisted until those words were used to justify the exact opposite of their intention. Desperation to find that sense of community again, to find a group you can believe in, take pride in, believe you are making the world better with. It’s an era where literal, actual deaths are occurring daily at the hands of policies championed by millions of people who look just like you. It’s where we worship the powerful and vilify the powerless.
​
It’s an era where words and results don’t matter so long as you can contort yourself enough to appear to be for whatever your audience thinks is good and just at a given time. It’s an era made for failures to become kings, for cowards who project strength, for people who look not play the part, for style to replace substance and an attention to community that only embraces a caricature of community. THAT, is the Buffalo Bills “culture.” The tragedy is that this is the perfect and really only time for it.
​
Go Bills.

The Outlander

Dear Terry,

We’re okay on first names here right? I’m Matt, PSU Law ’09 (We are!). Anyways, you and your wife first came across my radar some nine years ago not for any Buffalo association or prospects regarding their two professional teams but because of your Penn State associations. I’d played intramural floor hockey there with a team of classmates, a collection of hockey fans of the Pens, Flyers, Islanders, Rangers, Flames and yes, the Sabres. We’d occasionally talk about how Penn State had the ideal student body to support a D1 hockey team and now here you were a year or so after graduation, fresh from cashing out on a lucrative career facilitated by Pennsylvania’s lack of environmental regulations to provide that. Your philanthropy at the time seemed to be a godsend that occasionally but not often happened from Nittany Lion alums and seemed tailored to us specifically. There was to be a cash bomb to hire the best staff, recruit the best players and most of all, provide a state of the art arena, a student section with bleachers as steep as the fire code would allow, an arena tailored to enhance crowd noise and intimidate schools steeped in tradition like Michigan and Minnesota. The facilities were to be the best for training, practicing and teaching the players the game.

And you delivered. The arena that bares your name has one of the loudest atmospheres in the collegiate game. The coach is fantastic. The players are not merely consistently good but they consistently find their way to NHL rosters. They were a game away from the Frozen Four five years into their existence and this year merely two goals away from another tournament berth. The team has provided an excuse for reunions with my friends that may not have otherwise happened so for that cash bomb I will always be thankful.

I’ve been a Sabres fan as long as I can remember. The nuances have been discussed here before but I think having an absent dad, raised by my grandfather and mom, plus the affordability, easier commute and less debaucherous atmosphere contributed to me going to Sabres games much more as a kid. I had my first girlfriend in 1999, attended game four by myself, game five the next year with my grandfather in the last game we’d attend together. I attended game one against the flyers in 2006 with my college sweetheart, graduated college on three hours sleep from the delirium of Pominville’s winner. So many wonderful moments of my life are intertwined with that franchise, a proud one that for their first forty years only missed the playoffs three years in a row once. Family, friends and times now long gone that can be remembered fondly with that team.

A couple months after the Penn State announcement your name started to be floated around regarding the Sabres. This was welcome for numerous reasons but at the core it was that we’d become discouraged as to the state of the franchise and what its purpose was. Ownership and management had made very clear back in 2007 that success was not worth paying above a certain amount. They took the best team in the league and languished, a team without its leadership, without a reliable backup goalie, narrowly missing the playoffs two years in a row. Sure, they followed that up with a division winner but even that team was missing something. We weren’t being unreasonable, we just had a standard. In ten years they’d made the Stanley cup finals once, been 20 minutes away from it again, won a president’s trophy, made another conference final and been some 77 seconds away from another one. To then take their foot off the gas, to try to cobble a couple seasons together with a mishmash of spare parts and vets wasn’t acceptable. We needed an owner to whom success wasn’t merely the easiest way to turn a profit, it was the entire point.

I listened to your press conference in the car, on the lonely eight-plus hour drive back to Barre, Vermont. After the press conference I listened to WGR the rest of the way back. In early 2011 I extremely did not have my shit together, sleeping on a mattress on the floor above an insane fundamentalist Christian family, listening to games on my phone while sitting in a camping chair playing video games, digging my car out from a new snowstorm every two weeks, drinking a bottle of wine or two a night. But listening to you wax poetic about the Sabres role in your life, your love for the French Connection, the sole purpose of existence being a title, the deprioritizing of profits in favor of bringing in the best and the brightest, it brought tears to my eyes and chills up my spine. Here was this unfathomably rich couple and somehow their connection to the team was the same as mine! These weren’t cold, calculating venture capitalists, this were people with an emotional connection to the team. I trudged in the snow to watch you be introduced before the Ottawa game, trudged to that same bar to watch the vast majority of games the rest of the way, having honest to god tears watching them run the clock out against Philly and then win it in overtime. Gutting game 6 and 7 aside, hockey was back and we couldn’t wait for more.

