Suckiest Sucks, Revisited....

I wasn't going to babble more about the Bills' blowout loss last night, but I notice now that since I wrote the post last night in which I mentioned Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan's constant harping that the Bills do not have an elite defense, he went and wrote his entire column in this morning's paper on the non-elite defense.

Now, I'm not about to claim that the Bills played a good game last night on defense, because they didn't. Their pass-rush, which I'm complaining about on a weekly basis, was abyssmal last night, failing to apply pressure to Trent Green even when they sent seven men across the line. They gave up 38 points and 375 yards, they had no sacks and they created no turnovers. That's bad. But Sullivan seems to want to put the entire blame on the defensive unit. As he writes:

But you can't blame the offense for this one. The Bills moved the ball well at times. Travis Henry ran for 124 yards on 22 carries. He might actually have scored a TD if Gilbride had the sense to run on second-and-goal from the 2. Henry ran for 87 yards after halftime. Too bad the game was already decided.

The Bills had to follow a simple blueprint to win. Run and stop the run. They ran OK. The only thing they stopped was any talk that Buffalo has one of the NFL's top defenses.

I can't blame the offense for this one? Really? The offense that scored three points in the entire game, with the team's other two points coming on a blocked punt in the end zone for a safety? The offense that, despite averaging 5.1 yards per carry against a team that everyone knew was susceptible to the run, only ran 26 times? The offense that only handed off to its Pro-Bowl running back, Travis Henry, nine times in the first half? The offense that turned the ball over seven times, with three of the resulting Kansas City drives resulting in points scored? The offense that went pass-wacky at all the wrong times, just as it has so often in this season? I can't blame that offense for this game, Jerry? Please.

This game as a total-team effort. The Bills blew this game in all phases. Let's not pretend it was a defensive melt-down, because it wasn't.