Messrs. Brightside

Bills fans in Highmark Stadium. Image found on Facebook.

I don’t blog about football much at all anymore, obviously. I used to be the kind of obsessive football fan who watched every down of every game the Buffalo Bills played, and then I’d write an extensive blog post about the game after. By the time I was blogging, the Bills were mostly not very good, and most of those posts were post-mortems for a loss. Eventually I stopped watching the games entirely and I almost never blog about the Bills anymore.

So this post is not going to be a resumption of regular Buffalo Bills content. However, I just have to say something about the season that ended last weekend with yet another colossal disappointment at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs. The AFC Championship Game wasn’t quite as galling a defeat as the infamous “Thirteen Seconds” game from three years ago, but it’s pretty close, and yesterday at work I overheard on the radio one of the local sports talk guys hinting that the community may soon be done talking about this one. I scoffed at that, noting to a friend that locals will be dissecting this game all the way up to kick-off of next season’s opener. Hell, we’re still talking about Thirteen Seconds.

Hell, we’re still talking about Wide Right.

So, here are some random and uncollected thoughts about the game and the season that’s now over:

::  This year was supposed to be a temporary step back for the Bills as they reloaded and spent time developing some young players into hopefully the core of the next sequence of contending teams. A bunch of the core players from the last few years of constant Super Bowl contention parted ways with the team due to age or money, and those that remained are noticeably on the tail end of their careers. The Bills have a bunch of very promising young guys coming up, but the overwhelming feel was that the Bills would have an “off” year this year. Preseason predictions of a 9-8 season, missing the playoffs entirely, were common. The Jets and Dolphins were both popular picks to win the AFC East. Instead, both of those teams sucked and the Bills roared to a 13-4 record, winning the division easily as a lot of those “not ready yet” players stepped up.

Given that, and the fact that the Bills have a lot of picks in the upcoming draft and they’ll have some more salary cap room to play with (for several reasons I’m not bothering going into, their cap situation this season was not ideal), it’s not at all hard to see the Bills managing to improve their already talented roster for 2025. It’ll take some time, but eventually the sting of the AFC Championship Game will give way to the brightness of the future.

::  So, what do they need to do in the offseason? Well, everybody’s got opinions. Here’s mine: the offense is mostly fine. Maybe a true “Number One” receiver could be added, someone to reliably make the big plays and attract the double teams that allow the rest of an already-talented receiving corps to step up even more than they did this season. Basically, they could use Stefon Diggs 2.0, a younger version of the Diggs they had in 2020 and 2021. (Not so much the 2023 incarnation, whose production tailed off and who was notably cantankerous on and off the field.)

There’s been a lot of kvetching about how to “fix” the offense so it can beat the Chiefs, but thing is, the offense is good enough to beat the Chiefs. They’ve beaten the Chiefs in the regular season matchups each year over the last few seasons, and while yes, they’ve gone on to lose to the Chiefs in the playoffs, in those last three games they have scored 29, 24, and 36 points each. Yes, in each game they got fatally outscored, but those numbers do not paint the picture to me of a team that needs more firepower. And besides, historically the NFL team that has the most scoring firepower in the regular season often ends up getting beaten eventually in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl because at some point defense actually becomes important. Remember that Broncos team that scored something like 947 points in the regular season and then got smoked in the Super Bowl by the Seahawks by something like 48-8? Or the “Undefeated Patriots” who piled up points at will in the regular season and then got held to 14 points in the Super Bowl by the Giants? So yeah, I’m skeptical about the whole “Put all the eggs in the offensive basket” approach.

So obviously, I think the defense needs the most attention. This year the D lived and died by the created turnover, which is never a confidence-inspiring thing. The pass rush was generally inconsistent, and the linebackers were often banged up. The secondary did what it could, but eventually the injuries piled up there, too, and even a good secondary is going to have a rough time if the front seven aren’t rushing the passer. A lot of people want the secondary improved, but my personal focus would be the front seven. Add a couple pieces to the D-line, particularly a solid and consistent edge rusher, and maybe another linebacker.

For people who say that the way to win is to pile up offensive talent, I point to the Chiefs themselves. They were a score-score-score kind of team the last few seasons, but this year they shifted to a more defensive philosophy, which yielded a 15-2 season, and yet another Super Bowl appearance, in a year in which they scored 30 or more points exactly twice all year. 

And another way to look at it is this: improving on defense can actually help your offense score more, by virtue of taking pressure off the unit to score every time and by giving it more chances to take the field.