The local press was a bit unfair to you at the start weren’t they? Some were deeply condescending to Kim, others had this bizarre obsession with somehow tying you to the Penn State scandal, trying to follow the hockey program money as if it would end up in Sandusky’s legal fund. It was gross and upsetting to me both as an alum and as a Sabres fan; you’d made this amazing gesture with your money, rescued my favorite team from the dead and now some pencil neck like Mike Harrington or sausage neck like Bucky Gleason felt like taking potshots? Fuck that.

After narrowly missing the playoffs in 2012 you didn’t hesitate during a slow start in the lockout season to fire an icon in Lindy Ruff. This was fine, many of us thought the modern game had passed him by (despite his success with the modern game 05-07 and 09-11) and with the mid-aughts core slowly aging out of their prime it was time for a full reset. We were all on board with this; it showed you were paying attention as much as the fans, were frustrated along with the fans and unlike the fans, had the power to make clear that the fans deserved better. We knew things might get ugly. We were still with you.

When Ralph Wilson died five years back I actually thought it was unfair and unappreciative for fans and media to run to you and urge/question whether you would buy them. After all, you were a hockey guy. You’d kept the hockey team here, pumped it full of cash, given the sign off to chase the best and most expensive coaches and free agents, and here were all these Bills-first pissants whining about the Bills leaving. While I’m certainly a Bills fan, my thought was Ralph was the one who left this open-ended and if Rogers was going to swoop in, pay a nominal penalty and move the team out in 2022, lying about viability and stadium requirements while setting things in motion in Toronto, so be it. I wrote about life without the Bills, about downgrading to something with lower stakes like a CFL franchise, picturing summer Friday nights with open air tailgates and a big rivalry with Hamilton. After fifteen years of failure it seemed frankly a little quaint.

The point was you didn’t have to buy them, nothing you’d ever said led anyone to believe you would buy them, and besides your interest in the NFL seemed passive anyways. That said, I was ecstatic when you came out of nowhere with your offer and blew Toronto and some television blowhard away. Both teams were safe and that was because of your finances. Despite the last place Sabres finish the previous year there was a plan. They grabbed the best offensive prospect in Sam Reinhart and word was there were two kids coming out the following year that could change the trajectory of whoever was lucky enough to draft them. I was sold.

It’s been five years. I guess the only thing that’s up in the air now is to ask which one is it? Were you lying to us in 2011, or did your priorities, your expectations, your goals for this club change? It’s either one or the other. Whichever one it is begs the simple follow up question, why?

Last season was the most disappointing season in franchise history, at least comparing expectations to results. The team had shown growth under Bylsma, albeit slow growth hampered with a few big whiffs by the general manager. You had your core but development was too slow. This highly touted Nashville assistant and former star was to get things on track. What happened was the team fell off the cliff; the season was dead by Halloween, they finished worst in the league yet again. It was baldly obvious that this coach was not the answer- you can’t improve in skill and get worse. The time for losing was over and while Dahlin was a hell of a silver lining, at some point wins have to be expected. To me and many fans, the 17-18 performance could not have shown more clearly that Phil Housley’s vision was not cut out for this league, at least as a head coach. Your reaction was to do nothing.

During this time you’ve been quite busy. You tag along on college pro days, you follow the Bills GM and coaches around to meetings, you acquire massive swaths of property throughout Buffalo for presumably a modern NFL stadium. You pop up in the New York Times on owner transcripts, fretting about the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, calling Anquan Boldin by the wrong name, complaining about sponsorship issues with the hockey team (which had been at the bottom of the league for several years by this point). You’re there in the locker room in Miami when they break the playoff drought with the third coach of your short tenure. It would appear that you’re obviously smitten with the level of influence financially and otherwise that comes with being part of the NFL owners club. It would appear that you’ve realized it is this the real ticket to gaining more property and business influence in Western New York and otherwise. Of course, when we all met you eight years ago we didn’t think that real estate, business development or influence were your goals. We didn’t just assume that- you told us explicitly, in probably the clearest press conference you’ve ever given in your life. So did you lie? Or did you just change?

