Tag: Football

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Cowboys 25, Bills 24

I guess I need to say something about this game, which has already attained legendary status in Buffalo’s annals of negative sports outcomes. I tend to have a sunnier outlook on stuff than most Bills fans, so here it is: I don’t think Dick Jauron should be fired (yet), and I think that this game may turn out to be a key foundational event in building the character of a good team to come.

How’s that?

The offensive play-calling is baffling, and of this current coaching staff, if there’s anyone whom I think should be on a “Job Endangered” list, it’s offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild. I don’t understand running a reverse on third-and-one; I don’t understand the continued refusal to take shots downfield; I certainly don’t understand his continued refusal to run the ball in obvious running situations late in games. This was the third time this season that the Bills went “pass-wacky” in a late-game situation:

:: There was the long bomb at about three minutes to go in the Denver game, which the Bills led at the time, 14-12. Had they simply run the ball and kept the clocking going, and everything else had unfolded the same way, the Broncos would have run out of time before kicking the FG to win 15-14.

:: The Bills threw in a similar situation in the Jets game, thus failing to run any time off the clock. This left the Jets enough time to attempt a drive for a tying FG. They came up short when Pennington threw an interception, but it wouldn’t — and needn’t — have ever come to that.

:: And in this game the Bills led 24-16 with six minutes to go. Third-and-eight from the Dallas 11-yard line, so they’re easily within FG range. Instead of running, grinding away a minute or so of game time, and getting three points in the bargain to go up by 11, Fairchild called ‘pass’. The pass was picked off. The Cowboys didn’t get points off that turnover, but they preserved clock and the more manageable point margin they needed to overcome.

I genuinely don’t understand why the Bills’ coaches keep doing this stuff. It makes no sense. I don’t know a single Bills fan who would rather have the offense score touchdowns than have the whole team win games.

On the quarterbacks: I personally think that JP Losman has to be put back in now, if he’s healthy, but with the proviso that he’s got to show his stuff, now. He had time for growth last year. If the Bills go another four or five games and he still looks the way he did in the first two games this year (when he didn’t so much play poorly as barely play at all), then bring on the Edwards Era. (Of course, if some other team wants to offer up a compelling trade offer for Losman, including one or two high draft picks, I’d hope the Bills would take it.) I’ve been rooting for Losman because, frankly, I like the guy and hope he has a great career. Losman just seems like a good guy, and I like that. But production’s production, right?

(However, some perspective is always helpful: if Losman had been under center Monday night and produced the exact same result — 150 yards or so passing, 0 TDs and a very bad INT, leading the offense to producing just three points — Bills fans would be calling for his immediate one-way ticket to the waiver wire.)

Finally, I’m hearing a lot of negative stuff about Dick Jauron, how he’s too stoic and he’s not that good on the X’s and O’s and how his press conferences can be maddening affairs. (His defense of that third-and-eight pass play? “Well, you don’t know that if we run the ball, the back doesn’t fumble.” Huh?!) I agree to a point. But then I think of how lackadaisical and just plain apathetic the Bills looked through large whacks of the Gregg Williams and Mike Mularkey “eras”, where this year’s team (and last year’s), play with as much fire and heart as I’ve seen a Bills team even during the glory days. They come up short because of talent, injuries, and yes, poor strategy. But when I look at the way this supposedly overmatched team came out and very nearly knocked off the NFC’s best team, I wonder if we’re not selling Dick Jauron short as far as his motivational skills go.

Anyway, this week’s a bye week. Next up, the Baltimore Ravens, with former underachiever Willis McGahee making his return to Buffalo. I hope they kept his old hotel room and video game controller warm for him.

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Stupid Patriots 38, Bills 7

You know, I find football fans to be an amazing lot. Before the season started, I’d hear lots of fans on sports radio shows and in regular life saying things like, “Geez, with this schedule, we’ll be lucky to be 6-10” and “Wow, they’re gonna open up 0-4” and stuff like that. Now that the Bills actually are 0-3, suddenly we’re all shocked — shocked! — that the team is struggling mightily. Of course, that’s probably a function of how the team is struggling mightily; most fans expected a team that would lose games by scores like 28-20, 38-24, 45-27, and the like. No one expected a team that would, after three games, have two offensive TDs on the year.

JP Losman’s effectiveness was questioned strenuously by fans after both the first two games; I was unimpressed by him, although I didn’t call for a pulling of his plug, and I feel slightly vindicated by what happened today. Losman was injured on the very first series and came out of the game after the third play, leading to rookie (third-round pick this year) Trent Edwards, who had a couple of good drives in pre-season which was somehow enough to sell a lot of people on the idea that he’s bursting with intangibles. Which isn’t to say that he isn’t bursting with intangibles; I just think that one doesn’t want to estimate a rookie quarterback’s intangibles based on a fourth-quarter drive against the Detriot Lions in a pre-season game. But that’s just me.

