On fandom, personal attachments, and the Buffalo Bills

 

Unless you live in a cave--and a particularly deep, nasty cave with trolls and snakes and giant spiders and whatnot--you probably have heard that in 2020, the Buffalo Bills finally returned to the ranks of the Indisputably Good Teams, after an 18-year stretch of almost unrelentingly bad teams that finally ended with a Pretty Good Team in 2019. This year, the team blossomed in full fire, scoring more points in one season than at any other point in team history. They finished 13-3, and they would have been 14-2 if they had managed to knock down a last-play Hail Mary pass against the Arizona Cardinals. They took the second seed in the AFC, and as I write this, tomorrow night (Saturday night), they play their second playoff game of the year, this time facing the Baltimore Ravens after defeating the Indianapolis Colts last Saturday. That game against the Colts was the Bills' first playoff win since January 1996.

Longtime readers might remember that I used to be very staunch in my Bills fandom. This began in 1988, to be quite specific. Prior to that, as a kid I'd never been terribly interested in sports, even though my father enjoyed sports quite a lot. I'd root for the Steelers along with him, especially in 1978 and 1979, the final seasons of their 1970s NFL dominance, but once they declined and we moved a few times and both the Steelers and the Pirates went into the doldrums, I stopped caring much at all. Plus, there was probably a bit of the whole "teenage kid doesn't want to be interested in the same things Dad likes" thing, though I think in my case that was more of getting really into stuff that I loved more than rebelling against stuff that he loved.

I also wasn't about to get all that interested in football during the mid-80s, when the Buffalo Bills were utterly awful, going 2-14 two years in a row, and drafting a quarterback named Jim Kelly who hated the idea of coming to Buffalo so much that he opted to go play in the USFL instead for a few years, only finally relenting and accepting his Buffalo fate when the USFL folded and he realized that if he wanted to keep on living as a football player, his choices were either Canada or Buffalo. A funny thing happened then, though: the Bills got good, and in 1988, they got really good, and everybody in the region got really happy and excited. I found it hard to be around that and not join in, so that's about when my football fandom blossomed. Plus it was then that I finally had to ask my father things like "What does 'first down' mean?" and "What's the difference between a field goal and an extra point?" and stuff like that. Took me a while, but I got there. (Likewise, two years later the Pittsburgh Pirates would get good, so all this happened again, with baseball.)

Now, 1988 was the first half of my senior year in high school; in 1989 I went off to Iowa for college, and while it didn't happen instantly, I did get homesick on occasion. That was when the Buffalo Bills being really good became a godsend: they were on teevee a lot then, because they were really good--four consecutive Super Bowl appearances good. And when they were on teevee, it felt like I was seeing a little bit of home, even if they were playing a road game. I didn't get to see them on teevee all that much, because they weren't local, obviously. But they were on a decent amount, and it meant a lot to me at the time, even if they would lose the Super Bowl ever single season.

The Bills stayed good (mostly) through the 1990s, all the way up to the 1999 team, which lost a playoff game on that knife-to-the-heart kickoff return against the Titans, and then they got bad and stayed bad for seventeen years. When I started blogging, though, I was still watching the Bills religiously, and I'd post extensive thoughts about how they played after each game, along with ruminations about how they might improve or...as it happened, not improve. Over time I got less and less interested in blogging about the Bills' every game, and as the losing mounted, I got less and less interested in watching the Bills. There was a game in the 2009 season where the Bills hosted the Cleveland Browns, and in this game they managed to hold the Browns' quarterback to just two completed passes. And yet they lost that game, 6-3. Later that same season, they had a game at Atlanta where, having completely fallen out of playoff contention, they decided to start some young quarterback they'd found from somewhere else, and the resulting game was one of the most boring games in football history, a reverse-routing that probably wasn't even entertaining for Atlanta fans, even though their team beat the Bills 31-7 or something like that.

It was right around then that I started realizing that I wasn't really enjoying watching the Bills very much, and I likewise started wondering if maybe I shouldn't stop devoting three hours a week to watching something that didn't make me happy at all. The next season I decided that I'd watch the games until I started finding them annoying, at which point I'd switch to watching movies or reading or writing. This point came sometime around, oh, week nine or ten of the season (a season is seventeen weeks, with sixteen games played and one week off for each team). The next couple of seasons my point of abandoning the team came earlier each year, until finally I decided to stop watching entirely. Initially I adopted a personal rule of not watching them until they were at least four games over .500, but the last couple of seasons they've actually hit that mark, and it turns out that I am so broken of my football-watching habit that I have quite simply stopped watching entirely.

Other fans used to mock this idea; some even called me a "fair weather fan", as if there's some kind of obligation involved with being a fan. I continue to resist this notion, as I find the idea that being a "fan" requires that one subject themselves willingly to something that doesn't bring anyone happiness deeply odd. If watching your football team being bad is making you angry, why keep watching it? I never understood this, and I still don't. 

Nowadays, I still root for the Buffalo Bills and I'm glad that they are doing well right now, with a future that as of right now looks very bright. It's kind of like that 1988 season all over again: it's hard not to be excited when so many people around me that I love a great deal are themselves really happy and excited about something, and there's still a part of me that really does consider itself a "Bills fan", so even as I'm not watching the games, I'm refreshing the box scores online and checking Twitter once in a while to see what's going on. Am I back on the bandwagon? I have to admit that I am...a little. I still have a lot of problems with the NFL, things that started standing out like sore thumbs to me when I stopped feeling the need to attend upon the NFL's product on a weekly basis out of fandom obligation. The NFL's foot-dragging as the reality of repeated head injuries became clear was very disappointing, as was the reaction by some fans to this, along the lines of "So what? They signed contracts, let 'em get jobs if they don't want to play football." Wow, really?

I was also troubled by the NFL's reliance on patriotic military fetishism as a major part of its marketing strategy, and by the collusion the teams engaged in blacklisting Colin Kaepernick; and I continue to be frustrated by cities using public funds to build palaces for football teams to play in, thus ensuring gigantic profits for their owners for years or decades to come, while those same cities plead poverty when it comes to schools, infrastructure improvements, the arts, or anything at all that's not a shiny weapon for the police department. I doubt I'll ever again be the football fan I was when I was in college and watching Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, Bruce Smith, Darryl Talley, and all the rest of those guys on television. I haven't watched a full football game in at least five years, but I'll still root for the team and look at replays and read boxscores. And what of that? That's how baseball fans had to follow their teams' fortunes before they ever invented teevee, after all.

And it does help that the current Bills team is a pretty likeable batch of players, so for what it's worth, from this occasional bandwagon fan who finds the NFL kind of creepy...Go Bills!

A Farewell to Football

It's been fun, football, but I can't do it anymore.

I've been sensing this moment coming, with every single death of a former player. My enthusiasm started to wane with the suicide of Junior Seau...or maybe it was Mike Webster's passing...or Dave Duerson...or...well, it doesn't matter. For years we've known that life expectancy for former NFL players wasn't great, and that former players often had to live with significant health and body issues for the rest of their lives after retirement. For years I said what everybody else says: "They knew the risks. They signed the contracts. They made the money."

I can't say those things anymore. Not after reading what Darryl Talley's wife had to say.

