Tag: Football

Here’s something. It’s well-established that the Bills’ receiving corps consists of stud Lee Evans, and then a whole bunch of “meh” possession guys after him. The Bills didn’t take a receiver in the draft, so this is still a need.

And now, Keyshawn Johnson is available. Should the Bills go after him? At 35 and already on record that he wants to play another couple of years so he can get to 1000 career catches, I can’t imagine he’d be terribly expensive.

In fact, what about Keyshawn Johnson, anyway? I remember when he arrived in the NFL, he was basically a boorish ass, but guys who are boorish asses at the age of 22 or 23 when they have the world handed to them do sometimes turn into mature, OK guys when they’re 35 and the world is now being handed to new guys who were in junior high or younger when the old guys were all the rage. I didn’t hear much about Johnson last year, so is he still a boorish ass, or has he come into his own as a role-player wherever he ends up?

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While I wait for the Sabres to dump the Rangers (they’re in OT right now as I write this), I figure I should toss up some reaction to the NFL Draft. Because hey, it’s the NFL Draft. Wheeeee. (Usually the draft is more exciting around here, but right now, the Sabres have such a command on the Buffalo sports consciousness that I truly think that if it were announced that Jim Kelly had been cloned and then the Bills had drafted him, the reaction around here would be, “That’s nice. Now how ’bout that Sabres power play!”)

First, about the Bills: Looks like another standard Bills draft. Some needs filled, others not so much. What’s nice is the general lack in the Marv Levy era of the old standby of Tom Donahoe’s drafts: the general focus on solid athleticism on the part of the guys they pick, and the general sense that the organization has done its homework, come into the draft with a group of players in mind, and then gone about the task of getting as many of those players as possible without making a lot of gonzo trades with draft picks. Yes, they did move some picks around in order to grab the guys they wanted, but none of it really struck me as insane moving around.

So, the good: they got their new running back (Marshawn Lynch) and stud linebacker (Paul Posluzsny). As is a long-standing practice of theirs, they took a defensive back in a later round (safety John Wendling, sixth round) who is apparently a very fine athlete. In fact, the drafts of the 90s under Bill Polian and John Butler tended to emphasize strong athletes in the lower rounds, guys who could be groomed into starters over a couple of years, and it was that draft strategy in part that had the Bills as one of the league’s best teams of that era. Tom Donahoe didn’t seem to draft those kinds of prospects very well, which is one big reason the Bills haven’t made the playoffs since the Donahoe era began. (It should be noted here that Butler, not Donahoe, presided over the Bills’ 2000 draft, which may well be the worst draft in team history. Not a single one of those players panned out, and in the NFL today, if you have an entire draft fail to pan out, it usually spells several years of disaster for a franchise.)

The not-so-good: the Bills virtually ignored the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, not taking a single lineman until their second pick in the seventh round, when they took a defensive lineman who may have already peaked. True, the Bills signed several new offensive linemen already, but they’ve been very poor at developing O-line talent in this decade (Jason Peters is the lone standout), which is a trend that has to reverse if the team really wants to be a power again in the NFL.

:: The Miami Dolphins are getting older and older at the positions that make a good football team. That organization’s in trouble.

:: Does Matt Millen not remember that he was an offensive lineman? And does he not remember spending his final year as a player on the 1991 Redskins, the team that had the best offensive line I’ve ever seen? Why does Millen keep insisting that taking wide receivers in the top five is a good idea? Why does Millen still have a job? What is going on in Detroit?!

:: Boy, Bill Belichick really thinks he’s some kind of football deity, doesn’t he? The StuPats have traded for Randy Moss, of all people, who is an aging player with bags of character concerns; plus, New England drafted in the first round a guy who also comes with bags of character concerns. This, plus Belichick’s boorish behavior after his boys choked in the AFC Championship Game and the slide of Tom Brady’s halo over the last few years make pretty clear that if the StuPats win the Super Bowl this year — and they very well might — they’ll look more like the Cowboys of the 90s in doing so, when everybody starting hating them.

:: Geez, now the Sabres and Rangers are in the second OT. I’m going to wrap this up now.

:: And as I wrote that sentence, apparently the Rangers won. Well, that’s OK. The Sabres let the Islanders have a win in their series, too. That just means we’ll take ’em in five.

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Yup, time to babble a bit about football.

