I wanna be a sportswriter

Jerry Sullivan of the Buffalo News, today:

We ought to be talking about Chan Gailey’s first win as the Bills’ head coach today. God knows what took him so long, but he figured out that Ryan Fitzpatrick gave his team a better chance to win than Trent Edwards. He was right.

Jerry Sullivan, five days ago:

But this move, pulling the rug out two weeks into the regular season, smacks of desperation. It makes Gailey look weak and wishy-washy, and leads me to wonder if he’s even remotely as sharp an offensive mind as we’ve been led to believe.

Sullivan is an odd case. When the Bills play poorly, he is negative to a relentless degree, and when he is on the radio shows the next day after a loss, he is often bitter and/or downright angry. After last week’s loss, he was so furious on the radio show the next morning (I listen to it on my way to work) that I almost felt Sullivan’s spittle coming through my speakers. This from a guy who constantly claims to be the dispassionate voice, the objective observer of Buffalo sports with no personal stake in the matter as a fan. He loves to talk about what “you fans” accept and what “you fans” do wrong in supporting these teams, but really — would someone who isn’t a fan get as angry as Sullivan does?

And it often leads him to contradictory positions. Through much of the offseason, Sullivan insisted over and over again that the Bills, as a franchise, need to “bottom out”. This means finally just becoming so bad as to lose enough games to end up picking in the top three of the draft, so they could conceivably grab a really good quarterback. (Although frankly, had they picked first this year, I’d have wanted them to take Suh, the defensive stud who went to Detroit.) “They need to bottom out! They need to be really bad before they can move forward! They need to bottom out! They need to suck before they can be good again!”

And yet, after last week’s game against the Packers, in which the Bills played as poorly as I’ve ever seen a Bills team play, Sullivan was on the radio the next morning, spouting his “I’m not a fan” rage over the airwaves. When one of the show’s co-hosts pointed out that Sullivan wanted them to “bottom out” and that they were doing exactly what he wanted them to do, Sully’s response was one of the lamest I’ve ever heard: “I want them to bottom out with the right people.”

And now, here he is: “Benching Trent Edwards is a horrible move that reeks of desperation! But it’s also the exact right decision!”

Yeah, I want to be a sportswriter. Because you never have to be consistent.

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