"Our daughters and I spent a few years frustrated and concerned with Darryl’s anger, erratic behavior, insufferable mood swings, impulsivity, depression and memory loss," Talley wrote. "He’d been more and more frequently asking how to spell elementary words. He lost keys, wallets, reading glasses, and television remotes regularly. Where he once would have retraced his steps and been able to find a misplaced item, he wasn’t able to do so anymore. He had no ability to concentrate or make decisions."

Janine Talley says her husband sometimes struggles just to walk to the bathroom in the morning. He'll occasionally be eating and just drop his fork or glass on the floor because he has no feeling in his fingers. Excruciating pain often makes it difficult for him to sleep or sit in a chair.

Once, Talley came out of the house for a trip to the store, and Janine noticed his hand was missing a chunk of flesh and bleeding profusely. He hadn't noticed.

"When we got to the store and he pulled out his wallet, with it came his razor," Janine Talley wrote. "When he finished shaving, instead of putting the razor back in the cabinet, he’d unknowingly put it in his pocket. The mystery of how he’d cut himself was solved. His not knowing he’d put the razor in his pocket and not having enough feeling in his fingers to realize he’d sliced chunks of his flesh off of them repulsed and infuriated me."

I can't read stories like this and conclude that it was all worth it. I can't read accounts like this of a post-football life amounting to decades of pain and emotional turmoil and tortured family life. I can't see those things, and many more like them, as a worthwhile price to pay for a game.

Sport is the act of demanding things from our bodies that they're not really built to provide. I get that, and I'm sure every sport leaves its mark. But football is something else. Football is a meatgrinder of an industry that asks children to put their brains at risk in hopes of getting on the high school team, then asks the high schoolers to do the same in hopes of getting to play in college, and then asks the college players to do the same in hopes of getting to the NFL. With each level, the percentages shrink dramatically, and with arrival in the NFL comes...nothing more than that. You play your time, you get used up, and you leave.

I can't support this any longer. I can't cheer these young men on the field, knowing that in twenty or thirty years a good many of them will be suffering horrible physical ailments and may be struggling for money. (Talley's family has had fundraisers to pay for his surgeries. Fundraisers. For a former NFL player who made "millions", which weren't enough. And that's not Talley's fault.)

I can't support this sport any longer, with my feeling that it's a matter of time before a player dies on the field.

I can't buy the excuses anymore. Don't tell me they know the risks; don't tell me they sign the contracts; don't tell me they get paid a lot of money. Just don't. Nobody who reaches the age of, say, 40 looks back on their 22-year-old self and sees a paragon of risk-assessment. Likewise, don't tell me that money makes it all better. In a lot of cases, the money doesn't last, and in more cases, even if it's handled intelligently, the money runs out eventually. Those few millions dwindle quickly once the career is over and the medical bills start to mount.

I'm sure that a lot of former players, even the ones who are suffering the most, will say that it was worth it to them. That the high they got from taking the field is more than worth the years and decades of agony that come later. And maybe, for them, it is. That does not justify the industrial ruining of lives for the sake of The Game.

Watching football has brought me less and less cheer over the last few years, and now, it seems to bring no cheer at all. I look at football highlights and all I see are men being paid to hit each other as hard as they can.

So it's been fun, football, but I'm done. I no longer root for the Bills or hate the Patriots. I find the whole game a depressing thing for everyone concerned. Including the children who will see their fathers dwindle long before their time.

The difference between our bread-and-circuses and those of the Romans is that our gladiators aren't dying on the fields or in the Colosseums. They're doing it at home, alone, and sometimes they're doing it with a pulling of the trigger as their final act.

Is that worth a Lombardi Trophy, in any city?

For me...no. Not anymore.

Predicting the NFL Season (Badly)

I tweeted a bunch of NFL predictions this morning, and here they are! Most of them will be wrong. Some will be spectacularly wrong. I apologize for nothing.

1. Bills will go 10-6. Maybe, maybe not for playoffs. Depends on rest of AFC. In division, will go 0-2 NE, 1-1 MIA, 2-0 NYJ.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

2. Tyrod Taylor won't be GREAT, but he'll be good enough to keep Bills fans optimistic about his development.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

3. Gilmore will be awesome except for one play a week. On basis of that single play, fans will call for his head.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

4. Taylor will have three games that are downright bad. Fans will unironically call for signing Tim Tebow.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

5. Peyton Manning will look more and more like a shadow of his former self. Tim Brady, alas, will not.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

6. Terrible D in Pittsburgh will squander a really good offensive season. Steelers will aggressively address D in 2016 offseason.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

7. The Jaguars will, all evidence to the contrary, continue to exist for reasons passing understanding.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

8. Roger Goodell will publicly trip on his own shoelaces.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

9. Fred Jackson will be sobbing on the field when he plays his first playoff game. It will be the season's best moment.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

10. In a Voldemort-meets-Palpatine scenario, the Patriots beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl L. Nobody in Buffalo watches.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Over-under for "This team sucks and will always suck" columns by Jerry Sullivan: 4.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Over-under for times Bills fans will miss Kiko Alonso: Zero.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Over-under on innocent puppies consumed in the cavernous lair beneath Gillette Stadium: 42.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Flavor of pie Roger Goodell hits himself with in attempt to lighten mood: Mincemeat.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Opposing player who will horribly bungle a play late in Super Bowl L, guaranteeing Patriots win: Tony Romo.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Over-under on some drunk's antics at Ralph Wilson Stadium making national news: Eight.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Times per home game I'll be distracted from my writing by the crowd noise a mile away: 29.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Over-under on quality years left in Tom Brady's career: 22.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Pegulas will secretly refuse to push for new stadium until Brady's retirement, figuring, why bother?

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

After this season, Buffalo sports fandom will split into two camps: the Taylorites and the Eichelians. They will not trust each other.

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

This concludes my NFL predictions for the 2015 season. Play ball, gentlemen!

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) September 13, 2015

Remember: I will be wrong about almost all of this. Except for Brady playing until he's 64, because that's happening. I've given up. The man will be here forever.

Buffasaurus Rex

So, Rex Ryan is apparently the new head coach of the Buffalo Bills.

Not my first choice, really; but then, I didn't really have a first choice. I don't hate the hire, but I've never been a big fan of Ryan's. He strikes me as a media-savvy guy who uses a "larger-than-life" outward persona as a way of creating more of a sense of being a great coach than is really warranted by his record (which, after exiting the New York Jets after six years with playoff appearances in his first two, is still a losing one). Somehow Ryan is a "big name" despite a relatively unimpressive roster of actual accomplishment, so we'll see how he does in Buffalo, where the media spotlight won't be nearly as intense, and where he'll mainly have a single group of annoying sportwriters to irritate when things aren't going all that well.

I don't have too many thoughts on how he'll perform as head coach, really. He's a "defensive mind", but that doesn't really mean much. Bill Belichick is a defensive mind, but his success in New England has been mainly by virtue of his offense. Likewise, Brian Bilick was regarded as an offensive genius when he took over the Baltimore Ravens way back when, and proceeded to win the Super Bowl with one of the NFL's greatest defenses ever. If Ryan can bring in offensive coaches who can make head-or-tails of a currently crappy (but potentially talented) offensive line, and somehow figure out the going-on-two-decades-of-crappy quarterback situation, then great.

