Tag: Sport

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Eddy vs. Eddie

The road to Waimea Bay, and the Waimea River. The Wife and I drove this road when we were there; I regret not stopping.

On a river, an eddy is a place of relative calm in swift-moving water formed by a large object like a rock; whitewater boaters will often find an eddy in the middle of a rapid and use it to grab a quick breath before resuming their descent. An eddy is a micro-destination along the course of a river or a rapid.

In Hawaii, there is no “an” eddy, there is The Eddie: a surfing competition held at Waimea Bay on the north shore of Oahu. The competition is only held when waves reach a certain height–“open ocean swells of 20 ft”–and that means that the competition has only been held ten times since its inception in 1985. The competition is named for Eddie Aikau, a legendary Hawaiian lifeguard and surfer who died in 1978 when he was lost at sea in a boating mishap.

The last time The Eddie was held was just last week, and here is video of the day’s activities. This is stunning stuff! I can’t stress enough that you need to watch this full-screen with the highest resolution you can manage with your bandwidth.

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The “Greatest” Comeback???

From The West Wing, Season Three, “Stirred”:

VICE-PRESIDENT HOYNES: I heard you had Caps tickets.

SAM: Yes, sir.

HOYNES: How was the game?

SAM: Not very good.

HOYNES: Have you ever seen a good hockey game?

SAM: No.

HOYNES: Me neither. I love sports, I just can’t get next to hockey. See, I think Americans like to savor situations: One down, bottom of the ninth, one run game, first and third, left handed batter, right hand reliever, infield at double play depth, here’s the pitch. But scoring in hockey seems to come out of nowhere! The play-by-play guy is always shocked. “LePeiter passes to Huckenchuck who skates past the blue line. Huckenchuck, of course, was traded from Winnipeg for a case of Labatts after sitting out last season with–Oh my God, he scores!”

A warning for those who don’t care about football: Football blathering ahead!

In the Wild-Card weekend following the 1992 NFL season, the Buffalo Bills famously fell behind by 32 points, 35-3, to the Houston Oilers before coming back to eventually win the game in overtime, 41-38. The comeback was the greatest in NFL history…until just a few weeks ago, when the Minnesota Vikings fell behind 33-0 to the Indianapolis Colts before coming back to win, 39-36. So the Vikings now hold the record for the greatest NFL comeback of all time.

But…do they?

Well, obviously in one very key sense, yes, they do. The numbers don’t lie: a 33-point deficit is greater than a 32-point deficit. And much of the “debate” that followed as to whether this was really the greatest comeback of all time centered on Buffalo fans who just don’t want what’s probably their franchise’s greatest singular on-field accomplishment erased. That’s the problem with records like that: every record can be erased, or pushed to second place, eventually. Championships are forever, but records are transitory, and a record that stands for 30 years before being pushed to second place is still the second-place record. So yeah, I get it.

But…that’s a pretty starkly numerical way of looking at things, isn’t it?

You can’t escape numbers in sports. Numbers are bound up in sports. They are inescapable…probably because numbers are inescapable in life, but really, numbers are sometimes everything in sports. Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl rings, Nolan Ryan’s 7 no-hitters. Ted Williams, last guy to hit .400. The idea then shapes out that numbers, more than anything else, tell us everything about what happens on the field. I remember quoting Fox Mulder from The X-Files a while back, talking about how he can look up a fifty-year-old box score in a yellowing newspaper and know exactly what happened on the field that day, all because of the numbers captured in that box score.

But…can he?

I mean, he can, to a certain degree. But the numbers don’t tell everything.

You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?

The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.

Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.

But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.

Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.

This suggests to me that there’s another kind of greatness at play here, when we talk about “Greatest Comebacks”: situational greatness, we can call it. Or storytelling greatness? The New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 a few years back in the Super Bowl–and they came back to win it. That’s a 25-point comeback, still a full touchdown “less” than the Bills’ against the Oilers…but 25 points down in the Super Bowl? You have to give that some special consideration, I think, because comebacks just don’t happen in the Super Bowl. The previous record for biggest comeback in a Super Bowl had only been 10 points. That means something.

