Things I've Never Seen Before

I didn't watch much of yesterday's football contest between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Shitty Bills, but I did catch the last four minutes and quite a few highlights on the teevee. I saw something I swear has never happened before: Drew Bledsoe, whose mobility has in the past been compared unfavorably to that of Michelangelo's David, actually spun to avoid a pass-rusher and then took off with the ball, picking up something like 18 yards.

Musta been something in the water.

The ShiBills won the game, 22-17, and from what I've heard, it wasn't even that close. The ShiBills gave Willis McGahee thirty-seven carries, which was supremely refreshing to me after all those close games they lost over the last few years in which they'd run the ball, maybe, twenty or twenty-five times, tops. Bledsoe completed over fifty percent of his passes, he threw zero interceptions, and he wasn't sacked. Let me say that again: Bledsoe wasn't sacked, and he wasn't sacked for the second consecutive game. Wow.

Of course, this was a home game, but it was still against a good team, and the team's two wins in a row means that they are halfway to no longer being dubbed the Shitty Bills, or ShiBills for short, in this space. All they have to do is beat the New England Stupid Patriots on Sunday night, at Foxboro...yeah, that will happen. Right.

And like any good Bills fan I am able to find a dark lining to the silver cloud of yesterday. All through the late 1990s, the Bills organization would enter the year with an inadequate offensive line; but the line would start to produce fairly competently sometime in the middle or the latter part of the year, and the Bills would take this to mean that the O-line was doing fine, and thus bring in no one to upgrade the personnel in the off-season. I'm afraid the Bills may fall into this trap again. The team really really really needs to bring in at least one quality O-lineman for next year.

And finally, there was the incredibly stupid call to blitz the Jets near the end of the game on third-and-eight. Why you blitz in that situation is beyond me, especially since Jets QB Quincy Carter threw a 51-yard touchdown pass to Santana Moss. That made the game closer than it should have been. Ick. The blitz is the most over-used weapon in the football arsenal.

That's all for this week. I didn't pay much attention to football yesterday, except that I did watch a bit of the StuPats visiting the Rams. Man, is Mike Martz a bad coach. Wow.