I am mildly biased against Ryan because I never liked his father Buddy, but that's obviously unfair, isn't it? Mainly I never really got why everyone was so impressed with him in New York, especially as the afterglow of those first two playoff seasons receded into memory (with the first of those appearances coming simply by virtue of the Colts simply playing dead on the last day of the season, with the top seed already locked up). I do think that Ryan is a likely upgrade over the freshly-departed Doug Marrone, who appeared less and less into things as time went on here.

Ryan inherits a team with a very good defense, most of which should return intact (as well as getting back a very good linebacker in Kiko Alonso), as well as an offense which, while crappy this year, isn't totally without talent (part of the line, and the receivers). Quarterback is a big issue, but maybe the jury really is still out on EJ Manuel, and they can always bring in a veteran backup or challenger to the starting job. Despite local handwringing by Buffalo News sportswriters, the trade in last year's draft for Sammy Watkins, which left the Bills with no 1st-round pick in the upcoming 2015 draft, was hardly the equivalent of the infamous Herschel Walker or RGIII deals that left their respective receiving teams with no 1st-rounders for multiple years. The Bills should be able to get back to the quarterback drawing board sooner rather than later, if they determine that's needed.

In any event, it seems to me that with the roster he's inheriting, coming off a 9-7 record that should have been even better, it's not unreasonable to expect Ryan to get the Bills into the playoffs within two years (assuming that they don't end up 11-5 in one of those weird years where an 11-5 team is left in the cold, which does happen now and again).

So let's see what you got, Rex. Impress us. It's not like the bar for being impressive is all that high around here, after fifteen consecutive non-playoff seasons and only two winning records since 1999....

Costa Del Terry! Pegulaville! Marina del Kim! Otisburg....Otisburg?!

Lots of football news of late. Not all of it is depressing, but quite a lot of it is.

:: The most positive story is that, pending NFL approval, Terry and Kim Pegula are set to become the new owners of the Buffalo Bills. This is, well, huge. Worrying about the team's future viability in Buffalo has been one of this region's favorite pastimes for years, going all the way back to the late 1990s, and maybe even earlier than that. Ralph Wilson fueled some of this by deftly "convincing" local officials to pony up lots of money to renovate county-owned Ralph Wilson Stadium, and by stalwartly insisting right up until the end of his life that he had no secret backup plan to secure the team in Buffalo. Wilson maintained until he died that the team would be put up for sale to the highest bidder, and that's what happened.

It didn't help, in the late 1990s, that a bunch of NFL teams really did move for more lucrative cities: the LA Rams went to St. Louis, the LA Raiders went back to Oakland, and the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore. That last, however, did give the league enough pause to promise Cleveland an expansion franchise in a couple of years, and they even went so far as to declare the newly moved team a new franchise in terms of the NFL record books, so the Ravens can't count Jim Brown among their historic greats. Nobody ever thought the NFL would make any such motion to keeping football in Buffalo, and then the team started playing one game a year in Toronto, supposedly to help make money, but which felt like the first step in what would be a long, slow move.

The Pegulas are enormously wealthy, having made their fortune in the natural gas industry. Interestingly, no one around here had even heard of the Pegulas, despite their ties to the region, before Pegula announced his desire to buy the Buffalo Sabres a few years ago. It was the scenario that only the most optimistic people dared voice: "Oh, I don't worry about the team. When Ralph dies I'm sure some rich guy who used to live here will step up and buy them to keep them here." Well, that's pretty much what happened.

Is it a good thing that the Bills are staying? Sure it is. I'm not nearly as convinced that the team is as essential to the local mindset as some are. If the Bills moved, it would be a body blow to the psyche around here, but things would heal, in time, as they always do. I don't think the team leaving would be anywhere near as bad a blow to the economy as many do, but it wouldn't be good news, certainly. It is nice to know that people around here no longer need worry about that. The Pegulas' ownership of the Sabres has been a bit rocky thus far, and there's the fact that their fortune springs from fracking for gas, which is less than environmentally sound. But, for good or ill, the Bills are here. My personal fandom may be on the wane, but that doesn't mean I wish for them to leave and break the hearts of a lot of people I know. I do wish that the football team didn't command so large a presence in our community's emotional life, but that's the way it is.

:: I see that Penn State students still think that they and their football team were the real victims. I couldn't invent a more perfect example of the degree to which a sport's emotional hold over its fans can become toxic if I tried.

Someone on Metafilter pointed out the following: "In NCAA math, l'affair Sandusky (2-year bowl ban, 20 scholarships) is now officially less egregious than Reggie Bush taking money (2-year bowl ban, 30 scholarships)." Child molestation is second to a player taking money he shouldn't have taken. But then, that shouldn't be surprising, because...

:: ...Then there's Ray Rice, whose wife-beating was originally judged by the NFL to be not-so-bad a violation of its internal morality as smoking marijuana. Of course, then the rest of the video got released, forcing the NFL's hand because of public relations reasons.

It interests me to see the NFL taking such a hit over this one, to the extent that Roger Goodell himself is feeling a lot of heat. Quite well he should, since it's absurd to think that the NFL was genuinely surprised to see the entire video recording or Ray Rice punching his wife. (I continue to be confused as to why no charges have been filed in this matter. Obviously I'm no expert, but in a case like this, can it really be that if his wife declines to press charges, none will be filed? Is that really how it works? "We have video of a crime being committed, but the victim says 'No', so we don't pursue it"?!)

One person said on Twitter that it's important to remember that the NFL didn't act when they saw the video, they only reacted when you saw the video. That's right, and it's saddening, but again, not terribly surprising. What I think happened here is that Goodell figured the national media would pretty much do the same thing they did when he "investigated" the New England Patriots during the Spygate scandal: just say "OK, Mr. Goodell, thank you for your time" in response to his "I've investigated and handed down a punishment and we're done here." This time, though, it wasn't the national media that was driving the story, but rather TMZ, an outfit somewhat notorious for not really giving a shit.

I hate that it takes a woman being beaten to make it happen, but I'm always happy to see the NFL's image get tarnished a bit. The league holds too much power and mystique in this country, for what is essentially a rich kid's club.

:: The Bills are 1-0 and hosts Miami Sunday. Go Bills, squish the fish! (I know, they're not fish. "Pummel the mammals" doesn't do it.)

Football's Return, and why it's OK to be a bandwagon fan

This week marks the return of the NFL to regular season action. For those of us here in Buffalo, that most likely means another snore-fest of a season. The sense here is that the roster has some talent, but everything now hinges on whether or not second-year quarterback EJ Manuel can actually develop into a quality starter. Who knows? For me, I'm just going with past results. Each of the last three seasons, and four of the last five, have seen the Bills finish 6-10. The one "oddball" year in that stretch? They were 3-13. Before that? They were 7-9 three years in a row.

It's been a long time since the Bills were, in any real sense of the word, fun to watch. Sure, they have a few games each season where they put up an encouraging fight, but they also have more games where it's just a snoozefest, so a couple of years ago I made a new rule for myself: I won't bother watching any Bills football until they are a winning team, with "winning" for these purposes defined as "four games over five hundred".