And it also means something that the Bills’ comeback against the Oilers was a playoff game, at home, after a season that had been a bit of a struggle, when the Bills were banged up and missing several starters (including their quarterback and running back), and had been beaten soundly just the week before by that very same Oilers team. The Vikings’ comeback? A regular season game, at home, relatively healthy, against one the worst teams in the NFL that built its lead on a pile of field goals. The box score will tell you the Vikings overcame the biggest numerical point deficit in an NFL game to date. The box score won’t tell you the other stuff, and the other stuff is what we talk about when we sit over a beer and discuss old sports memories.

So. Is the Vikings comeback the greatest in history? Numerically, yes. Absolutely. Thirty-three points is more than thirty-two points.

But I doubt as many people will still be talking about that game thirty years from now as are still talking about that game in January 1993 when a backup quarterback erased a 32-point deficit in a playoff game.

(Credit for West Wing quote. Disclaimer: I do not endorse the fictional Vice President’s opinion of hockey.)

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The Indecision of Mr. Goodell

I’ve had this ESPN article loaded in a tab for almost a week now, without reading it. I figured a bit of distance would make the article less likely to make me angry.

It didn’t work.

As I write this, the Buffalo Bills are gearing up for a playoff game in a few hours. The Miami Dolphins are in town, but it’s not even so much the opponent as the feel that maybe this is the year the Bills finally make that long-dreamt-of Super Bowl run–the one that ends in the Lombardi Trophy being brought, at long last, to The 716.

The Bills’ season has been a tough one with a lot of peaks and valleys–and one deep, deep dive that ended up being national news that put the NFL in a very uncomfortable spotlight. Before the 1st quarter was even over in the Bills’ game against the Bengals a couple of weeks ago, safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle and then collapsed of cardiac arrest. What unfolded was one of the scariest sequences ever seen on an NFL field, a scene that involved Bills trainers and medical personnel applying CPR to Hamlin, Bills and Bengals players openly weeping, Hamlin being whisked away by ambulance, and then almost a full hour of chaos and indecision as to the status of the game itself.

Historically, the NFL’s approach to catastrophic injuries has always been: Get the player attended to, get them off the field and to proper medical care, and then the remaining players get a few minutes to warm back up and get the game back on. It’s been the approach for every injury, including such awful ones as Mike Utley (who never walked again) and Kevin Everett (whose injury was later learned to be life-threatening). At one point somehow the word got to the players: “Start warming up, play will resume in a few minutes.” Some players did start warming up. Others did not, or could not. The game’s announcers reported that they had received word that the game would resume, but later NFL officials would deny this to the hilt. This strains credulity something fierce, as it’s hard to imagine announcers just making up something like that.

Yes, previous practice has been to eventually resume the game. However, the Hamlin injury was something else entirely. This wasn’t “stabilize the injured player”; there was no Utley-esque “thumbs-up” gesture forthcoming. This was CPR being administered to a player right on the field. This was literally “We do not know if this player is going to survive the next five minutes. We do not know if this player will leave the stadium alive.”

As catastrophic as injuries like the Utley and Everett injuries were, what happened to Damar Hamlin was orders of magnitude worse.

And for the NFL to not have a policy in place for this is, to me, unconscionable.

I’ve had several discussions with other fans about this, some of whom agree with me, others of whom think that this was really an unforeseeable event, a circumstance nobody could see coming. The NFL couldn’t possibly have a plan in place for what to do in the event a player dies on the field.

And no matter how much I hear that sentiment, however earnestly expressed, my opinion remains: Yes, they could; yes, they should; and that they apparently didn’t is dereliction of duty.

The violence of the NFL game is well known. Hell, the violence of the NFL game is one of its selling points. There’s a reason the NFL surrounds itself with the trappings of military service and whatnot (which is partly why Colin Kaepernick’s silent, visual protests were so effective). There’s a reason the NFL drapes itself with war-like terminology. Offensive and defensive linemen are “in the trenches”. The quarterback is the “field general”. Teams are said to be going into battle.

Every hard hit gets replayed again and again, all the more if the field microphones happen to pick up the sound of the collisions. Many times you can hear the stadium crowds going “Oooooh!” after particularly violent hits. Football can be a beautiful game to watch, but let’s be honest: its popularity is in large part because football scratches the same itch that the citizens of Rome used to scratch by going to the Coliseum to watch lightly-armed gladiators square off against angry, starving lions. Football is a game whose dangers were quietly swept under the rug for many years, until enough former players were showing symptoms of brain damage that it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

Every fan I’ve known has said, at one point or another, “Sooner or later, someone’s going to get killed playing this game.” That’s not just random thinking by idle fans, either; former referee Ed Hochuli has indicated such fears in the past as well. Yes, what happened to Damar Hamlin is unprecedented, in that we’ve never seen a player stricken on the field to the point they literally required life-saving measures right then and there. But that’s not the same thing  as unforeseeable.