I’m also weary of hearing youth and injuries cited as reasons this team struggles. I think it goes to drafting and coaching. The greenest players each year, the ones who are really marginal NFL talents at their positions, always manage to make NFL rosters by virtue of special teams play, and the Bills’ special teams units are always well-prepared and they almost always execute well on the fundamentals. Today, a perfect downing-of-the-ball on a punt was executed by a rookie (Josh Wendling, a fifth-round pick this year), and in making that play he looked like he’d been doing it for years. That’s coaching. Funny how Bobby April manages to get so much more out of the same general batch of inexperienced youngsters than any of the other coordinators and coaches on the Bills’ staff, isn’t it?

Anyway, let’s move onto more pithy replies:

Woo-hoo!

:: The Bills have a very good punter.

:: The Bills had one very good drive.

:: Bill Belichick challenged two calls within five minutes in the second quarter; both went against him. I remember when those calls would probably have gone his way. I wonder if there’s some quiet bit of punishment for the whole Belicheat thing going on.

:: I got the floor vacuumed in our apartment! Woo-hoo!

Meh.

:: The announcers for this game weren’t very good. They made odd points, like “Dick Jauron’s had success wherever he’s been”, and “The StuPats have been good because they’ve had continuity at coach and quarterback, where the Bills haven’t.” I’ve heard that latter point a lot lately, not just in reference to New England, but to teams like Indy and Pittsburgh. The point seems to me exactly backwards: success doesn’t come as a result of continuity in the coaching staff and the roster; rather, continuity comes as a result of success. Does anyone think the Bills would have had any better a recent history if we were on Year Seven of the Gregg Williams/Rob Johnson era? Or Year Four of the Mike Mularkey/Drew Bledsoe era? Winning comes first, then continuity.

:: Chris Kelsay did a better job tackling. The defense continues to play really hard. They don’t make big stops or big plays, but they can’t be said to be lacking in the area of effort.

:: Marshawn Lynch. Not “Meh” for his effort, just “Meh” that he’s so potentially good on so ugly a team.

D'oh!

:: Longtime readers know I harp on this every year, but it wouldn’t be a Bills post of mine if I didn’t complain about the Bills’ constant lack of command at the line of scrimmage. Screw the quarterback situation; this team’s focus has to be getting better at the line of scrimmage.

:: Well, this game sure can’t be blamed on JP Losman. Trent Edwards completed fifty percent of his passes for under 100 yards, no TDs, and an interception. I’m not knocking Edwards, but this team is fundamentally bad in the trenches.

:: Maybe the Bills should just eliminate all their tight ends and sign some new linemen, since the TEs are useless here anyway.

:: Maybe it’s just my rabid hatred of the StuPats talking, but there’s no way Wilfork wasn’t gunning for Losman’s exposed knee on that play.

:: More injuries. What did the Bills do to so alienate the football gods? Now, rookie linebacker Paul Posluszny has a broken arm and will be out for quite a while. JP Losman will probably miss some time. About the only thing that can be hoped now is that some youngsters who would otherwise have never seen the field somehow turn out to be diamonds in the rough.

Well, that’s about it. Next up: the New York Jets, at home. The Bills usually play the Jets tough. But then again, once Aaron Schobel, Chris Kelsay and Donte Whitner all get hurt next week on the same play, the Bills will be fielding seven guys on defense.

Sigh.

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R Stillers 26, Bills 3

Heavens, this was one of those games where you’re left scraping the bottom of an incredibly low barrel to find good things to say. Yeesh, that was bad. Oh well, at least my second favorite team, the Steelers, won.

Woo-hoo!

:: Terrence McGee runs the kickoffs back nicely.

:: The Bills at least play hard. What always bothered me when they stunk up the field during the Gregg Williams/Drew Bledsoe era was the way they just looked lethargic when they were getting clobbered. The current crop of youngsters actually look pissed when they’re getting beat down badly. Not that this augurs anything in particular for their future, but hey, I’ll take Lee Evans losing his cool in the waning moments of the fourth quarter and committing two consecutive unsportsmanlike conduct penalties over Drew Bledsoe’s monotone insistence in the postgame interview that he’s “so mad he doesn’t know what to do”.

:: Brian Moorman’s a good punter.

Meh.