::  It needs to be noted that the 2024 Bills were really, really good. They set all manner of team records. There’s no need for a major re-tooling here. There’s always a danger in thinking otherwise, especially when it’s the same team that seems to be eliminating you each and every year. But aside from the 2022 season, when the Bills just ran out of emotional gas after the Damar Hamlin injury and got thumped at home by the Bengals in the playoffs, each playoff loss comes down to just a couple of plays that could have gone the other way, or just a couple of instances where a shift in tactics might have produced a winning result. I don’t envy trying to figure out how to “get over the hump” when you’re just that close to doing it.

::  I have no idea how to solve this problem, but it seems like the Bills’ defense is an injury-riddled M*A*S*H unit every year at playoff time, while everybody else is getting healthy for their Super Bowl run.

::  And then there’s the officiating. Yeah, the NFL has a problem here. No, I don’t believe that the NFL is “scripted”, but there’s a definite sense to which there’s a thumb on the scale. Calls are made for the Chiefs that aren’t made for anyone else, or vice versa, and situational calls almost always seem to favor the Chiefs. The Chiefs know this, too; there was a play in last week’s game where the Chiefs got a big catch, and the Nationally Beloved Travis Kelce came running in after the play to get in the face of one of the Bills’ defensive backs for some taunting. It was incredibly obvious taunting, too…but no penalty flag was forthcoming, until another of the Bills got in Kelce’s face to tell him to knock it off, at which point Kelce threw up his arms and flopped to the ground on his back, as if he’d been clobbered (which he hadn’t), and then the refs tossed the flag. Against the Bills. That kind of shit is supremely irritating, and the Chiefs are widely known to engage in flag-baiting. And there really does appear to be an unwritten NFL policy of “When the Chiefs ask for the flag, give it to them.”

I saw a commentator on Tiktok at some point this week (sorry, I can’t remember who), who made the point about the officiating this way, roughly paraphrased: “Take away this contested catch that was awarded the Chiefs, or that first down which was denied the Bills. Take away all those specific calls, and you still have a problem, because in this game you had one team whose defense had to play with the feeling that they were not allowed to hit the other quarterback, and another team whose defense played knowing that they could hit the other quarterback with impunity. If the NFL doesn’t think that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, I don’t know what to say, other than, I’m glad I’m not watching the games anymore.

::  I wonder: do the Bills have to beat the Chiefs to be taken seriously at this point? If they go out next season and somehow end up winning the Super Bowl but their playoff run somehow does not include Kansas City, how much downplaying of their championship will end up happening?

::  If there’s a more endearing out-of-nowhere team-and-fan tradition than the entire stadium singing “Mr. Brightside” at some point, I don’t know what it is.

::  The mood surrounding this team this year has been absolutely infectious, and it’s easy to see why it hurt so many people so badly when it ended before it felt like it should have. This was probably the most genuinely likeable Bills team ever, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pro athlete more adept at always saying the right things than Josh Allen. All of that said, I continue to wish that the Buffalo Niagara region didn’t invest so much of its emotional well-being in the NFL team.

::  As noted above, I’m still not watching the games, and in general I keep the NFL at arms-length nowadays. To check out of football completely probably isn’t feasible, because I do still like talking to people and football is a major topic around here. I’m as suspicious of the NFL in particular and football in general as I’ve always been, though: the public money being used to build the stadium, the increasingly uncomfortable partnership between the NFL and the military (look, I get as excited as anybody for big military planes flying overhead, but every game now gets a flyover???), and the brain-injury thing isn’t going anyway (sometime in the next 20 years we’ll probably be reading some very sad news stories about Tua Tagovailoa). Not watching the games and investing 3 hours a week in closely observing the NFL has done wonders for my mental health. Even last week, when the score went final, I was able to say, “Well, they lost. Wanna watch another episode of Scrubs?”

::  Finally, there’s a thing you hear sometimes when your team loses in the playoffs: “Root for the team that beat your team, so you can say that at least your team lost to the best.” That’s where all of my old football (and sports in general) fan mindset comes out, because screw that. I want the team that beats my team to get the shit kicked out of them, as quickly as humanly possible. So, as I think they say in Philly, Fly Eagles fly!

And it might just happen. I don’t know that the Chiefs have faced a team as balanced as the Eagles all season, and that sadly includes the Bills.

::  More finally, pitchers and catchers report for the 29 teams of Major League Baseball (and their AAAA affiliate Pittsburgh Pirates) anywhere from 8 to 12 days from this writing. Play ball!

::  Oh, and last finally, I’m officially sick of the Kelces (both of them) and I wish they’d go away.

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