The narrative that took shape in the hours and days after the Hamlin injury was that there was indecision and a lack of clarity from the NFL offices for almost an hour, and that the decision to finally suspend the game was not a clear decision made for obvious reasons by the league’s highest officials (according to the NFL rules, it’s the Commissioner’s call and no one else’s), but rather a forcing of the NFL’s hand by the players and coaches who were understandably rattled by what they had seen happen to one of their own, up close and personal. Those players and coaches had a traumatic experience of their own, and the narrative quickly formed that it was those players and coaches, plus officials from the Players’ Union, who forced the NFL into finally shutting the game down.

The ESPN article confirms this narrative. The NFL really was in a state of indecision. Troy Vincent, one of the highest officials in the League, really did screw this up, and he really did try throwing other people under the bus when the League’s hour of clueless indecision became clear.

I refuse to excuse the NFL on this. The language could be so very simple:

In the event that a player suffers an emergency during a game that requires life-saving care up to and including CPR, the game shall be suspended, regardless of how much time of game play has taken place.

What happened to Damar Hamlin that night was awful and scary…but given the nature of the game, the last thing is was was inconceivable. Every NFL observer I know has conceived of an instance of a player losing his life on the field.

The National Football League generates money in the billions. The owners are the richest group of people anywhere. And the NFL runs events year-round that are huge logistical challenges. Crowd control, food concessions, safety and security–all of these are things the NFL does every single day. And when you’re planning for events of the magnitude of an NFL game–think of all the moving parts in making an NFL game happen, and how much planning has to be done for them, and how much policy has to be made to streamline it all–you also have to have plans in place for emergency events that take place during these events.

For this one circumstance to render the NFL clueless as to what to do, even for an hour, strains the imagination, and it would have been so even thirty years ago, before the NFL spent much of the last decade pushing hard on “safety” requirements like concussion protocols, limits on practice time and physical exertion therein, and so on. It should have been clear almost as soon as the ambulance was on the field that the game was done. The players should never have been in the position of wondering or warming back up, and the coaches and refs should never have been playing phone tag in the middle of the field with the NFL offices in New York City.

Obviously a big factor here is money. That game was the NFL’s wet dream: a late-season night game, nationally televised, featuring two of the best teams in the entire NFL with the home QB being a rising star and the visiting QB being virtually a superstar, with playoff position on the line. It was the single biggest Monday Night Football game in years, and before one quarter was up, it was in jeopardy. I’m sure that the NFL was suddenly terrified of losing the ratings money.

And then there was a week of indecision as to what to do with the game itself, now that they had suspended it and sent everybody home. Here, too, there needs to be an actual policy. Not a wish-list, not a “Hey, maybe we can do this!”, but an actual policy of what happens in the event a game is suspended.

NFL seasons are only 17 games long, with games happening once a week. The NFL isn’t like baseball where you can say “OK, Royals-Twins got rained out on May 12, so we’ll squeeze that one in when they meet again in July.” NFL games rarely get postponed, and almost never when they are in progress; usually it takes a natural disaster or major weather event to intercede. Games are more often relocated (this happened to the Bills earlier this very season, when a snowstorm forced a home game to be moved to Detroit) than outright canceled.

But here, too, major events sometimes have to be canceled. And the NFL had no idea what to do in that case.

I don’t pretend to know what the policy should be, though my personal opinion would be simply this: In the event of a catastrophic event requiring the suspension of an NFL game in progress, the game shall be entered into the standings as a tie. Who knows, maybe do like MLB does and posit an official length-of-game whereupon the score would simply stand as final. Maybe the NFL’s rule could be this:

In the event of a catastrophic event requiring suspension of a game in progress, the game’s score shall be counted as FINAL if less than 22:30 remains in the second half. If the game is suspended prior to that, the game shall be entered as a TIE in the standings, though all game stats shall still count toward the players.