It’s hard to describe the damage that these Sabres seasons have done to the fanbase, to the discourse, to the actual love of hockey in the region. Last year for the first time I canceled my hockey package, before Thanksgiving; the prospect of spending three hours feeling sad or angry didn’t appeal to me, not in a world such as today’s with children being kept in modern concentration camps, mothers, fathers ripped out of hospitals, courtrooms, car accidents and shipped to countries they’ve never set foot in. Mass shootings of students, movie buffs, concert goers, night club attendees, churchgoers. A world that we know will be worse for our children than it is for us and will likely be worse for our grandkids than it is for our kids. This year I canceled it just after Valentine’s Day.

Something that was once nearly as much of my identity as my loved ones (what I wouldn’t have done to have had gamecenter as an option as a 1L in 2006-07) was for the first time not worth my time. Did you notice any of this a year ago? Did you follow the season? Did you see the empty seats, hear the silent, discouraged crowd? Did you hear about the collapse of the secondary market, people unwilling to pay $10 to take in that team?  How many listless performances did you watch? I ask because you sold yourself as a die-hard Sabres fan, a lifelong Sabres fan, a fan desperate to bring a Stanley Cup nay, multiple Stanley Cups. Certainly you had to have watched, had to have solicited viewpoints not just from your employees but from the fans, from the media. Surely you must have listened to WGR once in a while, read The Buffalo News recapping yet another dreary night on Washington Street. Surely you must have heard from your accountants about the failure of the World Juniors, been surprised since that had been such a boon for the economy and fanbase back in 2010. Surely you must have heard about season ticket figures. Surely you knew one year ago that things were dire.

So did you lie? Or did you just change?

After hitting on Dahlin and getting Skinner I don’t think it was unreasonable for anyone to demand a competitive team. While I thought I may have skewed close to unreasonable- I wanted meaningful March hockey and 5 points or less from the playoffs- it seemed everyone was at least demanding improvement-marked improvement- from such a disappointment. After the opener I was prepared to cut my subscription in the first month of the season but a funny thing started happening- they looked competent.

It’s hard to describe the win streak aside from just so needed. It was the month before my wedding, they demolished Ottawa during my stag and despite a loss the next day didn’t lose until my parents were at our place putting together gift bags the night before heading to the venue. Once again I was screaming, jumping off my couch, wearing my jerseys and gear out to the bars, blasting DJ Kool when it came on in my car. Were they back?

When it ended they were in first place and honestly anything but a total collapse would result not just in meaningful March hockey but a playoff berth for the first time since you came into the picture all those years ago. They’d have their first fifty goal scorer since I was a kid. They may not have the depth to roll through the playoffs, they may be unpolished and a little young but a message was going to be sent to Boston, Montreal and most of all Toronto that the Sabres were going to need to be considered moving forward. When we moved at the start of 2019 I had early April pegged for my first trip home centered around a party in the plaza, showing my wife over four years after we met just why I was celebrating those losses the first weeks of our courtship, taking in playoff hockey not as a student or as a flailing entry level employee desperately trying to find his way, but as a happy newlywed whose career had finally carved a path of modest comfort. The Sabres had always been there and I was going to be there for them.

Not only did this not happen, everyone involved in managing the team and everyone in charge of overseeing that management did nothing. As the team clung to their playoff spot, the shortcomings and holes obvious, your General Manager did nothing. When he made call-ups, your coach- whose wife’s doomed senate campaign you eagerly opened your checkbook for- refused to play them outright or played them with his boat anchors. As they sunk in the standings these same two men refused to take action. The things their very job descriptions call for- building a roster and implementing winning strategy- did not take place. By the time a trade was made they were fading from contention and the coach never modified any of his philosophies even as his players proved they needed to be changed.

Did you ever dive into the facts and figures of this season? Did you ever watch and notice how the coach played his worst players immediately after scoring goals? Did you then notice that they had a problem with immediately surrendering goals after scoring, killing their momentum? Did you notice he had the same tendency to do this in the closing minutes of periods and games and that it elicited similar problems? Did you follow the fact that when he was called up Pilut immediately looked like the second best defenseman on the roster? Did you notice the coach greeted that revelation with ping ponging him between the ice and press box, eventually adding Rochester into the mix? Did you notice goalies were decided based on results, not performance? Did you notice the dismay of the fans? Did you feel frustration when the coach would bring out the same tired platitudes about effort, about chances? Did you hear your GM talk about this season as a success merely because it was better than the previous season? Did you watch as your new star went from a shoo-in for fifty to not even reaching forty? Have you noticed your GM has failed to sign that star long-term? Certainly a die-hard, lifelong fan would feel dismay, anger at the coach and GM standing idly by as the season drifts off the road and then off the cliff. All the ones I know sure did.

So did you lie? Or did you just change?