Some folks laugh at this notion, acting as though I'm somehow missing something essential along the way; others question my "fanhood", calling me a "bandwagon" or a "fair weather" fan. I'm fine with that, actually. The Buffalo Bills aren't friends of mine; I have no personal connection with them at all, and therefore, I see no reason to assume that they deserve a greater commitment of time or emotional energy from me than I'm willing to give them. The idea that I must devote three hours a week to watching a bunch of guys who aren't very good at their jobs, or I'm not a "fan", strikes me as deeply bizarre. I can be a "fan" of a restaurant, but if they start serving consistently bad food, I'm not going to keep eating there because that's what a good fan does. That just doesn't make sense. Being a "fairweather friend", only there to support and help a friend in good times, is a bad thing to be. But fandom isn't friendship. Never has been, never will be.

Believe me, it can be a real downer to hang around with football fans the Monday after a representative Bills game of late, which is another reason I stopped watching. Why would I want to feel like that, when I can do something else instead? One fan friend of mine questioned this once, saying "Well, it's not like I'm doing something great and important with those three hours," to which I replied, "Nobody said you had to cure cancer in that time, but maybe doing something else means you're not spending the rest of Sunday and Monday morning in a funk over a football game." Seems to me that, all things being equal, subtracting things from life that regularly make us angry is a good thing.

So go ahead, Bills fans, or fans of any crappy team out there! Turn them off! Watch something else! Do something else! And if your "fandom" gets questioned, so what? If and when your team wins the Ultimate Championship, there will be no Fan Police in the streets to stop you from dancing because you didn't watch each and every crappy game they lost six or seven years earlier. When you die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls you will be denied entry because you chose not to witness every down of their fifteenth consecutive losing season.

It's OK to jump off the bandwagon, and get back on it. The team won't notice you're there. You don't owe them shit. You have zero moral obligation to watch any more or less of a team's games than you want to, and nobody gets the right to judge your "fandom" on the basis of their personal yardstick for voluntary suffering. For those calling me out for not watching this team, I hope you'll remember this next time you're sitting inside on a stunning fall afternoon watching your team lose 38-10 in the fourth quarter, or in December when you're insisting on watching every minute of a 42-3 laugher as the Bills fall to the Broncos.

(Ideas in this post were previously expressed here.)

Buckets, the Bills, Stadiums, Pies, Sharkheaded girls: Some random opinions on some random stuff

Just a grab-bag of some thoughts on stuff going on....

:: I posted the following on a Facebook exchange debating the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This wasn't really in response to anything anyone specifically said, but more in response to some more general negativity I've seen about it. (As such, it was probably out-of-place on that particular friend's feed, for which I feel a tad guilty.)

Here's my thing: fundraising of every kind, everywhere, is more successful when there's something "fun" involved. It's why charities have big galas and parties. It's why churches and small town organization have chicken barbecues. It's they the Jerry Lewis Telethon isn't twelve hours of scrolling text with telephone numbers. It's why people trying to raise money to help individuals with massive medical bills have events with basket raffles and Chinese auctions. It's why PBS stations air their really popular shows and specials at pledge time. I can't remember where I read it, but the other day I read an article where some charity in some city had an annual gala which was their BIG fundraising event each year, but one year they decided to not hold it and simply ask for the donations anyway, and their fundraising fell through the floor. We may not necessarily LIKE this aspect of things, but it's simply the way things are. All the ALS people did was figure out a way to tap into one of the newer avenues people are having fun with, and frankly, if it hadn't been this, it would have been something else.

That said, I cannot for the life of me have any problem with this whole endeavor. It's a horrible disease (my wife's grandfather died of it, just a few weeks after we started dating), but really -- they ALL are. If we approach fundraising with the solemnity of the disease itself, nothing would ever get funded much at all.

I stand by all that, even if my posting was rather badly misplaced.

:: As I write this I'm basking in the afterglow of my first-ever Buffalo Bills preseason game. Oh wait, did I say "basking in the afterglow"? I meant to say, "waiting for the stench cloud to dissipate". I know, it's just preseason and it's the last preseason game, so it's not like either team was really trying all that hard, but boy howdy, the Bills just looked fundamentally awful. They attempted no long pass plays, they were bumbling and mistake-prone, the backup quarterback hit exactly one guy on the numbers, and I saw four punts in the single half of football we bothered watching. (The tickets were free; no way do we pay to get in there.)

That said, I am obviously no expert, but I still do not see why it's taken for absolute faith around here that Ralph Wilson Stadium is an awful place that needs to be retired in favor of a spectacular new facility that's "easier to get to". RWS is plenty easy to get to, and I found it perfectly nice and structurally fine. Maybe some significant work to the exterior, like they did in Green Bay with Lambeau? Anyway, for my money, RWS is fine, and anyway, I'm loath to spend upwards of a billion bucks of public money on a facility just to help a collection of billionaires rake in even more cash. As for the current renovations to the Ralph, I like the place, although there could be some more signage directing where to go in the area between the ticketed entry queue and the actual concourses.

Oh, my prediction for the Bills this season? Well, they've gone 6-10 in four of the last five seasons, so why stop now? 6-10, it is!

:: Nobody ever gets to bitch about Presidents and their vacations again. I'm done listening to that shit. It's just plain dumb, seeing as how in this day and age, with the technology we have, a President could run things from the Unabomber's shack if he or she wanted to. Enough.

::  Speaking of vacations and such: it's Labor Day Weekend, which reminds me of something I read once: three day weekends are better when the extra day off is on Friday, rather than Monday, because that way it feels like two Saturdays followed by a Sunday, as opposed to a Saturday followed by two Sundays. I kind of agree with that -- July 4 weekend this year broke that way, simply because the 4th was on Friday -- but I also rather like having the long weekend and then a shortened work week on the other side. Short weeks are nice, which is why I always try to schedule my vacations to straddle two different work weeks, essentially taking a six- or seven-day weekend, bracketed by two two or three-day work weeks.

:: The other day, Buffalo's new-and-improving waterfront area became home to a sculpture originally from Cincinnati, called "Shark Girl". It's a little girl with the head of a shark. I am not making this up. Behold:

As art, I kinda like it. It's not really my cup of tea, but it is a whimsical thing and definitely unusual enough that it will have people going to see it and talking about it and so on. My only complaint, such as it is, was that such a high-profile art installation here wasn't seen as an opportunity to feature a local artist. However, I'm told that this is only the beginning, and that local artists will be featured at Canalside. Good.

Head of a shark. What will they think of next.

:: I'm not sure who I want to win MasterChef this year. I'm leaning toward Leslie, because he's really gonzo, but he's also best taken, I think, in small doses. Who I do not want to see win is Courtney, who has the single most annoying "Fake perfect Good Housekeeping wife" thing going on, along with incredibly annoying arrogance regarding her own kitchen skills. True, she has yet to screw up in any way at all, but land sakes alive, is she annoying.

:: A new law: If you have any kind of special request as regards bagging your groceries at all, then I don't care if you're only buying five things, go through the other line. Your "I want this item in double paper, double plastic and then roll it up and put it in a third bag" bullshit forfeits your right to use the express lane.

:: Finally, on a topic near and dear to my heart, I posted the following on Tumblr earlier:

Squirty whipped cream on a paper plate ain't gonna cut it, folks.