That’s just a suggestion, but there really should be a simple policy governing these situations. Otherwise, you end up with the NFL taking days to think through various scenarios because this game happened to be important for playoff-seeding purposes. The decision to not make up the game would have come within hours of the game’s suspension if it had been some late-season tilt between two teams vying for high draft position–Texans-Colts, perhaps. The approach should be the same no matter what game it is, and I find objections along the lines of “Oh come on, the NFL has never been in this position before!” deeply unconvincing, because these are billionaires running billion-dollar businesses. If we’re going to accept the existence of billionaires (now there’s a subject for another time) and treat them as the elite of our society–which we absolutely do, let’s be honest–then we should also tailor our expectations of them upward.

My overwhelming impression on the night of Damar Hamlin’s injury was that the NFL was exposing itself as a flat-footed, indecisive mess, and not one thing I’ve learned since has altered that impression. Even now I can feel the NFL heaving a big sigh of relief: Hamlin is recovering well, though his football future is cloudy. The playoffs are here (Jeebus, Chargers, did y’all have a big turkey dinner at halftime or something?!), the Bills play the Dolphins today, the Bengals are still there and ready to make a run of their own, and so on.  There might still be some controversy, particularly from Chiefs fans who are pouty that they don’t get to host the AFC Championship Game if it ends up being Chiefs-Bills, but the feeling now from the NFL that I’m seeing is “Wow, we dodged a bullet there!”

I don’t think the NFL should be let off the hook, is all I’m saying. Expect better from your billionaire masters, folks.

And oh yeah, Go Bills.

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“The Great One”

Were I given by some magical being the chance to see a single athlete from history, engaging their sport at the height of their power, my answer would likely come very quickly: Roberto Clemente, “the Great One”, who died in a plane crash just off Puerto Rico while doing humanitarian work in South America. Clemente died with exactly 3,000 hits, was a perennial All-Star and Gold Glove winner, and he played for two World Series champions during his career, spent entirely with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Clemente was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, and certainly the greatest Pittsburgh Pirate of all time.

I saw this highlight of Clemente’s play in right field just the other day. Usually when we admire baseball feats, it’s either a hit or a catch. This is a throw: in Game Six of the 1971 World Series, an Orioles batter hits a sharp, hard base hit into the right-field corner. There’s no way Clemente can turn this clear base hit into an out, but he can get the ball back in quickly, stopping any runners already on base from scoring–and that’s exactly what he does. Note how patient he is: he sets up and lets the ball come to him. It’s fundamentally perfect fielding, and that’s before he rises and uncorks an astonishing throw. Yes, it’s a one-hopper–but the hop doesn’t come until the ball is almost all the way back to home plate. No one scored on this play, and the Pirates went on to win that World Series.

And if the magical wish-granting being I mention above asked me to specify one play committed by the athlete of my choosing? In that case, I’d go back to the Pirates-Cubs game on July 25, 1956, when Clemente came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded, and hit the only walk-off inside-the-park grand slam in baseball history.

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They don’t make coliseums like they used to….

If the attitudes in Ancient Rome had anticipated attitudes on 21st century America, I suppose they would have razed the Coliseum after just a few decades because the rich and powerful–Brutus and Cassius, say–could have made more money on a newer venue farther out from the city core. But no, the Romans built a sports venue that would last them for centuries and whose stone guts would still be standing over 1500 years following the fall of their Empire.

Meanwhile, in the US we have absurd situations like the Atlanta Braves and Falcons, both of whom are playing in spiffy new stadiums built in the last couple of years, replacing aging venues built…in the 1990s. At least Chicago still has Wrigley and Boston still has Fenway…but here at home, in my neck of the woods, the Buffalo Bills are gearing up to start construction on their new stadium. (And this is literally my neck of the woods: we live less than two miles from Highmark Stadium, current home of the Bills, and the new facility is set to be built across the street from the current stadium, basically taking the stadium and the parking lots and flip-flopping them.)

Renderings for the New Bills Stadium (which I’m sure will sell naming rights to some local company so it’ll end up being a boring corporate-sounding name) were released the other day, all over news media and social media in the 716:

My reaction? Meh, whatever.