:: ESPN has given Joe Theismann the boot from Monday Night Football, and damn, it’s about time. Longtime readers know I can’t stand the guy, with his continual need to fill silences with idiotic comments such as when the Bills played New England, and Theismann fell over himself praising Tom Brady’s management of the game tempo during New England’s opening drive, about four minutes into the game. Ugh.

Somewhat gratuitously, here’s Theismann’s famous leg injury. The guy won a Super Bowl, but this is what he’ll always be famous for on the field. Crappy announcer, but that has to suck.

:: The Buffalo News‘s Allen Wilson gives a partial defense of Willis McGahee’s recent attacks on the city of Buffalo, here. The gist of it:

There have been a number of things said and written about former Bills running back Willis McGahee following his comments about the city in last Sunday’s Baltimore Sun. But there is some truth in part of what he said.

I’ve talked to a number of other single young men of McGahee’s age and background who have complained about a lack of things to do in our town. Some defenders of Buffalo’s night life will point to Chippewa Street, but not everybody likes to go bar-hopping. Some people have different tastes, like hanging out in more urban settings. But inner-city nightclubs for young adults are in short supply in Buffalo.

It should be noted that McGahee grew up in Miami, so compared to that city, Atlanta or Philadelphia, Buffalo does come up short in terms of diverse places for young adults to hang out.

I can see the point here, but really, I don’t much care. With the money McGahee made while here — even if he didn’t get his Really Big Contract until he got traded to Baltimore — he probably could have opened his own nightclub, right? But that would have required an actual desire to do something.

When you enter the NFL draft, you take your chances. Some guys get picked by the Giants and get to live in the country’s largest city. Some guys go to smaller, but still vibrant, cities. Some go to small markets that are trying to do the best they can. But all of them get paid a huge amount of money to do it.

Willis McGahee found Buffalo boring. Well, I watched the guy on the field, and aside from that first year he was here and the games against the Jets the rest of the time, I have to say that it was pretty mutual.

:: The Bills also traded linebacker Takeo Spikes to Philadelphia. I wish Spikes well; I hope he recovers from his injury enough to play close to his former level and that he finally gets to play for a playoff team. He left the Bengals for the Bills when it seemed like the Bills were getting better while the Bengals weren’t going anywhere, but it played out pretty much in reverse. And for his trouble, Spikes suffered a bad lag injury two years ago. Last year he wasn’t very productive at all, since he’d been in injury trouble all year.

I can see why the Bills traded him. The historical record for guys injured as Spikes was rebounding to one hundred percent is not encouraging. He may have a few good years left in him, but it’s highly unlikely that Spikes will ever again be the physical force he was before the injury; that being the case, the Bills would have been crazy to pay him the continued big money he was due.

Spikes was a terrific player here, and I hope that he gets back to that in Philly. I really do. He deserves better than what he’s received in his NFL career; he deserves better than to become the Archie Manning of linebackers.

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I suppose I should address the recent moves made by the Buffalo Bills, yes? (Since the question was asked in comments, after all.)

The major moves are twofold: the Bills signed three players to the offensive line, and they traded Willis McGahee to Baltimore for three draft picks (3rd and 7th round this year, 3rd round next year).

First, the line. Hooray, it’s about time, and all that. For the entire time I’ve been writing this blog, the offensive line of the Bills has never once risen above “merely adequate”, and has frequently made descents into the realm of “downright bad”, even making a couple of stops at “friggin’ abysmal”. As my longtime readers know, it’s my opinion that all the ink spilled over the issues of quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, defensive backs, linebackers, and everything else here pale before the fact that the Bills have not been a force at the line of scrimmage in a very long time.

And look at all the recent Super Bowl winners and runners-up: some had amazing, high-octane offenses; others had punishing, smothering defenses. Some had very competent running games, while others placed more emphasis on excellence up front in winning with a succession of backs and/or receivers. But for all the different approaches that get teams to the Super Bowl, it’s a fact that you don’t get to the big game if you’re not dominant at the line of scrimmage. As Chuck Dickerson used to say on the radio here (in just about the only words that ever crossed his lips that I agreed with), “Football games are won or lost by your big guys up front.”

So now the Bills have signed three new O-line guys, which is very welcome news in my eyes. The team’s approach to improving the offensive line, going back three general managers, has been to draft O-line guys low in the draft and hope they develop into studs. That hasn’t really worked all that well. (Now, maybe these guys all tank and the line still stinks. Could happen. But then again, maybe not.)

