Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Unique to the NFL season, of all the major sports, is the "weird day". Because everyone plays on the same day (except for the Monday night teams), whenever the weirdness all hits in a single day, it's more notable than in the other sports.

:: I'm not surprised that the Bills lost to the Chiefs. Arrowhead Stadium is a very hard place to play, if you're the visitor, for which reason I've become used to seeing me beloved Bills go in there and get clobbered. It used to be a yearly ritual in the Jim Kelly years, when the Bills were pounding everyone on the way to the Super Bowl, they would at some point in the regular season go to Kansas City and get beat 30-3 or something like that. So the Bills lost. But there were a ton of surprising aspects to the way they lost.

First, the game featured two of the league's highest scoring offenses matching up porous opposing defenses. That the margin of victory was a single point didn't surprise me. That the two teams combined for only 33 points did. In his "Two Minute Drill" this weekend, Chris Berman suggested a final score of 67-66, or something like that. So, 17-16 was something of a shock.

Despite the loss, this was probably the best job of coaching I have seen done by the Bills' staff. The game plan was perfectly devised: execute a ball-control offensive scheme, which would keep the Chiefs' firepower-laden offense off the field and thus keep the crowd quiet. On defense, the Bills brought a new focus on -- gasp! -- tackling, which paid off rather well. (Of course, I have to wonder why, if the Bills can evidently play this well defensively against a scoring machine on the road, they therefore got crunched against a less-high powered offense at home two weeks ago.) It would still be nice to see the Bills generate some more pressure on the opposing quarterbacks, and it would be really nice if the Bills' DBs could actually come up with the ball sometimes when it's going through their hands or bouncing off their chests. I counted three possible interceptions that the Bills didn't reel in yesterday, in a game where a turnover could make the difference...

...as it did in the end, when Drew Bledsoe threw a fateful interception with four minutes left, killing the Bills' drive for the potential game-winning score. (They were only down by one, remember; all they needed was a field goal, and the crucial INT took place very near the end zone, if not inside it.) The Bills have played a bunch of games this year that were won by a great Bledsoe play. This one, sadly, is the first which they lost because of a bad Bledsoe play. Oh well.

So now the Bills are 5-5, and 1-2 in the AFC East. I hate to be a nay-sayer, but I think their playoff hopes are barely flickering. I see them splitting the six games that are left, to finish 8-8.

:: If you want to see "parity", look at today's NFL standings. Seventeen of the NFL's thirty-two teams have between four and six wins, with all the teams (except St. Louis and Chicago, tonight's teams) having played ten games. Seven teams have won seven or more, and only two have won two or fewer. Two divisions -- the AFCs East and West -- have all their teams at or above .500. Only one division leader -- Green Bay -- is running away with its division, and they are still by no means a lock for home-field advantage. That's what you call, "competitive balance". I actually prefer it this way.

:: I think that the football gods have been looking down upon me as I've been tracking the progress of my Super Bowl picks, the Eagles and the Steelers, and they've been shaking their heads and saying, "He just isn't getting it." So they decided to make it crystal clear yesterday, by taking out both teams' starting quarterbacks with bad injuries. Maybe Kordell Stewart can find his on-again, off-again form and get the Steelers back into the playoffs (assuming that Tommy Maddox doesn't come back for a while), but I wouldn't bet on Koy Detmer being the answer in Philly. Here's hoping, though, that Maddox's injury is not serious, and here's toasting Donovan McNabb's heart for playing the entire game with his broken ankle. Wow.

:: I think that the best Super Bowl matchup right now would be the Jets and the Rams, both teams who are in the hunt after being almost certainly dead-in-the-water just three weeks ago.