:: The Bills’ offensive line. Pass blocking was still bad, run blocking was occasionally adequate. The Jason Peters/Derrick Dockery side was supposed to be very strong, but they allowed lots of pressure to get through.

:: Defensive effort. “Bend but don’t break” will eventually get you killed, if your offense can’t put points on the board, but those guys put forth the best effort they could. Sadly, it’s not even close to enough because their talent level just isn’t up there.

:: JP Losman. Again, he wasn’t a factor one way or the other. He didn’t have a bad game, he didn’t have a good game, I’m not sure that he even had a game. The guy has got to start making plays once in a while. Two games, and aside from a couple of nice runs, no plays made from QB. Right now he looks worse than he did last year, if only because he doesn’t look any better. If this keeps up, we may be looking at some extended playing time for Trent Edwards before this year is out.

D’oh!

:: Defensive results. I praised their effort above, but a boss of mine used to say, “Don’t confuse effort with results”. They got pounded hard, giving up over 400 yards for the second straight week. Rare pressure on the opposing QB, and when they do get pressure, it rarely results in a sack. The middle of the field is always conceded to opposing receivers. Sure, they work hard, but the results are more than 400 yards and 26 points yielded.

:: Offensive results. Three points, which resulted from a drive that began in Steeler territory after a McGee kickoff return. Receivers don’t get open. Losman can’t find anyone, and seems more and more to lack the finesse needed to make those really difficult throws. No good tight end play. The offensive line still falling apart and never looking to really exert any kind of control over the line of scrimmage.

Next up: the Bills travel to New England, which will likely be able to take a week off from cheating in order to beat up on this team. Somehow Aaron Schobel will get his usual two or three sacks of Tom Brady, since he always seems to play well against Brady, but that will be that.

Wow, this is shaping up to be a bad year.

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Et tu, Belichick?

Friends, Romans, NFL fans, lend me your ears!
I come to bury the Patriots, not praise them.
The games that they win live after them;
the things they do to win those games are oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with the Patriots. The noble Belichick
hath told you that the Patriots are noble,
and Belichick is an honorable man….

Well. Well, well well. Well. Ahhhh…well.

This may be unseemly on my part, but…heck, I don’t care. I’ve long made absolutely no secret how loathsome I find Bill Belichick and his whole merry band of cohorts in New England, and once again, they prove my point through arrogance and, now, unmasked misdeeds. I’ve always been flummoxed by the mystique surrounding Belichick (and Tom Brady), and now quite a lot of it is explained: it turns out that Belichick’s greatness is at least in part a function of the fact that the guy’s just a weasel.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious, doesn’t it, how Belichick’s managed to carve out his reputation as a guy who can somehow elevate the most marginal of players into terrific performers.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how all of those players who thrive under Belichick fail to thrive when they go someplace else.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how Belichick’s former assistants go on to their own coaching jobs and end up not doing quite as well.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how it is that the Patriots always struggle against the Bills in their first meeting of the season, and then blow them out in the second.

And it suddenly seems a lot less mysterious just how it is that New England always seems to just happen to have the exact right play drawn up in every situation.

I’ll admit it: I’m happy this came out. I like that the hallowed New England mystique has taken a major hit. I like that people are now seeing that franchise more the way I’ve seen them for years (pretty much ever since that incredibly phony stunt of theirs at the outset of Super Bowl XXXVI, when they eschewed individual player introductions in favor of “being introduced as a team”). For a number of years now, questioning the Anointed status of Belichick, Brady, and the Patriots has been the NFL equivalent of walking into a Catholic church during Mass and denouncing the Pope with a bullhorn.

Well, it now seems clear to a lot more people that the halo on the New England organization is actually a brass hoop held up by a bit of coathanger.

What to do, then? I personally would like to see the Patriots stripped of their first and second round draft picks next year, as well as have the league invalidate any trades they might make to acquire new picks in those rounds. And then I’d require Belichick to wear a three-piece suit on the field during all game days. That ought to hurt ’em!

(OK, gloating’s over. Back to the more reasoned tones you’ve all come to expect here!)

UPDATE: Belicheater.com. I love it. A taste:

Only Belichick’s lack of throwing furniture and his omnipresent monotone keeps his reputation from completely spilling over into Bob Knight territory. He’s a jerk, but not one you hear screaming a lot. Belichick might not completely disdain the comparison to Knight, a good friend of Belichick’s former boss, Parcells. Knight was never one to rush to apologize for his actions, and Belichick doesn’t openly, Nixon-style, declare “I am not a jerk,” instead issuing vague responses that sound like they were written by Alan Greenspan.

But one other thing about Knight. For all of his flaws, he was all about fair play. Belichick is about gaming the system as much as you can.