Last week, you granted a rare interview. Symbolically Arizona could have been a trillion miles from Buffalo where the hockey team was going through yet another listless performance in what would end up being a two-win March. You were asked about your team, this team you have loved since you were a young man, this team you supposedly went to see with your wife the day after your wedding. This team for which nothing but a Stanley Cup was once the goal but who had not sniffed the playoffs in seven years. Certainly this was unacceptable. No one expected you to fire folks over the television but certainly you empathized and shared the frustration of your fellow fans?

Instead, you lauded Housley’s playing days, days that ended before one generation of fans entered school and before the newest generation of fans was even born. You called him a young coach which I assume referred to his coaching career and not his actual age. You said the team was young, that they would grow despite the fact that the team isn’t that young anymore. You deferred to your GM, the same one who refused to call for help when the ship was sinking, alluded to the coach being safe, saying things needed to change but you “didn’t know what.” You made vague statements about Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s and the New England Patriots that alluded to the importance of continuity. For the first time you sounded like what you are, an aloof owner whose team is simply not a priority. You were busy, busy talking up a new football stadium and gearing up for the fights that will bring. You wanted to tag along with Brandon Beane, talk shop, you seemed like the hockey team was literally the last thing you wanted to discuss. It was a long way from “where’s Perreault?”

There can no longer be any debate that these are the darkest days in the history of the franchise. The roster is stocked with exponentially more talent than it was five years ago but their performance has not improved. No one associated with the team has had the temerity to say that this is not acceptable. That in itself is unfathomable based on the franchise’s first forty seasons or based on the path taken in 2013. This is a zombie franchise far more under your watch than it ever was under the watch of hucksters like Golisano or criminals like the Rigas family. Frankly, you seem over their failures as much as fans who have checked out. You have more positive things to do than worry about your hockey team! You can talk up Josh Allen, your coach everyone seems to love, the new signings. You can talk about property development and growth in the canalside area.

Meanwhile your hockey management team seems to have picked up the “culture” and “process” buzzwords in a vain attempt to spin the massive failure of the past two seasons as things just going according to plan. The hockey-first fans don’t buy it of course as they aren’t rubes like the football-first crowd but that matters little, right?

I’m not sure you realized when you presented yourself as a die-hard, lifelong fan how many people actually met that description. I’m not sure you realized how many Buffalonians, spread all over the continent, settled in on their couches three times a week, six months a year to watch the hockey team. I’m not sure you realized how many fans devour stats and performance metrics of your team, how many can easily discover that excuses provided by the coach failed to hold water. I’m not sure you understood what was happening in the city in November, what was happening over Thanksgiving weekend as a region and a fanbase dared to dream the darkness was over. I know you don’t understand how it felt the weeks and months after that, as the team and those leading it plunged themselves and us along with them right back into the abyss, the light gone again. As the season ends that light disappears permanently for another group of fans who say “no more,” leaving fewer of us to attempt to muster another season of hope, recycling memories long gone and not knowing if those memories are strong enough to make it through another winter, a car battery on its last legs. The legions who will sign on to be disappointed, embarrassed, patronized will dwindle yet again, leaving fewer of us to muster yet another season, pilot lights barely flickering, ready to be extinguished before the first snowfall.

Did you lie? Or did you just change?

You are the worst case scenario. You are so far removed from what you presented to the world in early 2011 that anyone predicting this back then would have been dismissed immediately as not just a pessimist, but an idiot. I defended the manner through which you obtained your riches to my more woke friends because to me you were no different than a close friend I disagreed with over taxes or guns. You were a Sabres fan goddammit and so long as you were working to bring a cup to Buffalo then I couldn’t give a shit as to how you made your money. I warned people five years ago that you didn’t owe the city anything more, you didn’t need to open your pocketbook for the football team because Ralph made the bed and after all you weren’t even a football guy! As people fretted over the hiring of poor coaches I told my friends something like “you don’t get to be that successful without knowing to kick people out when they aren’t doing their job.” Turns out I was the idiot.

Your reign has created an atmosphere where something as exciting and big as the Frozen Four is coming to your arena and no one cares to go. It’s not merely their love for the team that is suffering, it is their love for the sport. If you are concerned about continuity in coaching, if you are concerned with your reputation in the league, let me assure you that every minute that passes with Phil Housley in charge of that team only makes it worse. You know what’s worse than firing people willy-nilly every 18 months? Keeping the worst coach in franchise history because you’re afraid of your image. That’s what cowards do and that’s what people who ultimately do not care about the success of their franchise do. You have taken a franchise that for people of a certain age holds far more of a connection and brings up far more fond memories than the football team and you have effectively watched it slowly die. You’re nothing more than a 19th century British MP watching the Great Famine unfold and brushing it off because after all, there’s stadium blueprints and a football draft coming up.