Look, it’s fine. It’s nice. Stadiums (stadia?) nowadays all tend to have this futuristic-shiny thing going on (exceptions exist–I do like the way Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium ended up), and architectural diagrams always make new buildings look shinier than they do in real life; that outside rendering up top looks less like a building and more like a Ralph McQuarrie concept-art painting for a 21st century remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The field rendering? It’s fine. It’s a stadium. Inside, they all kind of look the same, because there’s really not a whole lot new you can do with a football field and 60-70,000 seats around it. It’s interesting that according to the scoreboard the Bills are beating the Jets 24-3, and according to the Gigantic Teevee Screen, the Bills are playing a home game in their white uniforms. Other than that, my basic reaction is “Yup, that’s a stadium.”

Do the Bills need a new stadium? Not exactly, in the sense that the current one is still perfectly capable of hosting games (they’re having one tomorrow night!), it’s not crumbling, et cetera. But in the sense of “Can the NFL, the Bills’ owners, and some others make a shit-ton more money than they already are if they rebuild?”, then the answer is, “HOLY SHIT YES, AND THEY CANNA BUILD IT FAST ENOUGH!!!” Which just happens to be what the answer always is, here in our era of Late-Stage Capitalism.

The worst part is the price tag that will be assessed not on the team’s owners, who are worth over 5 billion dollars, but on the public. This new stadium is supposed to cost well over 1 billion dollars, and it’s yet another example of the rich not being asked to pay entirely for the thing they want. So in a state and community with out-dated schools and infrastructure and loads of impoverished citizens, we’re spending over a billion dollars on a building that will help people who are already rich beyond comprehension get even richer.

I could rant about this, but at my vantage point of 51 years, I’ve given up on this sort of thing. If there is a point at which Americans become so sick of being fleeced by the rich that they start setting up the guillotines in the city squares, I’ve no idea what that point is. It’s tough shit, ’cause that’s just who we are as a country. We’ve equated “freedom” with “thank you sir, may I have another”, when it comes to the rich being showered with advantages they hardly need.

A while back the big debate around here wasn’t whether to build a new stadium, but where. Many people wanted it in downtown Buffalo, or as close to downtown as possible. The most frequently-mentioned site was a spot just off I-190, the main highway that accesses downtown Buffalo, where a bunch of mostly-abandoned buildings once used for public housing now stand. The arguments were that the stadium in that spot would benefit from downtown’s hotel availability and transit systems. Now, hotels I can maybe see, as there are a lot of new hotels in the downtown Buffalo area. (So much new hotel space that I often wonder why we have so much of it, given our city’s old, dilapidated, and entirely-too-small convention center that is in desperate need of replacing but probably won’t be for at least a decade now.) Transit, I’m not at all sure about. Yes, there are more bus lines in the city than all the way out to the suburbs, but that’s all there is, unless Buffalo’s Metro Rail system was somehow extended to the new stadium. (Our Metro Rail, built in the late 1980s, is literally a straight line. It was intended to be the start of a good regional light rail system, but nothing has ever been done to add to the original line.)

Building way out in Orchard Park isn’t awesome, but it makes sense on some other grounds. First, the site is shovel-ready; no demolition of existing property is needed at all. The new stadium is literally going onto the parking lot of the old one. There are lots of hotels kinda-nearby, but the area surrounding the stadium itself is not exactly a hotbed of lodging activity; just about any hotel is probably ten to fifteen minutes away. Public transit isn’t fantastic out here, either, with just a few stops that are meant more for commuters than for consistent access to and from the city. And sadly, neither of those is likely to change as long as the population of The 716 remains in its current neighborhood. Increased transit and lodging density aren’t going to happen unless this region starts growing its population in a major way again. (Which might happen longterm! Especially as climate change really starts digging it its heels. But it won’t happen fast enough to benefit the stadium.)

So, the new stadium will still be a place almost entirely accessible by car or bus or RV or whatever. It will still be a big building on a bigger piece of land with another big piece of land next door to house all the vehicles and such. In Buffalo, tailgating is a major part of the Bills’ fan experience; a downtown stadium would almost certainly have made tailgating mostly a thing of the past, at least as we know it now. Tailgating will survive now, so…yay. (This is the fanbase that drunkenly jumps through folding tables, so I won’t say that I was much swayed by nostalgic appeals to tailgating.)