That’s from this article by Bob Cook, reprinted at Belicheater.com.

I wonder how long this has been going on. This seems, frankly, worse to me than Barry Bonds’s steroid use; this potentially could put an asterisk next to the results of three Super Bowls. Ouch.

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There but for the Grace

Kevin at BfloBlog has a rundown on the latest details on Bills tight end Kevin Everett, who suffered a very bad spinal injury in yesterday’s game. I don’t have much more to say than this…but what a horrible thing to happen.

The thing about the whole incident is that the hit that ended Everett’s career and may have paralyzed him for life wasn’t that big of a hit, by NFL standards. This wasn’t one of those “Cringe when you see the replay” hits. And yet, Kevin Everett may never walk again. Hell, he may even die from this.

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Broncos 15, Bills 14

Well, that sure sucked! Expecting one’s team to go 5-11 doesn’t make it any more fun when one of the eleven predicted losses turns out to have been as winnable as this game was. For what it’s worth, I saw from the Bills today pretty much what I expected to see today: some promising stuff, and some other stuff that made me wish for December.

Anyway, here are my reactions to various stuff, categorized into three areas depending on how I feel about them.

Woo-hoo!

:: Marshawn Lynch. This was the first time I saw this guy in action, since I didn’t watch anything in the postseason. I didn’t realize how large he was, and he looks like he’s going to be a really good one as he gets better and more experienced. On his touchdown run, he literally pushed a Denver defender into the end zone in front of him.

:: Roscoe Parrish. Great kickoff return, obviously.

:: Paul Posluszny. I liked him a lot. Now, if someone else on the defense would make plays.

Meh.

:: JP Losman. Look, I didn’t think he looked bad in the game. Nothing he did seemed really cover-my-eyes awful, like he once did last year. But he didn’t seem to step forward at all, did he? Losman’s at a stage in his career when he should be able to make more plays than he did yesterday. He didn’t step it up. I don’t think Losman made any mistakes that cost the Bills the game, but he didn’t take control, either. I don’t think he took a step backward — but I didn’t see any evidence of a step forward. At this point I think he should be showing some of those “intangibles”, now that his raw mechanics seem to be OK.

:: Bills defense. We knew it was going to be a bad defense, and it played like it. Sure, they only gave up 15 points, but it seemed like every time Denver needed to make a big conversion, they either made it or gained enough yardage to turn a long yardage situation into a short yardage situation on the very next down.

:: Offensive line. I was, on balance, favorably impressed by this unit. But we’re talking, roughly, fifty-three percent impressed versus forty-seven percent shaking my head in dismay. I like to think the unit will get better as the year goes on and the chemistry develops. They weren’t getting blown off the line by the Denver defenders, and a few times they actually seemed to exert some will over the Broncos. But they weren’t consistent.

D’oh!

:: Injuries. Holy crap. Coy Wire, Ko Simpson, and Kevin Everett: all hurt today, with Everett’s sounding potentially career-threatening. (Not like Everett’s had much of a career, but still.) The Bills are already weak at all the positions at which guys got hurt today.

:: Tight ends. It was maddening to me that Jay Cutler always had this big, strong target roaming the middle of the field to grab his dump-off passes (Javon Walker — not technically a TE, but still), and Losman didn’t. Robert Royal? He provided a catch. So did Everett before he got hurt on a special teams play. Two catches. None of Losman’s receivers could get open in the middle, and the Broncos did a great job in taking downfield away. Ugh.

:: Peerless Price. One catch. Drawing a lot of salary that could otherwise have gone to a better receiver or a tight end or a defensive lineman or someone who could make a contribution.

:: Dumb mistakes by players. Josh Scobey either missed or ignored a signaled fair catch, and leveled the Denver player who was going to catch a punt. The resulting penalty and re-kick resulted in a net change of nineteen yards of field position.

:: Playcalling. I really hope it comes out who was responsible for trying a deep pass play when there’s 2:30 left in the game and you’re holding a two-point lead. What a horrible, horrible idea that was; it’s only defensible in that goofy NFL-speak way where “You’re a genius if it works and a goat if it doesn’t.” But if that play had simply been a run up the middle for no gain, it would have run fifteen or twenty seconds off the clock that were left on the clock otherwise by the incompletion. If everything else had been exactly the same from that point, the Broncos’ rally for the winning FG would have run out of time well short of FG range. As it played out from that point, the Bills didn’t even have to convert the third down.