I watched No Goal in ninth grade at the house of a friend who would nearly 20 years later be my best man. After the shock- and being unaware of the conflagration whipping up over the goal call- I hopped on my bike to go home. I remember saying to myself that it was okay, they’ll just win it all next year. I said something similar to myself in 2000, in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011. Failure is a part of every aspect of life and sports are of course no different; being a Buffalo fan has always made that clear. I’ve only grown stronger in my appreciation for my fellow fans and those who we share these experiences with.

What has also become clear as I’ve grown from a 15 year old to a 35 year old is that powerful people lie. They lie to get what they want, they lie to avoid questions or scrutiny, they lie because they can. I’m not sure if you lied because the Sabres were your way in, I’m not sure if you lied because you felt it would ease the scrutiny from media, I’m not sure if you lied because you just wanted to be the hero. But I know this:

You lied.

The Outlander

Rarely does a result go from one inevitable conclusion to an opposite yet still inevitable conclusion. One minute I was penning a post preaching the ultimate palatability of the CFL as a replacement for the Bills and the next minute the very idea was laughable. One minute the Bills were gone, the next minute they weren’t. To be a man so powerful that your mere presence tips the scales of a billion-dollar entity firmly from one column to another, rendering the presence of the other billionaires and media conglomerates impotent in your wake, is a power that I simply cannot fathom. To have the ability, the determination, and more importantly the closing speed to shape the future of a metropolitan area in a way that politicians are unable and entrepreneurs ultimately lack the vision, the benevolence, or as one of the Toronto columnists put it last week, the craziness to do themselves for so many years. Terry Pegula is a force of nature that, if drawn up in a hypothetical five years ago would have been the only way for both teams to have long term security in Buffalo and would have dismissed out of hand as being too absurd, to pie-in-the-sky, too batshit insane to ever actually emerge.

And then, once he did emerge, once we were aware of his intentions, once he sold one of lord knows how many billion-dollar tracts of land that he owns, the endgame was already written, the Buffalo Bills wouldn’t be going to LA, San Antonio, Toronto, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. In the end Terry Pegula is the only person that will allow the Ralph C. Wilson truthers to blather on about how he was really the foundation of this franchise’s future in Buffalo and not get laughed out of the room. In the end Terry Pegula saved Ralph Wilson’s legacy, perhaps collaterally but fully and completely. Once Pegula Sports and Entertainment conveyed their interest to get involved we could have packed up shop, except we can’t do that; this come-from-ahead defeatism eventually gets so ingrained that we refuse to accept the inevitability of success- at least until we can confirm the oasis is not another mirage.

What strikes me most at a time the guy is about to plop around a billion and a half to participate in a crooked, malicious league, is that Terry Pegula is ultimately a bigger person than most of us. I don’t mean his spending power - this is unrelated to how he accumulated that wealth over the years - but the ultimate decision that this was how he wanted to use his money. In the three years since solidifying the Sabres' future and redefining the parameters of success (“just break even,” anyone?), as well as the dedication to win at all costs, he has received an almost constant deluge of tar and feather from the boobs who work a couple buildings down on Washington Street and who demanded he answer about the Penn State scandal as if he was an accessory; who turned his folksy demeanor against him as if he were campaigning for office; who used the hesitancy to clean house to paint him as out of his element, as Mr. Magoo, as incompetent and star-struck; and who convinced a not-insignificant amount (mostly those decrepit enough to prefer their morning paper to turning on a computer) to feel the same way. Despite the most talent-rich prospect pipeline in the league, the losses by the parent club made things like “hockey heaven” something to be used ironically only.

Why I disregarded Pegula for the Bills was simple; I could not fathom a man who would not be so overcome with resentment, regret and anger at those involved that they would even consider doing something like that again. I couldn’t believe that he would get tossed in boiling water for three years and then say “is that burner up all the way?” I found it inexplicable that he would invite more criticism, take more control, that this guy would spend his fortune to make himself the head honcho of one of the most cursed sports cities on the Continent. That is a coolness, an inner calm, a confidence and ultimately a set of stones of a size that I cannot fathom. Western New York is Terrytown, Pegulaville, whatever you want to call it, aand what makes me happy is to know the man wants it just like that. He really would rather be nowhere else but right here, right now.