So I’m seeing that on the heels of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, some folks are trying to make pie-in-the-face challenges the next thing. As you might expect I am TOTALLY on board with this, but I fear the well may be somewhat tapped, and folks are trying to do this in “honor” of several different diseases, such as depression and Huntington’s Disease. Again, this is great, but I suspect this might have the effect of diluting things.

More to the point, though, is that the “pie” is often a bit of whipped cream from a spray can on a paper plate. This is well below the standards we should be willing to accept as Americans, folks! If you’re going to experience the joy that is a pie in the face, make it happen with a REAL pie and not just a dollop of canned stuff! A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing RIGHT. Come on, America! We invented the pie-in-the-face routine! Let’s show the world how it’s done!

[Insert picture of Sam the Eagle here. Or something suitably pompous.]

Remember, folks, don't do this:

Do this instead:

Or follow the instructions in the "A Pie in the Face is a Wonderful Thing" page to do this:

That's all that's running through my head right now, folks. Have a great Labor Day weekend! (I'm not taking off from posting, though.)

On Mr. Wilson

Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills, died yesterday at the age of 95. He was the only owner the team ever had, and, like seemingly everything else around these parts, Buffalo's relationship with him was...complicated.

Wilson brought football to Buffalo when he decided he wanted to own a football team but the NFL wasn't playing along, so he joined some other rich guys and launched the AFL. Somehow the new league got off the ground -- even with Wilson having to loan some money to another of the owners, a guy named Al Davis, so he could get his franchise, which he dubbed "the Raiders", off the ground -- and eventually flourished to the point that the NFL just merged with the AFL, thus paving the way for the NFL as it exists today.

There would be no football in Buffalo today if not for the efforts of Ralph Wilson, and it's entirely possible that without him, the NFL itself might not be what it is today. In the annals of football Ralph Wilson's name might not loom so large as, say, a Paul Brown or a George Halas, but he's no mere footnote, either.

But Wilson had his troublesome qualities as well, which were often balanced with the good. He could be difficult to work for, as evidenced by his tendency to buck heads with his own underlings. He wasn't George Steinbrenner in this regard, but Wilson did burn more than a few bridges with good people (most famously former GM Bill Polian, who built the Bills of the early 90s and who then went on to a short stint with the expansion Carolina Panthers and then to the Indianapolis Colts, who Polian then built into one of the best teams of the 2000s). It's generally been an article of faith that one major factor that's kept the Bills from ever becoming a championship team was Wilson's level of discomfort with people he didn't know well, which kept him from ever really exploring other possibilities as far as people running the team. Thus Wilson rarely went looking outside his organization for bright, motivated people whose trajectories were on the way up.

Wilson also was one to rattle the "relocation" saber every so often, when the team's stadium lease was coming up. He never outright said, as far as I can recall, that the team would have to move if he didn't get his way, but the message was always pretty clear that the county-owned (and therefore taxpayer-funded) stadium would need some new stuff done to it every seven or eight years, if the team was to "remain viable in this market". The whole NFL racket of shaking down municipalities for stadiums or stadium improvements is pretty nauseating, especially in light of the NFL's non-profit status as it wallows in as much money as anybody has in this world. Ralph Wilson played this game to the hilt, but...he never did move the team, or even come close to doing so, and over the last twenty or thirty years, that hasn't been the case around the NFL. Al Davis moved his Raiders twice. Georgia Frontiere moved the Rams, Art Modell moved the Browns, and of course, thirty years ago the Irsays brought in moving vans at midnight to haul the Colts away from Baltimore. It happens, but Ralph Wilson resisted the siren call of richer markets.

But on the other hand -- and there's always an "other hand" with Ralph Wilson -- he also staunchly refused to publicly consider any kind of ownership succession plan that would guarantee the team's future in Buffalo after his death. It's become almost an article-of-faith around here that Wilson must have had some kind of "secret plan" ready to go for after his death, but...well, I guess we'll find out now, won't we? If he did, great. But if not...well, as radio play-by-play guy Van Miller used to say, "Fasten your seatbelts!"

Ralph Wilson never moved the team or even came close, but he did extort the county for as much money as he could. Ralph Wilson seemed cheap at times, never being mentioned at all as a guy who would spend top dollar to get the best executives or coaches, but he did shower money on a lot of players in attempts to make the team better. Ralph Wilson was one of the most important figures in the sporting history of this town, but he lived in Detroit. Like I said, it was complicated. Hey, that's Buffalo. It's never easy, for us.

Thanks for the football memories, Mr. Wilson. I hope you had one final trick up your sleeve, though.

Super Thoughts

Wow, what an awful game. We haven't seen an out-and-out blowout in a number of years, have we? Remember what it felt like, back when the Super Bowl was an annual ass-kicking? This was quite the throwback -- it was even an NFC team beating up on the Denver Broncos!

Random thoughts:

:: I'm a Peyton Manning fan, so I was hoping he'd go out and have an indisputably great game, just to silence everybody. I figured that if he ended up losing, it would likely be the Denver defense that did him in. I honestly did not figure that Manning would look as bad as he did yesterday. It was painful at times, watching him play. His passes weren't accurate, they didn't have much zip, and he looked panicky. It was really pretty shocking. This is the first time that I have ever seen a Super Bowl where the very first play from scrimmage actually set the tone for the entire game. Amazing.

:: I was also rooting for the Broncos because I don't like Pete Carroll or Marshawn Lynch. But I don't dislike those guys enough to hate the entire team or anything like that, so I'm not heartbroken, here. Seattle has a heck of a team, and given their youth, who knows where they go from here? Maybe back!

:: The game's musical offerings were excellent. Renee Fleming did a wonderful national anthem, I always love seeing Queen Latifah (she is just amazing), and I even found halftime enjoyable. I'm not a Bruno Mars fan, but I don't hate him, either -- his music is pleasant in that way of not really making me want to change the radio station when he comes on.

:: Troy Aikman and the rest of the commentators were sort of annoying. I loved -- and by "loved", I mean, "hated" -- all the various commentaries about "How can the Broncos get back into this game?" They all went into lengthy explanations and such, when the answer was pretty simple: They needed to score points, and lots of 'em.

:: Oh, commercials? As usual, I paid no attention to them, except for a couple. I loved the Coke commercial with "America the Beautiful" in all those languages, and I'm saddened (but not shocked) to see the knuckle-draggers in our society attacking it because "In America you speak English!" or some such nonsense. Like I tweeted: If you were offended by that ad, you are a person I do not wish to know.

:: One last thing: The Denver loss puts their Super Bowl record at 2-5. And that means that the Buffalo Bills no longer hold a share of "Most Super Bowls lost". So yay, us!

On to the Draft!

The Most Beautiful Sight In Sports

Don't taunt the football gods.

The Houston Texans are supposed to be one of the best teams in the NFL this year, but they've had some hiccups, including some very erratic play by Matt Schaub, their starting quarterback. Going into yesterday's game, Schaub had thrown a "pick-6" -- an interception that was returned by the other team for a touchdown -- in three consecutive games. And yesterday, the visiting St. Louis Rams jumped out to a lead, so when Schaub got hurt and the backup QB had to come in, the fans in Houston cheered.

The football gods took notice of this.

That backup quarterback promptly came in and...threw a pick-6.

Taunt not the football gods! For they are a spiteful bunch.

Ooooh, football season!