The other big debate about the stadium was whether or not it should have a dome. As you can see by the renderings, the current design is not domed, which you might think a surprise given how the weather around here can be. Now, as always, it’s worth the eternal Buffalo-rejoinder about our weather: “On average it really isn’t that bad in winter here, you just hear about the few times it does get really bad, and anyway, it’s spring that’s massively unpleasant here, winter’s fine.” And yes, all of that is true. And while more teams play in enclosed stadiums now than ever before, there are still hold-outs that play in the open air in northern climes: the Packers, Steelers, Browns, Giants-Jets, and Patriots all play in open-air stadiums. It’ll be fine here, especially if, as built, it’s got a bit more cover than Highmark Stadium, which somehow manages to surround you with concrete and make you feel more exposed to the elements.

And with the “What, no dome?!” reactions come the real pie-in-the-sky dreamers, the ones who say (and yes, they really do say this), “But if it’s not a dome, then Buffalo can’t host a Super Bowl!”

Oy.

Look, folks. Buffalo could build the single-greatest domed stadium in the history of such venues. They could build it right downtown, and give it a Metro Rail spur with a station right there in the building. They could build it within walking distance of all those nice new downtown hotels…and Buffalo would still be unable to host a Super Bowl.

Like it or not, Buffalo for all its charms and all the work it’s doing to try to reverse its sixty-years of bad economic and demographic fortune is simply too small to host an event as big as a Super Bowl. One person actually said to me on Twitter, “How is Buffalo too small? Stadiums can only set 70000 people. It’s not like the stadium doubles its capacity for the game.” It’s almost like it comes as news to these folks that the Super Bowl brings quite a few times as many people to the host cities as can attend the game. I found an article indicating that when Atlanta hosted Super Bowl LIII in February 2019, more than half a million people flooded the city.

Buffalo, at this time, simply does not have the hotel stock or transportation infrastructure for a week-long influx of that many people. The most recent illustrative example is Jacksonville, FL, which hosted Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Jacksonville is often cited as the worst host city of the last couple decades; most famously, that city’s lack of hotel stock at the time was addressed by docking cruise ships in the city’s harbor to act as temporary hotels. And Jacksonville is a city that’s three times the size of Buffalo, in terms of population. (I think it’s obvious that docking cruise ships in Buffalo’s harbor in February is simply not gonna happen.)

So, summing up, my reaction to all this stadium talk is basically, “Sure, OK, looks fine, I’m sure it’ll be a lovely place to see a game if you can afford it, we shouldn’t have to pay for it but we will, and can we please knock off the Super Bowl-hosting talk? Anyway, Go Bills.”

Go Bills, indeed.

 

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You will believe a man can fly.

I promise that even as the local football club, the Buffalo Bills, may possibly be enjoying their best season ever, I will not turn this blog into a place for frequent football-ish commentary. For one thing, I’m not watching the games anymore; for another thing, football opinion often turns out to be dead wrong, and I’m wrong enough without tempting the Wrong Gods.

But…well, the Bills played at Kansas City the other day, and that is a matchup that many see in today’s NFL as being possibly equivalent to Patriots-Colts back in the 2000s, when those two teams always seemed to be squaring off in memorable contests pitting Tom Brady (boooo!) against Peyton Manning. And in the contest the other day, which ended with a 24-20 Bills victory (at Kansas City, which is amazing enough), there was a play toward the end of the game that typifies the Bills now. Quarterback Josh Allen took the ball and ran with it. Allen is quite the running quarterback, and he doesn’t just “take off and slide before he gets hit”; Allen runs the ball. Earlier in the season he stiff-armed a defender, which was amazing to see, but there’s another thing he does that he’s kind of made his calling-card:

Josh Allen hurdles guys.

He literally jumps over defenders, and he does so in such a way that he comes down and keeps running.

On this particular play, Allen took off. He was running toward the sideline, and then he turned upfield. Chiefs safety Justin Reid–wearing number 20–executed perfect technique to bring down a ball-carrier in this situation. Reid got in front of Allen’s lane, squared his shoulders, lowered himself to make the tackle, and brought up both arms. His arms closed–on nothing.

Because as Reid executed his perfect tackling technique, Allen went airborne and flew right over Reid’s head. Allen then landed and kept running, picking up another few yards, while Reid grappled with nothing but air. It was the kind of play that you almost always remember.

No, I’m not going to be a regular football blogger again. But I have to tip my blogging hat once in a while when something like this happens.

Just…wow.

 

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Everybody on the Bandwagon!

A metaphor for the concluding thirteen seconds of the Bills’ 2021 regulation-time season.