The other big Bills story is, of course, the trade of McGahee. I’m fine with that. McGahee has never lived up to his potential in Buffalo, which is a real shame because that first season he started, he showed real flashes of excitement. But this past year, he didn’t make it to 1000 yards, I didn’t see him make one of those awesome stiff-armed blocks he used to do all year, and he basically gave off an air that said, “I’m here to make money and that’s about it.”

Do I think McGahee stinks? Not at all, and in fact, I’d bet that he’s about to have two or three very good years in Baltimore before he starts his career decline. But what got me this year wasn’t even his lack of output, but the fact that he just never seemed to care all that much. Sure, there were two games that were notable exceptions, but like it or not, the Buffalo Bills don’t play the New York Jets sixteen times next season.

I finally realized McGahee was never really going to lift off here during the second-to-last game of last season, when the Titans came to town. The Tennessee running back that day was Travis Henry, the workhorse guy that McGahee had originally pushed out of Buffalo back in 2004. And Henry outran McGahee that day, badly. Basically, McGahee let the guy he’d pushed off the Bills roster come back into town and show him up in his own park.

Did the Bills get better by trading McGahee? Possibly; possibly not. But it was already clear that they weren’t going to give him a big contract heading into next year, and they probably weren’t going to try to resign him after next year. So, faced with the possibilities of a training camp holdout and then finally losing him anyway, they chose to lose him in a way that gets them something in return. Sounds good to me.

Now, on to the draft.

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I just realized that I haven’t yet mentioned the Super Bowl in this space, so just a few thoughts:

:: Lots of folks left due to the rain, which meant that by the middle of the third quarter, Dolphins Stadium looked about like it always does for regular season Dolphins home games.

:: Worst halftime show ever? Nope — I still remember the Michael Jackson one at Super Bowl XXVII, and the “Rockin’ to the Oldies in 3D” thing they had for Super Bowl XXIII (you had to get the 3D glassed out of TVGuide or something like that).

:: Commercials: I don’t watch them much, really. During Super Bowls, I use commercials for their intended purpose (to go to the bathroom, get more chips, refill my glass, et cetera). There was one with a couple of gorillas that was mildly amusing.

:: Is the NFL trying to raise the Vince Lombardi Trophy to the status of the Stanley Cup or something? This business of having it marched in to a giant trumpet fanfare at the end of the game is just weird.

:: Why the Bears Lost, in a nutshell: despite the game being close for most of the way, they ran the ball less than half as many times as the Colts did. Sure, Grossman’s picks didn’t help, but surely rushing the ball more would have helped keep Peyton Manning off the field.

:: The whole game was weird, between the opening kickoff return, the constant turnovers, the rain and whatnot. Even though the score at halftime was only 16-14, the guys on CBS were saying things like “If Chicago’s gonna get back in this game, they gotta…” That struck me as an odd way to put it when the differential in the score was only two points, but it was true: this game was either the closest blowout I’ve ever seen, or the most lopsided close game I’ve ever seen.

:: One final shot at the New England franchise: surely we can stipulate that losing the Super Bowl is several orders of magnitude more disappointing than losing the conference championship game. And yet, compare and contrast the behavior of Lovie Smith and Rex Grossman after the Super Bowl with that of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady after the AFC Championship.

And now, into the offseason we ride. Go Sabres!

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I only ask because I’m trying to watch the pregame stuff, and all I can find is this weird performance in a stadium that looks more like the opening ceremonies of a Winter Olympics than a Super Bowl.

(Oh, and during the final pregame analysis, everybody in the CBS booth agreed that nobody ever remembers the team that lost the Super Bowl. Well, whenever I tell anyone that I’m a Bills fan, you’d better believe that people damned well do remember some teams that lose the Super Bowl. Grrrr.)

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(being a Socratic dialogue between the Left Brain and Right Brain of a football fan)

LEFT BRAIN: OK, there are 52 weeks in a year, which therefore implies that there are 52 weekends in a year.

RIGHT BRAIN: Gotcha.

LEFT BRAIN: Now, do we pay attention to pre-season NFL games?

RIGHT BRAIN: Nope. We read about ’em in the paper, you know, to see who’s playing well and who might make the team and that’s about it. But we don’t watch ’em or structure our weekends around them.