In the end, the only people who said this wasn’t inevitable were those who get paid by reporting drama. In the end all the noise was coming from only those who could advance their career, pump their byline, attempt to cry and scream just enough to keep enough people tuned in, enough people clicking their links. This was the 2012 Presidential Election; it was never close but until the results were in you could bet your ass everyone paid to write or talk about it was going to make it seem close. The only mistake Tim Graham made throughout this process was what he would probably peg as his finest hour, when he “broke” the “news” that the Bon Jovi had contacted Jim Kelly to form some sort of supergroup. It’s laughable in hindsight and unprofessional in ways that should probably be laid out. First, he used Kelly’s frailty to paint a narrative where the MLSE group was going to use Buffalo’s hero to facilitate moving the team, which was a pretty dick move to Kelly and his family, and then he reported it without confirming- or disclosing- the result of the “meeting.” He managed to make everyone crazy and then the following day reported “just kidding, the meeting didn’t go anywhere.” Either he 1) didn’t know what was said and reported a story without knowing its full scope, or 2) knew what was said and chose to report half of it in order to get clicks. So is he dumb or unprofessional? Well, his writing is too good to be the former so let’s assume the latter.

In the end though, the unprofessional antics of The Buffalo News have simply served to marginalize them further. In a world where relevant Sabres news is broken by TSN, The Hockey News or even a newspaper in Ottawa, TBN can be ensured their relegation to minor outlet for sports news is complete. Sure, the hit pieces will continue but when your swings barely reach the ankles of your target, exactly what kind of damage can you expect to inflict? They can continue to cry about the owner’s availability because quite simply Pegula has shown he doesn’t need them, he can create his goodwill with actions, not words. They can lament that the new owner refuses to play ball like the previous one considering the previous one created the bidding circus that allowed them to act relevant for a few months longer. In the end though, the ultimate end of The Buffalo News as a viable sports reporting entity makes the rest of Western New York media stronger.

2014 has sucked. I mean not so much for me personally what with this move to Maryland, but for the country, the world, the human race generally. Between Ferguson, the Malaysia Airlines flights, Russia trying to start a new war, ISIS, war crimes in Israel and Palestine, Ebola, the continued disintegration of political influence and freedoms for average Americans while the power of the state and the corporate entity continues to grow, it’s been a really shitty year (seriously I just ran those off from memory, what a fucking mess). I wasn’t alive in 1968 but from reading about it over the years 2014 seems the closest to ’68 that has occurred in my lifetime. We’re at war- STILL- and not sure what “winning” can ever look like. Race- well let’s just not even delve into it, police facing off against unarmed civilians like some post-apocalyptic film, and unrest throughout Europe caused by Russia being wildly antagonistic. Aside from the political assassinations of ’68 we really seem to have it all.

It’s been said that 1968 was saved by Apollo 8, the first manned flight to orbit the moon. It came at Christmas that year and allowed everyone to celebrate something, to remember that sometimes good things happen. The purchase of a silly football team cannot replicate that on the same scale, but regardless of our thoughts about Israel’s role, or what to do about ISIS, or whether police have too much power, what we have today is something we can all get behind, celebrate, support, something none of us could have imagined only several short years ago. We deserve it, and while the rest of the world may continue to come apart at the seams, this is our time to forget about all that shit and dance.

What now? Well there will be more than enough time for that because the Bills future is in perpetuity, it is not defined as six years of us sadly sipping blue lights outside trash can fires at the Ralph as our team inches closer to departure. The future is defined in whatever fashion we wish to do so and there will be plenty of time to call for Russ Brandon’s firing into Venus, where he will be flattened into nothing by its heavy atmosphere (I, for one, am eager to know exactly what role Brandon had in this sale, specifically to determine whether my suspicion - that he was the MLSE/Rogers man on the inside, setting the dominoes up just so in exchange for running Toronto’s NFL franchise, deciding to jump aboard what he felt was the winning team once Ralph’s health began to decline - is accurate). There will be plenty of debate as to the fates of the other lame ducks wandering the halls at One Bills Drive, of how best to end the playoff drought, of how best to move the franchise forward. That’s the fun part, though; no more “I just want them to stay,” no more fretting about whether or not the population drain means we can’t be “big time,” no more using sports to drive our regional insecurities. They are staying, and now we can just be fans, which is something we haven't been allowed to be in, well, arguably ever in this town.

Now comes the fun part, just wanting them to win. Thank you Terry. Thank you Kim. Let’s go Bills.

The Defenseman

Look.