Worse, that call sends a horrible message, doesn’t it? If that came from the coaching staff, it seems to indicate a total lack of confidence in the defense. Granted, the D had not played very well all day, but they’d kept Denver to a low score. Calling for the home-run at that point basically says, “There’s no way our young guys on D can preserve the two-point win once the other guys get the ball back.” It could have been, “OK, youngsters, win the game for us.” Instead, it was “God, we need more points.” Bad, bad, bad move.

Next up: the Bills visit the Pittsburg Stealers. They should be able to bounce back against…oh crap, it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ach, I have a bad feeling about this.

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Are You Ready!

We’re coming up on the start of the NFL season, folks, so here we go: it’s Prediction Time here at Byzantium’s Shores. Or, in other words, “Let’s all watch as our Humble Narrator goes on record to demonstrate how little he knows about football.” First of all, the usual warning to people who might be newly encountering my football-related drivel: don’t take all this too seriously. I don’t write about football with the intent of seeming like this guy:

but rather like this guy:

OK? Then let’s have at it, in our usual Q&A format!

The Buffalo Bills lost just about every talented player they had in the offseason, and replaced them with nobodies, nothings, has-beens, not-yets, never-wills, and never-wases. Just how bad will they be?

Next question.

OK. How bad will the Bills be?

They’ll be bad. They may avoid the cellar in the AFC East, by mere virtue of the Dolphins being in possibly worse shape as a franchise, but there’s no way they’re better than the Jets, and I’m sure they’ll have their usual result against the Stupid Patriots (hang with them one game until they blow it late with stupid mistakes, and get blown out in the other).

The Bills are young again. They’re new. The roster has lots of holes that are hoping to be filled with guys with three years or less of playing experience. The Bills do have some promising talent on the roster, and if this draft proves to have been roughly about as good as last year’s was, then maybe next year they’ll be in position to start plugging in guys from free agency and start to sniff around the playoff hunt.

Next year.

Yes, I said it — I’m looking to next year already.

I think JP Losman will continue to improve. (Can we stop now with the comparisons of Losman to Rob Johnson? Losman’s already demonstrated ten times the heart, drive, and toughness that Johnson ever did. So they’re both scruffy-looking quarterbacks from Southern California. That’s where the comparison ends. Johnson never gave any kind of impression other than that the only reason he was in the NFL was because, well, that’s what you do after you have a good college career, he never liked Buffalo, and he got hurt so much that it was like he was made of glass. Not like Losman at all.) Maybe the offensive line, with three new guys on board, will settle in and be better than it’s been in years. Maybe Peerless Price finds his form, and maybe the Bills find a tight end who can catch reliably well. It’s on defense that they’re going to have big problems. They will probably be very soft at the line of scrimmage, as they have been ever since Pat Williams left. Their corners are young and mostly untested. So are their linebackers. This defense is a possible disaster-in-waiting.

And yet, I’m not bothered by the departures of London Fletcher, Takeo Spikes, or Nate Clements. All of those guys are getting older, and the fact is that with the problems this team has in terms of talent on the roster, by the time they got good at the other areas, those players would have been beyond the age of use anyway. Spikes is the one that hurts, in my mind: he was a stunning talent and a thrill to watch, but then he suffered an injury from which players do return, but almost never to the level of play that they’d exhibited before. Clements had a good year last year, but I’ve watched him his whole career and he often seems to have motivation issues and makes dumb mistakes of selfish nature. I don’t think he’ll tank in San Francisco, but I don’t think he’s going to be the savior out there, either. And Fletcher? A tackling machine, sure, but he too is getting older. So basically, whether these guys were here this year or not makes no big difference, since they wouldn’t be around when the Bills finally get good again. That being the case, I think it’s best to go with youth.

I know that a lot of Bills fans are impatient to make the playoffs again; I know I sure am. Seven years going on eight as one of the eighteen “also-rans” in the NFL is getting a bit old, but I think a lot of Bills fans never actually realized just how fundamentally poor the roster was in the wake of the Tom Donahoe years as GM: this shows as we see just how few of his chosen players are still around (Losman, Lee Evans, Terrence McGee, and a few others). Once the nucleus is in place, then we’ll see the kind of thing where the Bills can do the plug-in-guys-via-free-agency thing like all the really good teams do. But Marv Levy is still building his nucleus. I like what I’ve seen of this so far (with a few oddball exceptions, like throwing money at Peerless Price).

[I don’t mean to totally rag on Donahoe, who I think genuinely tried to make good football decisions, aside from his bizarre refusal to address the line of scrimmage as opposed to making big deals to land what he thought were star players like Drew Bledsoe and Willis McGahee. It’s just that few of his decisions panned out in terms of good, long-term guys on the roster; several were outright disasters (Williams); and it shouldn’t be forgotten that Donahoe himself inherited a team whose roster was bleeding talent, fast. (Read up sometime on the Bills’ 2000 draft, if you don’t believe me. Not one of the players picked in that draft ever amounted to a thing, and as Gregg Easterbrook once wrote, you can’t whiff an entire draft without entering a period of sustained decline as a franchise.)]