LEFT BRAIN: That’s right. Especially since they play preseason games on any day of the week.

RIGHT BRAIN: Yup!

LEFT BRAIN: OK, so back to the 52 weekends per year. How many weeks long is the NFL regular season?

RIGHT BRAIN: It is 17 weeks long.

LEFT BRAIN: Just so.

RIGHT BRAIN: Because every team plays 16 games and has one buy week.

LEFT BRAIN: “Bye” week.

RIGHT BRAIN: Right, that’s what I said.

LEFT BRAIN: OK. So there we have 17 weekends of NFL regular season action.

RIGHT BRAIN: Exactly.

LEFT BRAIN: And what of the playoffs?

RIGHT BRAIN: Nah, my team sucks.

LEFT BRAIN: Yes, but do you still watch the other teams play football in the playoffs?

RIGHT BRAIN: Oh, sure.

LEFT BRAIN: And how many playoff weekends are there?

RIGHT BRAIN: Three, of course. Wildcard weekend, which consists of eight teams in four games, from which four teams emerge. Those four winners go on to play the two teams from each conference that earned bye weeks, in the Divisional Round. The winners thereof, four in number, then play the next weekend in the Conference Championship Games. The two winners of those games are given trophies named for Lamarr Hunt and George Halas, respectively, and they then move onto the Super Bowl two weeks hence.

LEFT BRAIN: Ummm…you’re the Right Brain, and yet you just used the words “thereof”, “respectively”, and “hence”.

RIGHT BRAIN: Word of the Day Calendar.

LEFT BRAIN: Oh. So that’s three weekends of playoff football, plus a single weekend for the Super Bowl, two weeks later, for a total of four postseason weekends, yes?

RIGHT BRAIN: Let me see…sounds right.

LEFT BRAIN: So, with the 17 weekends of the regular season, it follows that there are 21 weekends devoted per year to football.

RIGHT BRAIN: (consults slide rule) 17 + 3 + 1 = 21. Yes. Exactly.

LEFT BRAIN: Which in turn means that there are 31 weekends per year that are not devoted to football, yes?

RIGHT BRAIN: (slide rule time again) 52 – 21 = 31. Yes!

LEFT BRAIN: And since 31 is greater than 21, it therefore follows that we spend more weekends per year not watching football than we do watching football, yes?

RIGHT BRAIN: Why, yes!

LEFT BRAIN: So, the central problem is this, then: Why the hell are we always lost in the wilderness when that inevitable first football-free weekend comes?

RIGHT BRAIN: I dunno. So what are we gonna do today? There’s no football on.

LEFT BRAIN: That’s the point! Weren’t you listening?

RIGHT BRAIN: Nah. You lost me at the whole “greater than/less than” thing.

LEFT BRAIN: Oy.

RIGHT BRAIN: And besides, you forgot the Draft in April! That’s a weekend! And that combine thing too!

LEFT BRAIN: Yes, but —

RIGHT BRAIN: Minicamps! Celebrity signings! Organized team activities! Watching games I taped from years ago, like the time our boys won the division by beating the Jets 9-6 in overtime! Playing Madden!

LEFT BRAIN: Or, we could watch a movie, or read a book, or watch the figure skating, or hockey.

RIGHT BRAIN: Watch what with the who now?

LEFT BRAIN: Sigh….

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OK, time to react in sagely fashion to the AFC and NFC Championship Games:

:: I was rooting for the Saints, like everybody else, but the Bears’ advance to the Super Bowl doesn’t bother me one bit. Since 1985, that franchise has had intermittent flashes in which they’d get pretty good, but mostly they’ve been mediocre. Living in Buffalo and watching nearly every play JP Losman makes (or doesn’t make) scrutinized as evidence of his growth or retardation as an NFL quarterback, I have some sympathy for the constant tone of Bears coverage: “Will Grossman kill their chances? Tune in for kickoff at 3:30 Eastern!” Fact is, this is a team built around a defense that, when clicking on all cylinders, is fast and very physical. The Saints may have been the sentimental favorite, but the Bears pretty emphatically proved that right now, they’re the better team.