I usually make some kind of quasi-official (read: half-assed) prediction of how the Buffalo Bills will do each season, so here it is, even though I'm not returning to blogging about each individual game. My new rule, as stated a week or so ago, is that I won't watch any more Bills games until the team reaches four games over .500. If that takes them until the 2015 season, so be it. Watching what will almost certainly be bad football doesn't strike me as a good use of my beloved autumn and winter weekend hours, so there they go.

But anyway: the Bills are going with a youth movement. They have a new rookie quarterback, whom they took in the first round this past year: EJ Manuel, who was off most scouts' radar for some reason. From what I've read, I'm not sure why that is, but then, I'm not a scout. He seems to be an intelligent player who works hard and who played quite a bit in college. Works for me. We'll see what happens. Other than that, the Bills pretty much stink everywhere else except running back. And maybe the offensive line.

It's a year for youth, so I expect lumps a-plenty. My best guess for their final record is 4-12. Yippee. Go team, rah rah rah, if you can't do it, the other team can!

My only thought on the NFL draft

Barkevious Mingo, who went to the Browns, may have the greatest name in the history of football. I just love that name. He sounds like something out of a pulp SF novel...like one of the natives of Barsoom met by John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books.

Barkevious Mingo. I just like saying that name. Barkevious Mingo! Barkevious Mingo! And it's easy to type, too!

OK, I'm done. Sorry.

Super Thoughts

A few random thoughts on the Super Bowl....

:: This was the first football I've watched since week four or five of the regular season. I haven't watched this little football in a single season since the mid-1980s, and in all honesty, I didn't much miss it. I've also pretty much stopped listening to sports talk on the radio, even as little as I did that (mostly to and from work, and rarely on weekends). I'm just increasingly meh on the whole thing. I find the fans' mad rush to re-embrace hockey after a completely pointless and avoidable work stoppage pretty disheartening, and I find a lingering unpleasant aftertaste in football each time we learn a little more about long-term brain injuries. And I really find something distasteful and sad every time I hear a fan basically blow all that off on the basis that "They knew they were signing up to play a violent game."

:: As for the Super Bowl itself, it was a weird game, definitely one of the stranger games I've seen. It looked like a blow-out at first, and then there was the power outage, and then the comeback. Ultimately it was decided by four mistakes, all made by the 49ers a fumble and an interception (both of which led to Baltimore TDs), one of the worst instances of goal-line play-calling in history, and the single worst coverage afforded a kickoff in all the time I've watched the game. Weird that the game ended up as close as it did.

:: Ray Lewis, when asked about the murders in which he was involved: "God doesn't use murderers to do His work." Note to Ray: open your Bible and read a little. Especially the part about Barabbas.

:: The commercials: I was amused by the M&Ms one and the goat eating the Doritos. Other than that, as usual, I paid little attention. The idea of willingly sitting down to watch advertising strikes me as a giant waste of time.

:: Alicia Keys did a wonderful job on the National Anthem. I loved her simple, understated performance.

:: The halftime show nearly gave me a seizure, what with all that flashing of lights. Hated it.

:: Phil Simms is really annoying.

That's about it. Next up...well, who knows. Like I said, I care less about sports in general each year. The only thing on the sporting horizon to which I am looking forward is actually next year's Winter Olympics.

An open question for #BuffaloBills fans and the #BillsMafia

(The hashtags in the post title are for the benefit of Twitter followers of mine who might not read the blog.)

A little background: each year for the last, oh, I don't know, five or six years, I have eventually reached a point in the football season where I recognize the writing on the wall, which invariably seems to read, "Not this year". Or "Bad team here." Or "Go forth and do something else with thy time." I've tended not to ignore such things, as my general feeling has been that I just don't enjoy doing things that simply are not enjoyable. And for twelve years now, Buffalo Bills football has certainly been mostly not enjoyable.

So, at some point each season, I've just stopped watching the Bills. Usually this happens at some point in the second half of the season, so I have borne sad witness to such Bills thrillers as the game they lost at home to Cleveland 6-3, a game in which they actually held the opposing quarterback to just two completions. But I've spared myself a lot of bad games, too, such as the "Let's see what Brian Brohm's got" laugher in Atlanta a few years back, or last year's season-ending game at New England, in which Brady and Belichick and the boys basically said, "Hey, let's spot these guys 21 points and then still beat 'em by 28."

What do I do instead? I go out with family, or read, or write, or watch movies in what I like to call "Instead of the Buffalo Bills Theater". (Today I watched Prometheus. Review forthcoming.) Now, some fans I know scoff at me when I make my yearly announcement that I'm not watching the games anymore, the implication being that I'm not a real fan, that I'm being something like a 'fair-weather friend' who is only there for people when times are good. But then, I'm just a guy watching games on teevee and talking about them. How does my 'support' matter to the Bills, one way or the other?

So my question is this. Imagine that the next few years of Bills history spin out thusly: At the end of the current season, they finish up 4-12. Whether he's fired or decides to 'spend more time with family', GM Buddy Nix exits stage left. Bill Polian and his son take over and immediately draft a franchise quarterback, be it Barkley, Smith, or one of the other highly-touted QB prospects. The kid proves as good as advertised, maybe taking the Bills to a pair of wild-card, 10-6 seasons before finally exploding and going 14-2 with a Super Bowl win in Year Three. Now: as they're hoisting the Lombardi Trophy and toasting either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Wilson's memory, and as you're dancing in your living room because the Bills have finally won the Super Bowl, is the feeling really that much sweeter because you watched 6-3, or the Brian Brohm start, or any of the Bills' trips to New England the last 12 years? Really?

For me...I'll like 'em again when they win.

Cartoon Violence for Men

I'm thinking a lot about football lately, in light of the recent 'Bounty' scandal involving the New Orleans Saints, their coaches, and their players, who engaged in a system of paid incentives to players for injuring opposing players. Saints head coach Sean Payton has been suspended the entire season without pay; former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has been suspended 'indefinitely', which means he gets to sit out a good long time before the NFL -- commissioner Roger Goodell, specifically -- decides to entertain his prospects for a return to coaching. There are also fines and docking of draft picks, I assume.

This whole business is deeply troubling for me as a football fan. I love the game and have for years; I love the strategies involved, and the beauty of well-executed plays and drives. I love how the game can elevate players to heroic status (although football is not unique in this). But here's an admission: one of the best things about football is its physical nature. And that, unfortunately, is just a nice way of saying, "Football is a violent game and we like our violence."

One thing that makes a football season so intense is that there are only 16 games. That's it: your team plays once a week, and one loss here or there can be calamitous for a team hoping to make the playoffs. In baseball, you have 162 games; the very best teams can still expect to walk off the field as losers at least 50 times in a year. But why does football only have 16 games? Because, obviously, the game is too physical -- too violent -- to be played more than that.

We love to see players hitting hard, and getting hit hard. We don't like to see players injured, which is why we applaud when they bounce back up, walk back to the sidelines, sit a minute or two, and then retake the field. It's why players who excel in a game despite being hurt -- say, Emmitt Smith in the 1993 regular season finale, when he had a huge game despite a separated shoulder -- can attain legendary status. We love quarterbacks who can stand in there and deliver a perfect pass despite the fact that they're about to get taken down by a hard-rushing defensive end. We adore it when a receiver comes across the middle of the field, leaps into the air, snags the ball, and holds onto it despite getting sandwiched between two defensive backs. We prize those moments when the running back charges full-speed into a cluster of bodies and, despite taking multiple hits from multiple players, still manages to churn forward enough to get the first down.