So…how will the Bills do? I personally will be elated if they go 7-9. That would equal last year’s record, but with a much younger roster. If they pulled off 7-9, I’d be fairly optimistic about their future as a team. However, 7-9 is probably the outlier of possible realistic goals for this team, this year. I think 5-11 is more likely.

You know, you’re awfully sanguine about the Bills being in an apparently-unending rebuilding process, in this NFL era when teams can go 3-13 one year and make the conference championship game the next. Doesn’t it annoy you that they’re one of three teams to not make the playoffs in this century?

Sure, that’s irritating, but it doesn’t do any good to get mad at the situation as it exists, right? The way I see it, Marv Levy is now doing what Tom Donahoe should have been doing when he got here. Except for Donahoe’s first year here (2001, when the Bills were coming off their worst draft in franchise history and were in serious salary cap trouble), he managed each offseason as though the team were just a player or two away from being a contender. We now know that wasn’t the case, but that’s how Donahoe managed things, for good or ill. By the time his tenure ended, the team’s talent stock was terribly depleted. No matter who took over, it was going to mean several seasons of rebuilding.

So how much more rebuilding are you willing to put up with, anyway?

Well, I think that this year needs to be the last of the rebuilding years. Going into the 2008 season, Levy will have had three drafts and three free agent signing periods with which to put together a decent team. I think he’s on his way, but if 2008 comes and goes without a playoff berth (or at least a winning record with a serious push for a playoff berth, since it’s always possible in the AFC these days to go 10-6 and still miss the postseason), I’ll start grumbling.

Should Ralph Wilson sell the team?

Of course. Next question.

OK, the Bills are going to stink then. Bummer, dude! So will the Colts repeat?

They could, and I certainly think they’ll be right there, in the mix. I’m not picking them to repeat, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.

Will you vomit all over your keyboard if the team from New England wins it all?

Yes. As my long-time readers know, I can’t stand the smugness of Tom Brady’s default facial expressions, Bill Belichick makes me want to throw up, and I detested the way both of those guys acted when they lost last year’s AFC Championship Game. (Belichick was rude and dismissive, while Brady apparently didn’t even bother to shake the hand of the guy who’d beaten him, Payton Manning. Chalking it up to their shock of actually having lost doesn’t wash; when you’re a pro at that level and you’ve been around as long as those guys have, it should be muscle memory that you shake the hand of the guy who beat you.) Watching those guys lose makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. It makes me feel like a little kitten. Conversely, when those guys win, I think God kills a puppy.

So…will the team from New England win it all?

Probably. I shall now gnash my teeth into oblivion.

They’re a well-managed franchise. They’re loaded with draft picks for next year. They beefed up their receiving corps. Sure, stuff could happen: Randy Moss isn’t a given to do much of anything, their linebackers are old, and Smuggy McBrady (I’ve just now decided that’s what I’m calling him this year) is probably due for a bite from the Injury Gods. Their defense could falter. Lots of things could happen that could keep them from Their Holy Anointed Goal of winning Super Bowl XLII. But if none of those things do happen, then I think they’re favorites to take it all.

Which means that I’ll be buying a new keyboard the morning after the Super Bowl.

Can’t someone else beat them? Won’t someone stand up to the Stupid Patriots? PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Well, sure! San Diego’s got an absolutely loaded roster, and Philip Rivers is a year older. And if their new head coach was someone other than Norv Turner — talk about recycling a lackluster coach, that’s like if Q from the James Bond movies gave the keys to the Aston Martin not to 007 but to the rookie spy Agent Fred — I might even pick them. And New Orleans is also a complete team that could end the NFC’s losing streak in Super Bowls (currently four games, and 2-8 overall since Denver finally reversed the AFC’s awful Super Bowl trend after the 1997 season). Indianapolis isn’t going to fade, and Baltimore should be there as well.

So who are you officially picking to win it all, then?

Well, let’s pick the division winners first, I suppose:

AFC East: New York Jets
AFC North: Baltimore
AFC South: Indianapolis
AFC West: San Diego
AFC Wildcards: New England, Cincinnati

NFC East: Dallas
NFC North: Chicago
NFC South: New Orleans
NFC West: Seattle
NFC Wildcards: St. Louis, Philadelphia

AFC Champion: Baltimore
NFC Champion: New Orleans

Super Bowl Champion: New Orleans.