The Saints’ year this year looked like the Buffalo Bills in 1988. That team emerged from years of being not very good to go 12-4 and got to the conference championship game before exiting with a decisive defeat; that team was also quite young and had to endure another year of growing pains (9-7 in 1989) before becoming the AFC’s dominant franchise for the beginning of the 90s. The Saints have a lot of young talent; all they need is to get better on defense and they might be knocking on the door of a run of excellence.

:: To think I very nearly watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last night (via CTV in Toronto) instead of the conclusion of the AFC Championship Game! Wow, that was a game. Utterly amazing.

The question before me now is: did the StuPats choke yesterday?

Now, I’ve never been fond of the “choke” label. Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose, and it usually seems to me a bit over-the-top to say that one team or the other “choked”. But sometimes it’s a useful label. The Chargers choked last week. They put themselves in position to win that game, and then they committed a series of errors that resulted in them losing. That’s choking. Did the StuPats do the same thing? Not exactly. They didn’t make all manner of mental errors as did the Chargers.

“Choking”, in sports, is more a matter of the after-the-fact narrative perpetuated by sportswriters and whatnot than anything else. Considering the exact sequence of events in yesterday’s game, it feels odd to say that the StuPats “choked”; but if the game had unfolded in exactly the same way, but with everything reversed, so that it was the Colts who had gone up 21-3 and it was Peyton Manning who threw the interception at the end to seal the loss, you can absolutely bet that the media coverage today would feature the word “choke” all over the place, in reference to the Colts.

The StuPats are the mighty dynasty that came up just a bit short. But had the Colts done the exact same thing, they’d be the “chokers”. So what does that mean? I don’t know, really. What it comes down to, for me, is that in the recent years when these two teams met in the playoffs, the StuPats were simply the better team, while yesterday the Colts were. That’s all.

:: Of course, having said all that, I have to note that I’m not surprised at all that Tom Brady didn’t pull it out at the end. There’s a vast difference between those last-minute drives he led in those Super Bowls and the task that confronted him yesterday. Coming into a drive knowing that a field goal wins it, but as long as you don’t turn it over, you’ll at least get another shot in overtime is different from coming into a drive knowing that you must score a touchdown or you will lose. Sure, “FG or OT” is a clutch situation. But you don’t get more clutch than “TD or lose”. And that’s when “Captain Clutch” threw an interception.

And while I’m on the subject, I’m a little fuzzy on what we call “comeback wins” in football. We all know that John Elway was the “Comeback King”, but a while back, I actually found online somewhere a list of every one of his “comeback” wins, and quite a few of them were simply games in which he came in with the score tied and drove for a winning field goal. That doesn’t seem like a “comeback” to me. “Game winning drive”, sure, but “comeback”? Not so much. (And this complaint of mine refers to everybody, not just Tom Brady.)

In the schaedenfreude department, I have to say that I enjoyed the stunned expression on Brady’s and Bill Belichick’s faces after the game — especially when Belichick gave a two-sentence “interview” to a CBS sports reporter afterwards. They looked like the possibility that they might actually lose had never once crossed the transom of their minds. And in the “saying something nice for once” department, I will admit that Brady’s absolutely one of those guys who elevates the players around him, and that Belichick gets more out of guys who would suck on any other team than anybody else. (But I still hate them so much!)

:: So it’s Colts versus Bears. I’m happy that Ruben Brown, drafted by the Bills in 1995 to shore up their sagging line and let go a few years back, will finally get a chance to see what the Super Bowl is all about. But I’m really hoping that Bill Polian, who built the Bills of the 90s and was unfairly let go, finally discovers that he’s built a Super Bowl Champion.

UPDATE: In comments, Sean says that Belichick’s definitely a sore loser, but Brady isn’t. Well, it now appears that Brady didn’t shake Manning’s hand after the game, and you can see right here how when Manning came up to Belichick on the field after the game, Belichick wanted nothing to do with him and only gave him the briefest of handshakes. (His body language is all “Fine, fine, you won, get the f*** out of my way.”)

Not a huge deal, but I think it gives the lie to the narrative that’s been woven about the Patriots for the last five years or so, the deification of Brady and Belichick. Here they came up short, and they couldn’t even be gracious to the team that had beaten them. And this comes on the heels of their behavior in last year’s playoffs, when they were pouting about not getting enough “respect” before getting beaten by Denver.

Were they and awfully good team for a few years? Sure. Are they still going to be near the top of the NFL? Probably for another couple of years at least. But they’ve been unmasked as an ordinary team now.

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