I know there is going to have to be some compromise on my part during this entire sale process. I have no control over the Buffalo Bills in any fashion. I can simply choose to watch and care. Nothing is up to me. All I can do is decide if I want them to be an important part of my life or not.

The community of friends I have built around the team and how I interact with them make distancing myself from the franchise problematic. I’m a long way from home. Sports keeps a line open to all of the friends I’ve made. Sports is how I made them in the first place. I’m kind of a flake. It isn’t easy to make friends when you think every single person around you thinks you’re a flake. Sports act as the crutch I sometimes need to interact with people like a normal human being. Hang out in a crowd. Lob a few jokes around. People laugh. Suddenly they are talking to you. Did you just make a friend by talking about how bad Tim Connolly is? Sports!

This is the existential dilemma of sports. For it to exist properly, we must have an emotional connection to the enterprise. For it to be a success for all involved, you are going to have to maintain a rooting interest in the players or the team in your immediate geographic vicinity. Sports can be like theater, and ain’t nobody staying to watch a stage play where everyone is an asshole to you. So you buy in. You find people to like, maybe even love. We love the things they do and how they do it in dramatic fashion. We ride the emotional ride with them through all of the highs and lows. And we have no control.

Where sports and theatre diverge is how much our sports organizations demand our allegiance. Do people wear Irish Classical Theatre jerseys? Is there a Shea’s Mafia? Do we ascribe our self-worth as an audience to a review of the latest performance of Waiting for Godot? Is somebody calling in WGR with all manner of hot takes on that last monologue or aside? Theatre asks for our love in different ways. They’d like for you to be there, be a polite audience, and maybe help out when they need money for renovations.

Professional sport walks into your life and holds you at gunpoint. It is our childhood time killers hijacked by men with long mustaches, top hats and capes. We take something that has brought us immense joy in our lives and give responsibility for it to the wealthiest in our society – those who are the furthest from us in class, empathy, humility, and civics. If you don’t like a little politics in your sports, you can stop reading now. Go in peace. 

Back from the dead, The Scizz joins The Barrister for some delightful conversation wherein the pair take endless potshots at everyone, talk about the pitiful Buffalo hockey club, ponder Donald Trump and the meaning of life, and discuss the Wayans brothers. And other stuff probably. 

Music from The Jambrones, LCD Soundsytem, Pearl Jam, and Electric Guest



Download here or here. RSS feed here. iTunes button below. Streaming player below. Protect ya neck.

The Barrister

FOR. FUCK'S. SAKE.

I don't subscribe to the Sabres email list - this email was sent to people who do, and the homie @Mechaphil tweeted it and has told me that he believes this is the first instance of any such emails while he's been signed up on this list for the last 6 or 7 years - but if I did, I would expect some degree of care and respect and, I don't know, not this fucking garbage. This email is (a) not hockey-related, (b) not Sabres-related, and (c) bullshit. 

Hockey Heaven this is not, assholes. 

This is a fundamentally asinine and abusive use of fan interest to increase revenue by a team that deserves far less fan interest than it currently gets. This is the Third Jersey of emails. This is the Big John shirsey of emails.  This is the Terry Pegula of emails.  

Monty Python would write sketches about stupid shit like this and we'd all laugh and it would be grand but instead THIS REALLY HAPPENED AND CHRIST YOU ARE AN AWFUL FRANCHISE.

When people ask me why DGWU Sports has basically become a soccer-and-soon-baseball website, at least until the Bills get going again, this is now going to the top of the list. This is inexplicable. 

You're now worse than the Bills, in almost every way. Congratulations. You did it.

Mr. Pegula, you've purchased a local hockey team that ought to be held in public trust, with community ideals held as sacred, and fan faith and love and interest cherished above all else.  Instead, not only do you not win, and not only do you show scarce signs that you have any fucking clue how to win, and not only do you miss the mark with team marketing more often than you hit it, but now this. It's so fucking easy to not be the corporate behemoth that treats its fan base as money trees to be slaughtered and left to waste, but I guess it's also equally easy to do exactly that.

We shouldn't be surprised. You've made your billions by raping the environment, and now decide to dig wells into your fan base, rip cracks into the foundation of a city's love for its team, and take whatever you can straight to the bank.  We don't even really know how inept the organization is, but we see signs enough to make us fear the worst. We ignore those signs out of little else than fear that these past 10 years might actually be the glory years when we're looking at the first pick in the 2035 NHL Draft, the Presidents Trophy and Divisional banners looking just as lonely as they do now.