And on defense? That's when we love to see our boys dishing out the punishment. We love to see our defensive ends put the quarterback on his ear -- even moreso if the QB never sees him coming. We love to see an opposing receiver grab the ball, only to have one of our defensive backs slam him so hard that the ball pops out. And we think it's great when a linebacker comes flying in out of nowhere to knock a running back off his feet, backwards. We love the big hits, the ones so hard that the announcers go "Wow!", the ones so brutal that you can hear the fans in the stadium go "Ooohhhhh!", the ones where you can hear the actual impact of the hit captured in the parabolic microphones from the sidelines.

We know that these are violent hits, and we know that injuries are a part of the game, because they happen all the time. But some injuries are worse than others, and for most of them, we just hope the backup is ready to play. Even a bad injury -- say, a torn ACL -- doesn't seem as bad these days. It's a season-ender, but they'll be back next year. That particular injury is getting more and more treatable all the time; Wes Welker had one in a playoff game a few years ago, and time was then that would have seriously jeopardized the entire next season. Instead, he was back in time for the season opener.

Mostly, I think we view football violence as live-action cartoon violence. The crushing hits that football players dish out and endure are the equivalent of the disastrous things that happen to Wile E. Coyote whilst pursuing the Road Runner. For the most part, we expect our players to take monster hits, maybe get hurt a bit, but show up in the next scene. Maybe the next game. If it's bad, maybe after a few games or even next season. Once in a great while something very bad happens, a Mike Utley or a Kevin Everett, but I think that football fans, in their hearts-of-hearts, view that as the price of doing business, and for the most part, the thousands of guys who play football over the years take their hits and then retire and go on to live normal lives, free of football pain at last.

Except, thing is, now we increasingly know that they don't. Increasingly we must confront the fact that former football players have significantly shorter average lifespans, and we must confront the fact that football injuries, repeatedly endured over a period of years, take huge tolls in terms of quality of life after the game. We know that the brain is not nearly as able to bounce back from concussion as we used to think. We have to acknowledge that football is a game that takes a huge toll, and we have to acknowledge that all those hits we're cheering on Sunday afternoons have a price.

And just when we're acknowledging this, we learn that there are coaches and players out there who not only don't take this seriously, but see it as another way of gaining possible advantage on the field. That's what it's all about, and why it's so sickening. I've heard fans say that other football scandals -- SpyGate being the most famous -- are worse because that was actual cheating: doing something against the rules in order to gain competitive advantage. Well, by that definition, bounty programs are cheating too, and worse, they are cheating that involves the intentional infliction of physical injury. I don't think we hear this enough in this whole scandal. The Saints didn't just run a bounty program. They didn't just pay players to hurt their opponents. The Saints cheated, and so did anyone else in the NFL who has been doing this.

Football isn't cartoon violence. Football players aren't superhuman figures who can get run over by steamrollers and reinflate themselves; they're not beings who can escape pursuers by stopping to paint a train tunnel opening on a wall and then duck inside. They're human beings, as fragile as anyone else, and they are playing a game that works against that very fragility -- so much so that they have to wear body armor. That we still have problems with people taking this seriously is truly disheartening.

Molto Mario!

Wow. What a surreal couple of days to be a Buffalo Bills fan, as they have signed the second-most coveted free agent player available this year. (He'd have been the most coveted, if not for Peyton Manning being available.) Williams is a former first-overall draft pick who has mostly lived up to his lofty potential thus far, except for an injury-shortened year last year, and he's only 27 years old, which means that as he enters what should be the best four or five years of his career...he's going to enjoy them here.

This is big. Stuff like this doesn't happen here. The Buffalo Bills don't usually grab any coveted free agents of any type; if they sign anybody at all, it's a week or two after the free agent signing period has started, and the guys they grab up are the NFL equivalent of leftovers.

Now, I don't think this is because the Bills are 'cheap'. I think it's because the last bunch of execs running things here, well, didn't really know what they were doing, so the Bills have been in this odd position for over a decade of not being good enough to attract free agents but not being bad enough to have top five draft picks to build with, either. But now they feel that the roster is looking up and it was time to add a big talent...which they did. Kudos to them.

Current GM Buddy Nix has been criticized in his first two years of basically standing pat at free agency, but I'm not sure what choice he had either year. The roster was in the worst shape of the entire sorry decade when he took over, so signing free agents would have generally made the Bills look like the Washington Redskins of recent years: a team with no clue trying to luck into a good team by throwing money around. Nix made clear that his intent was to build through the draft and then add some free agent talent. He's said all along that when he feels there's a player available who can significantly help this team now, then "we go and get him". Well, they did that!

Signing Mario Williams doesn't make the Bills an automatic contender, but it's a big piece to a puzzle that doesn't have as many remaining pieces as some believe. His presence will give the Bills something they haven't had in years: a guy on the defensive line whom offensive coordinators have to take into account. That's big in itself. If he can take on double-teams, it will free up the rest of the line to wreak some havoc. Basically, this move makes the Bills better at the all-important line of scrimmage.

What else do the Bills need, then? Another wide receiver, most of all. Another outside linebacker, possibly a better left tackle, and perhaps a cornerback (although the secondary should benefit greatly from the improved pass-rush that Williams's signing virtually guarantees). Williams's arrival gives the Bills a lot more flexibility when next month's draft arrives, as they are now no longer really beholden to drafting whoever the best pass rusher available when they pick happens to be. (They pick tenth overall.) Perhaps they might even consider themselves in a good enough position to trade down and add picks.

Williams's signing was not a quick process. He got here Tuesday and spent all of Wednesday here before finally signing on Thursday. Apparently he was doing quite a bit of touring the Buffalo area, which I suppose was necessary; teams that haven't been winning need to show off their cities to convince guys, and Buffalo's reputation, unfair as it is, is one that can be muted with some smart display of the good stuff around here. The best sign was when Williams showed up at the airport on Wednesday, not to fly to his next potential team, but to pick up his fiancee. That seemed to display that he was impressed and that he was giving this place serious thought. There's a school of thinking that says that Buffalo's poor reputation as a city is one factor that keeps free agents from signing here, but that has never made sense to me; if a player feels that a team is a winner, he'll go there. The Bills haven't been winners in twelve years, but for the first time there's a real sense that maybe they're about to be.

So anyway: Welcome to Western New York, Mario Williams! And may the Force be with you.

I'll pay you $1000 to shove the airhorn up Coach's arse.

If there's a sports story that's more simultaneously surprising and no surprise at all than the current "bounty" scandal that's enveloping the New Orleans Saints, I haven't seen it. Apparently former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams offered players financial incentives to hit guys hard enough to knock them out of games. The NFL has been investigating this for two years, and Williams has pretty much openly admitted it.