That’s who I’m picking, folks. Lock it in now, and tune in each week to see how wrong I am! (In the time I’ve been doing this, I’ve picked one Super Bowl exactly right before the season, when I chose the StuPats to defeat the Eagles three years ago. Last year, I was staggeringly wrong, as neither of the teams I picked to go to the Super Bowl even made the playoffs.)

Wait a minute! You said up there that the StuPats would “probably” win it all, and then you don’t even pick them to win their divisiion? What’s up with that?

Well, I picked that way for several reasons. First, the best way to guarantee that your picks will be at least partially wrong is to pick every defending division champion to repeat. Somebody always falters. Second, in the AFC, it doesn’t really matter, does it? The last two AFC Champions have been third and sixth seeds respectively (and both then went on to trounce the NFC top seed in the Super Bowl), and over the last thirteen seasons, AFC top seeds are 3-10 in converting a top seed status into a Super Bowl appearance anyway. And finally, I’ve been picking the Jerks from New England first every year, and I’m sick of it, because I hate them. So there. It’s a totally emotional pick, but then, this is a totally emotional blog, right?

So there you are. Write it down: Saints win it all. In February, when somebody else is holding up the Vince Lombardi Trophy, you’ll all be able to laugh at me in my egg-faced state!

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Ah You? Ah No!

Random thoughts on sports, culled while I was on hiatus:

:: Over the last two weeks, the Baltimore Orioles have launched a nine-game losing skid with a game in which they gave up thirty runs. That’s an already notorious event in this MLB season, but what gets me is that this was the first game of a double-header. Those guys gave up 30 runs, and then had to go right back out and play that same team again. Ouch.

They finally snapped that losing streak with a win in the first game of a three-game set against the Red Sox just this past Friday night — but then they went right back out on Saturday and got no-hit by a rookie pitcher.

And yet for all that suffering of one of the more impressive streaks of futility I can remember (although obviously not even close to that epic losing streak with which they began their 1988 season), as of this writing the O’s still have a better record than my Pirates.

Oy.

:: The Buffalo Bills made their final roster moves the other day, eliminating a number of fairly surprising names. Quarterback Craig Nall, brought in last year to be part of a supposed three-way competition for the starting job? He’s gone now, with rookie third-rounder Trent Edwards apparently the backup to JP Losman. Running back Shaud Williams, who has somehow managed to maintain a stranglehold on a roster spot the last few seasons despite being the embodiment of “Meh”? He’s gone, too. I’m surprised that Terrance Pennington, a seventh-rounder last year who got quite a bit of game time in 2006, was cut; sure, he’s not exactly the reincarnation of Howard Ballard, but I didn’t think he was disastrously bad and might have grown into a decent player. He still might, actually, but unless it’s on the practice squad, it won’t be here, ’cause he’s gone.

The biggest disappointment, for me, is the release of defensive end C.J. Ah You. First, the Bills need all the help on the defensive line they can get. (Ryan Denney suffered a broken foot in camp and Anthony Hargrove — who lives in the apartment building next to mine, by the way — is suspended for four games. The Bills signed Al Wallace last week to help, and then he promptly got hurt so the Bills put him on IR.) Now, Ah You was a seventh-round pick this year and scouting reports at the time made clear that he was unlikely to be any kind of impact player in the NFL, but I was really hoping he’d buck those odds and become a defensive stud, because I think it would be really funny to hear 73,000 people chanting Ahhhh YOOUUU! whenever he makes a play. I’m always bummed out when a player with a potentially amusing name fails to make the squad.

:: Ahhh, New England, the home of everything good and virtuous in sport!

:: A conversation of mine from The Store the other day, in anticipation of the Bills’ opening game next week against the Broncos, which will pit (among other matchups) generally productive running back (and former Bill) Travis Henry against the Bills’ less-than-stout run defense:

Guy I Know: Hey, I think Travis Henry already has 185 yards rushing against us.

Me: Yeah, and he’s already fathered two more kids.

Cheap shot, I know, but Lord, Travis. There are ways to keep this stuff from happening, you know. Nine kids out of wedlock, in four different states? WTF?!

:: And speaking of kids out of wedlock, the NFL’s Oh-so-dreamy Golden Boy is now just eight kids behind Travis Henry! Tom, Tom, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, no one can! And no tut-tuting for him, because he’s the Caucasian GQ-model quarterback who fathered his out-of-wedlock kid with the actress he dumped for a supermodel. That’s OK!

