Tag: Football

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Ooooh, football season!

What it feels like to be a Bills fan these days

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And at center, number sixty-seven, Kent Hull

Kent Hull, who played center for the Buffalo Bills from 1986 to 1996, died yesterday. He was only 50 years old. The first indications of a cause of death that I saw cited a heart attack, the coroner’s report blames intestinal bleeding.

As a member of the offensive line, Hull was not one of the “glory” players for the Bills during his time on the team. That’s the nature of the position. If you’re only a casual football fan, centers are part of that group of guys on each team whom you know are there and have a job to do but whose names aren’t terribly important, because they’re rarely the ones handling the ball, running it or catching it or scoring with it. But for football fans who know something about the game, they are incredibly important, and fans of any team can as readily discuss the performance of individual offensive linemen as that of the quarterback.

And Kent Hull was one of the greats.

It is no coincidence at all that Hull’s time in Buffalo was also the Bills’ heyday as a franchise. While he played, the Bills made the playoffs eight times, won the AFC East seven times, and made the Super Bowl four times. That kind of success is impossible in the NFL if you don’t have a great offensive line…and the Bills did. Kent Hull was its leader, and not only that, he was one of the main leaders of the entire team.

I never met Kent Hull, but he was part of a football team that meant a great deal to me. The Bills’ era of greatness mainly coincided with my four years of college, at Wartburg, in Iowa. I was 800 miles away from home, and even though I had a lot of great friends — many of whom are still friends of mine to this day, and one of whom is now married to me — I would still get homesick from time to time. The Buffalo Bills were my main touchstone from home during those years. Being that far away, I was, of course, nowhere near the Bills’ broadcasting region, so I didn’t get to see many of their games at all. In Iowa at the time, the teams I could always count on seeing on teevee were the Bears and Vikings from the NFC, and the Chiefs from the AFC (hence the fact that I’ve always rather liked the Chiefs since then). Bills games tended to only be on if they were nationally televised, or if the Chiefs weren’t on, or if the Bills were on Monday night. (And of course, the playoffs.)

So I didn’t get to see the Bills all that often. But when I did, I was watching home. Those were my hometown fans there, on the teevee. I’ve driven by that stadium more times than I can remember. I was going to college in a place where very few folks knew where in New York Buffalo even was; more than a few thought it was one of the five boroughs of NYC, or that it was just up the road, maybe where Yonkers actually resides. (Folks who worry about Buffalo’s national reputation might consider the possibility that Buffalo doesn’t even have a national reputation, as “snow capital of the world” or anything else. In my experience, Buffalo’s a place that people have heard of, and…that’s about it.) But several times a year, I got to see my team, my hometown team, play some of the best football that anybody was playing at the time. And Kent Hull was a part of that. You can be damned sure I knew who my team’s center was, even if his name was never said on teevee.

As to that: there’s a saying about offensive linemen that you know they’re doing a good job if you don’t hear their name mentioned by the teevee guys. That’s pretty much true. Commentators almost never point out good blocking when it happens; they only mention the offensive lineman by name when they want to indicate which guy just missed a block, causing a sack or a tackle for a loss or whatever. Kent Hull’s was not a name you heard much at all when you watched Bills games. And I think he’d be proud of that.

Thanks for the memories, #67. You’re still missed, in many ways.

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