I'll make no secret that I never liked Williams. He was head coach of the Buffalo Bills from 2001 to 2003, and putting it plainly...he was an ass. He showed up at that first training camp, barking how he was going to change things around here and walking around camp with an air horn that he liked to blast in players' faces. Change the culture? Now, the Bills had just undergone a salary-cap driven roster purge that was going to send them to a 3-13 record, but this was still a team just two years removed from its most recent playoff spot (which is still, to this day, the team's most recent playoff spot). Nothing about Gregg Williams's public persona in Buffalo ever indicated anything other than "douche", so on that score, I'm not surprised that he's involved.

Likewise, this does shed a bit of light on just why Williams has never received another shot at a head coaching job. Most guys who fail at their first coaching jobs eventually get another shot, especially if their failed shot is with a team like the Bills, who have come to be seen as a mismanaged organization from the top. And Williams has still been highly touted as a defensive coordinator, winning a Super Bowl with the Saints. And yet, he's never yet received his second shot at a head job. Why? I'm willing to say that part of it is because he's done this kind of stuff for years, and that most of the NFL is aware of his dirty laundry and the nasty habit dirty laundry has of eventually coming out.

I've heard some disturbing rhetoric about all this, to the point that it's not that big a deal. This bothers me a great deal. No one disputes that football is a violent game, and if players get together before games and on the 'down low' offer each other cash to hit opposing players hard, well, all you can do is make that illegal and deal with it if you catch them doing it. But for coaches to be involved puts an official stamp on it. Something that's under-the-table becomes organizational policy, whether it's on the books or not. And that, I think, crosses a line. There's a very real difference between "I hit other guys because I play hard and that's my way of playing" and "I hit other guys because there's money in it for me".

Football is a game where players get hit, and where players get hurt. So are a lot of games. But the object should never be to hurt the other guy, and that's what bounties do. That's why they're bad. Put it this way: if you think that this is no big deal, and that it's normal in football and that the Saints just got caught (one commenter on Facebook the other day referred to it as a 'manufactured controversy', an odd sentiment given that it hasn't been fueled by the media but is rather the result of a two year NFL investigation), then you can't think that this guy is a dirty bastard:



ADDENDUM: I'm seeing a lot of comparison of this business to SpyGate. There's no question in my mind that this is far, far worse than SpyGate. But if there's one meme about SpyGate that I'd like to see put to bed, it's the notion that Roger Goodell came down super-hard on the Patriots for that. There was a big fine, but still an amount that for an NFL organization is the equivalent of a parking ticket. And yes, he stripped them of a 1st round draft pick -- in a year when the Patriots already had two. So even after going 18-1 and being found guilty of breaking NFL rules, the Pats still got to pick in the top ten of the Draft. No, they did not get hit hard in that punishment. Goodell handed down a punishment that was designed to look tough, but really wasn't. I suspect he'll have to come down harder on the Saints, but he can't strip them of a 1st rounder this year, because the Saints traded it away last year to move up. And here's a conspiracy thought: this has been a two year investigation, which means that it was ongoing a year ago, so the Saints knew that the chickens were going to come home to roost sooner or later. Maybe that played a role in their wishing to trade this year's pick away last year; they knew that if they wanted to use it, that might be the only way. Hmmmmm.

On Whitney and the Anthem

In comments to the previous post on Whitney Houston, Kerry asks why I didn't post the video of Houston's now-iconic performance of The Star-Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXV. It's a fair question, worthy of a couple of answers.

First of all...the performance wasn't truly live. She was singing, with the mike turned off, while her pre-recorded performance, great as it is, was played over the stadium speakers and to the broadcast audience. She wasn't lip-syncing, but I have a hard time seeing that performance as a truly live performance.

Second: well, this may be stupid. But I often have a hard time separating events from one another, and that anthem performance is irrevocably linked with one of the most painful outcomes I've ever experienced for one of my sports teams. (The only one that hurts more to remember, down to this day, is the Atlanta Braves' Game Seven defeat of my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates in the bottom of the ninth in the 1992 National League Championship Series.) I hear Whitney Houston's anthem, and so much more floods through my mind: botched tackles. A heroic game by Thurman Thomas, to no avail. And yes...Wide Right.

Because the next three Super Bowl losses were all by much greater margins, they're easier to remember for me. Super Bowl XXV, though, is the one they should have won. They should have been champions when that night ended, and they weren't, and what's worst is that as things unfolded, that was their best shot at it.

This all probably sounds pretty trite, but I have very powerful memories of that game. The Bills' Super Bowl runs all happened (except for the last one) when I was at college, 800 miles away from home. The Buffalo Bills were home. When I sat down to watch that game, it wasn't just to watch my favorite team; it was in hopes and expectations that when it ended, I'd be sharing the same emotional high that everyone back home would be feeling. Instead...I got a kick in the gut.

You know what the worst thing was that night? I had a sectional rehearsal for one of my musical ensembles that night, scheduled for 9:30 or so. I'd told my section leader beforehand, "Look, I'll be there, but not one second before that game ends. Because it's the Bills." So the damn game ended, and I had to get up and head out for a damned rehearsal, pretending that I was just fine and ready to get back to work. Which was, frankly, the very last thing I wanted to do.

I've been through an awful lot of shit since the night of Super Bowl XXV, so it may seem silly to still feel icky feelings about that night and how it ended. But I'm not really wired to separate entire events from things that happened in life outside of it, which is why as a rule, my memories of Whitney Houston's Star-Spangled Banner aren't terribly happy ones.

The Newest Dolphin

So, apparently former Bills quarterback JP Losman has signed with the quarterback-desperate Miami Dolphins. I have a hard time deciding what to feel about this. Buffalo Bills fans are supposed to hate the Dolphins, even if the rivalry isn't nearly what it used to be, mostly owing to both teams stinking for a decade. But right now, hating the Dolphins actually forces me to root for them, so they don't end up with the top pick in the draft and thus guarantee that the Bills have to face Andrew Luck twice a year for a decade or so. (Although, not that facing Dan Marino twice a year for fifteen years turned out all that badly, but still.)

And now the Dolphins add Losman to the mix.

Losman wasn't good here. He just wasn't. The Bills decided in the 2004 draft that they wanted to get their quarterback of the future, come hell or high water, so they traded back into the first round (giving up their 2005 first rounder) to take Losman. It didn't go particularly well. Losman did show some flashes of talent, and he had a cannon for an arm, but he just never settled in, never seemed to figure out the game, never developed a touch for finesse passes, and just...never got there. He was replaced by Trent Edwards (who also never got there), was eventually cut, and has knocked around a bit without really landing anyplace.

But the thing is...Losman's a good guy. He really is. Or at least, that's the impression I got when he was here. He's a Southern California kid, but when he landed in Buffalo, he extended a lot of effort to make this his home. He chose to live in the city, as opposed to buying a McMansion out near the stadium someplace. He did community stuff in public. He worked hard, he tried hard, and he made it clear that he really wanted it -- both NFL success and a hometown in Buffalo. It just didn't work out, and it was a shame. I was a big backer of his for quite a while, until even I had to admit that it wasn't going to happen for him here, but even when the end of his Buffalo career came, I wished him all the best wherever he landed.

And I still hope he succeeds. Maybe for Losman, "success" will mean putting together a nice career as a back-up QB or occasional starter. Heck, maybe his career will follow the Rich Gannon path, and he'll have a late-career blossoming. You never know...but for my money, JP Losman is a good guy and I hope he finds some football success.

Even if it's with the frakking Dolphins.