:: Apparently the Michigan Wolverines decided to channel the spirits of the Detroit Lions when they played Appalachian State the other day. Whoops. What’s funniest? The attendance for that game, at Michigan’s home field, was more than 109,000 people.

:: I’m filing this under a sports post because I first heard about it while listening to the Jim Rome Show the other day (Rome’s monologue on this here). It’s probably mean to pile on at this point, but Miss South Carolina’s disastrous answer to a question is now the stuff of Interweb legend, no? Now, let’s avoid making this a “Dumb Southerner” thing, because I know people from Buffalo who’d probably be that incoherent if put on the spot like that. (Heck, maybe I would! I’m not afraid to admit that I write better than I talk.) And I suspect that this question was the last thing she expected; she probably figured to get a “How do you solve world hunger” or “How do you fix the schools” or something like that; “People can’t find the US on a map!” probably threw her off just a tad.

And besides, there’s a bit of truth to her answer, right? I’ll bet lots of people don’t have maps or globes or spend any time looking at them except for when they’re trying to drive from here to a Burger King over there. Hell, look at American reading habits. Lots of folks don’t have books, so why should they have maps?

Still, I can’t help but be tickled by such verbal constructions as “US Americans” and “the Iraq”. You know what I find funniest in that whole excerpt? It’s not even something she says! If you listen close, you can hear this goofy quiz-show suspense type music underneath her reply, and the second time she says “the Iraq” (at about the 42 or 43 second mark in the video linked above), the music makes this “Ding!” sound, like you’d hear on a quiz show when the contestant gives the right answer. That little chime elevates this from bad comedy to surrealist comedy, in my opinion. Therefore such as.

OK, that’s that. Look for my annual NFL Preview Post later this week! It’ll be a hoot! (It usually is, because I’m almost always wrong about an awful lot of stuff.)

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I heart JP Losman

Here’s what I love to see: JP Losman, the Bills’ young starting quarterback (entering his fourth year with the team), has taken his new hometown into his heart in a big way:

When Losman started to think about what he could do for the City of Buffalo, it’s no surprise his focus went to the grass-roots level. Lending his name to a project, donating a bunch of money and then handing it all off to subordinates is so not his style. If Losman is going to get involved, he’s going to roll up his sleeves and throw his heart into it.

So this summer, Losman created a project called Buffalo Lives, a nonprofit organization with a goal of beautifying Buffalo one block at a time.

His new project has a website, BuffaloLives.org. Of this project, Losman says:

“When you pick a name, you ask yourself, what are we trying to get accomplished?” he said. “We’re planting things that are going to be alive and stay alive. It’s not a dying city. It’s a city moving forward.

“It’s a city that has had the greatest number of comebacks in the last couple of years, according to some studies of the number of people moving back to their communities,” Losman said. “It was just rated in Forbes magazine as one of the coolest cities in America for nightlife, culture, art, music. It is being recognized, but the actual people of Buffalo need to recognize it.”

The 26-year-old Losman is a native of Venice, Calif., and spent his college years at Tulane University in New Orleans. After being drafted by the Bills in 2004, he moved into a downtown condominium. Last year, he bought a house on Oakland Place, near Women and Children’s Hospital.

“The old-style homes in the city — they were built to last,” Losman said. “Whereas you go to California, and they box you in like rice. The homes are twice as expensive as here in Buffalo and twice as small and twice as close together. There’s no backyard.

“On any given night, you can hear good music,” Losman said of Buffalo. “On any given night, you can go to many great restaurants. People do take pride in the area, but I think people need to realize they can take more of a leadership role in their community than they realize.”

This is just terrific. Bravo, JP.

Now, win the Super Bowl one of these years, and you’ll be worshipped like nobody since…Jim Kelly!

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A couple of sporting thoughts

One: on a scale of relative outrage, I think that the Michael Vick thing so far outpaces the Barry Bonds steroids thing that they’re not even remotely in the same reality. One guy takes drugs to give him some extra ability on the field. The other kills dogs because he thinks it’s fun to kill dogs. Bonds: jerk. Vick: depraved, disgusting individual.

Two: good article here on the NFL’s lunatic approach to rookie salaries. I hate this business of rookies, who have never played a single down in the NFL, holding out because they deserve more money, and I hate that this has made having the top pick in the draft a less attractive thing than it should be because the team with the top pick is saddled with a massive salary for that player before they ever make the pick. Rookie salaries should be capped, and capped hard. (Now, since the average NFL career is quite a lot shorter than that of other sports, I’d compensate by making rookies free agents a lot sooner — maybe their second or third years. That way, they can cash in with big contracts sooner, and run less of a risk of getting hurt before their initial rookie deal is up.)

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