I fucking love the Buffalo Sabres. But, as surely as I do, I hate the people insistent on ruining it. 

Fan goodwill is forfeit, you money-grubbing pieces of shit. If you wanted my attention, you've gotten it. Hell, maybe this will be a Sabres site again. I guess I was probably waiting for something like this.... maybe now I'll come here much more often to talk about how much I loathe you vile sacks of excrement parading as Buffalo's next generation of revitalization heroes.

Fuck you.

Back with actual Buffalo sports talk in a Dear God Why Us? Sports podcast, The Barrister, The Outlander and The Commander form a critical mass of the Deeg and break down what happened with the Sabres over the last few days. Good God, it was messy and beautiful and let's do it again soon.

Musical interludes by way of The Jambrones, The Mooney Suzuki, Talib Kweli, Architecture in Helsinki and Basement Jaxx. Throw your hands up.


Download here or here. Stream below. Subscribe via iTunes below. Subscribe via RSS here. Do your thing the way you want it. 

I really didn't know when I was going to write another post here. The Red Sox season- while for me magical and enthralling- has been described in many different publications and blogs by many different writers than myself in much more satisfying ways. Not to mention our readership's approval rating of the Red Sox has got to be hovering in the same ballpark as Congress' and I don't need to put something out exhalting my joy just for all you to shit all over it. 

You're not my real dad dammit.

As for our local teams, up until about 9:15 this morning, what could really be said? Our Bills weekly previews and reviews capture this season's varying degrees of optimism and hopelessness, especially now that we just got clocked with the 2x4 of reality watching the Pittsburgh game. The best Sabres forward of the past fifteen years got traded and the team has embarked on a journey that many fan bases have endured but virtually no one who has ever watched this team has had to witness: the laughingstock year. The year of catching shit from every friend or coworker who roots for other teams or generally enjoys the despair of others; the season of watching them in numb resignation, too indifferent to yell at the television, not because the team didn't look terrible but because you knew that they simply couldn't do any better. They're a cast of guys who may be perfectly likable and able to contribute to the right team (except Stafford, fuck him), but to watch them skate around for two and a half hours chasing their own tail just simply wasn't a good use of our time. 

The constant theme to make us want to tear our hair out- those of you with any considerable remaining scraps anyways- was the decision-making of the coach regarding lines, scratches and ice time, really the only things that a coach does that are pretty easy and straightforward. A coach watches the players and puts the best ones on the ice, with the most offensively skilled players matching up with others of their like. It's literally the only thing that someone playing NHL '14 can do as well as a real coach. And somehow, someway, this team managed to place a man in this position who could not even be passable at this task. These are not mistakes - as Doug Marrone, for instance, freely admits to making when they appear - it was a failure of philosophy; a flaw in Ron Rolston's hockey DNA that poisoned the entire franchise in a matter of months and has at the very least set back the development of young talent and possibly derailed it permanently. It's easy to not care about who wears the "C" when they're in the rightfully earned position for their skill set. It is much harder to ignore when that same player is being double shifted in the third period of a game you're being outshot by thirty.

So where did this get us, or me more specifically? I was offered tickets to last night's game and had not even the slightest bit of interest because there was a UB FOOTBALL game on television. Tickets were hovering in the low teens and I didn't even consider heading down to the FNC to take in the carnage. The overhead of attending a game (traffic, new security measures, parking, a late bedtime on a weeknight) had become too much to see what has been my favorite local team since well before I was a teenager. I've spent thirty bucks on weeknights just to yell at Patrick Lalime about how much he sucks, but I could no longer be bothered. A 3-7 Bills team appeared light years ahead of their NHL counterpart and it wasn't close. Any optimism for the future, be it trades, draft picks or free agents could be dismissed simply by mentioning those who were in charge of acquiring talent and developing talent. I am confident in saying there has not been as dark a time regarding the cumulative future of our professional teams, and while the Bills have had bright spots in the midst of an objectively dismal record, what did we have to look forward to regarding the hockey team? The jersey retirement of a guy who hasn't played for them in a dozen years? The failure of the young kids to ultimately develop and trigger the long overdue firing of Rolston some three years down the road? The hope that maybe the third time the seemingly immovable General Manager failed at rebuilding a team from the ground up, it would be his curtain call? 

Over six years removed from their last playoff series victory that distant hope for the future was too far off for many, including myself.

The Deeg


News happened yesterday. We blew the conch, gathered, and produced this. Enjoy.


Music by, well, I won't ruin the surprise. You're welcome.

Download here or here. Stream below. Subscribe via iTunes below or RSS here.