Sh-boom, sh-boom --

A while back I suffered a fit of Football Fan's Anger after a loss by the Buffalo Bills, which led me to re-dub them "the Buffalo Shitty Bills", or ShiBills for short. Now, it's pretty rare for me to suffer a fit of Football Fan's Anger (FFA, for short), since my view is generally that thinking about football is best done on Sunday afternoons, Monday mornings at work when you catch up with the coworkers who are fans, and possibly Monday nights, if the Monday Night Football offering interests you. I've lost a lot of my ability to understand people who can dissect a football game for days after it is played. Nevertheess, I don't much regret this particular fit of mine, since at the time the ShiBills actually were playing in downright lousy manner.

In the earlier post, I outline one absolute minimum requirement for me to abandon the ShiBills moniker, and return them to being the Bills. That requirement is simply for the ShiBills to win four games in a row. Four consecutive W's strikes me as a reasonable number for a non-crappy team to attain, and since no NFL team ever plays four in a row at home, to get four wins in a row a team would have to win on the road, something which the ShiBills hadn't done in quite some time at the point of that post.

Well, now the ShiBills are just one win away from achieving Bills-hood in this space, after they outlasted the Miami Dolphins 42-32 yesterday. Strange thing is, I don't think the game was even that close. I'm not going to recap everything, since there are plenty of places one can look for that kind of thing. I will note that even when the ShiBills fell behind 24-14 in the second quarter, I never really worried. I don't know if this was burgeoning confidence in my team because of the way they've played in recent weeks, or if this was simply refusal on my part to take the Dolphins seriously. Maybe a bit of both.

Observations about the game itself? Not many -- it was pretty straightforward. Rookie receiver Lee Evans is blossoming very nicely, and next year he ought to be a barnburner. Drew Bledsoe continues to impress with his arm (four TDs versus zero INTs); Will McGahee continues to show flashes of brilliance as a running back; the ShiBills still can't generate pressure on opposing QBs without blitzing (a fact which will hurt them before long). This was a good old-fashioned fun game to watch, the way all the Bills-Dolphins matchups used to be. Too bad so many Florida football "lovers" decided to dress as empty seats at the stadium.