So, the NFL season kicks off next Thursday! And playing in the 2022 season’s very first game are the Buffalo Bills, taking on the defending Super Bowl Champion LA Rams! Wow!

It’s been an interesting ride with the Bills in the last five years or so. The fifteen or so years before that were pretty much of an unending era of bad football. Somehow every year the team would manage to do something in the offseason to make fans think “Hey, maybe they’re turning the corner, maybe they finally won’t be crappy this year,” and yet…every year another terrible season. Records like 6-10 and 7-9 as far as the eye could see. Every year, picking somewhere between 9th and 13th in the draft, and yet somehow never getting better.

Longtime readers will remember that through all that, I simply stopped watching them. There was a weaning process that took place over several seasons (where I’d watch the first few games but eventually stop), but when the 2009 Bills took the field in a home game against the Cleveland Browns, and held the Browns’ quarterback to just two completions, and still managed to lose 6-3, I started thinking that the Bills were not a worthy use of my time.

Well, long story short, eight years later they drafted a quarterback named Josh Allen from Wyoming who has turned out to be an unimaginable stud of a player, and they put a whole bunch of talent around Josh Allen, and lo and behold, the Bills are good again. In fact, as I write this, they’re a common pick by “experts” to, as Tom Berenger once said in Major League, “win the whole f***in’ thing”.

Obviously, this region’s mood is…very different now, as far as football is concerned. Bills-mania is everywhere, and especially this year, where the Bills may be about to field the single most Super Bowl-ready roster in their history. It hasn’t felt like this around here* since the early 1990s, when the Bills famously went on their run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances (none of which produced a championship, but hey, it was still fun to live through).

During the long run of football futility, Bills merchandise would show up in stores in August and September, and then usually quietly disappear except for a few key items by November. Ohhhhh, not so this year! The Store is constantly getting in shipments of Bills stuff, to the point where we’re struggling with where to put it all. Last year there was a special run of a certain toy made with a Bills theme, and The Store got pounded on the day this was released to the public. Now, we’re all wondering, “OMG, what’s it gonna be like if they actually do win the Super Bowl?”

(I’m not making any predictions, by the way. This isn’t any fear of “jinxing” things, but simply acknowledging the reality that the NFL can be a wide-open free-for-all once the playoffs roll around. Last year saw both conferences’ fourth seeds make it to the Super Bowl, so…you never know!)

One thing about fandom, though. I saw this sentiment on Twitter the other day, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen this type of thinking:

Yeah…folks, ignore this. If you’re out there cheering for the Bills because it’s fun and you just love that everybody around you is happy about it, and somebody tries to gatekeep your fandom by asking you if you watched the Bills fall to the Patriots 34-20 on the last day of the 2013 season to wrap up yet another shitty 6-10 campaign, just tell them to feck off.

Seriously.

I have posted the following several times, always as a reminder to sports fans that if their team sucks, they are not required to support them or watch them play or do anything at all. This flies in the face of the notion that “If you’re a fan you’re always there for your team!”, which I think is just a big waste of time. There is no virtue at all in being a staunch fan when your team sucks, and your joy when the team wins is no better or worse in comparison to whatever suffering you may have chosen to endure or ignore.

When the Bills were eternally crappy, I finally just stopped watching the games entirely. At the time I imposed a rule: I would start watching again whenever the team reached a point where they were no fewer than four games over .500. (Meaning, only when they would have won at least four more games than they’d lost.) At the time I imposed this rule on myself, I honestly didn’t think it would take that long for them to get to that point. If memory serves, I came up with that rule in 2010 or 2011, and the Bills did not reach my new rule for watchability again for something like eight years. By that time I was so accustomed to not watching football that…I just went on not watching football. Hence my new version of sports fandom, where I only read about it, like folks did before teevee and even radios everywhere.

But I remember a lot of mocking when I would tell people about my four-games-over-.500 rule, with the most common being a derisive comment along the lines of “Oh, so you’re just a fair-weather fan now.”

And now, I quote my earlier remarks:

The Buffalo Bills aren’t friends of mine; I have no personal connection with them at all, and therefore, I see no reason to assume that they deserve a greater commitment of time or emotional energy from me than I’m willing to give them. The idea that I must devote three hours a week to watching a bunch of guys who aren’t very good at their jobs, or I’m not a “fan”, strikes me as deeply bizarre. I can be a “fan” of a restaurant, but if they start serving consistently bad food, I’m not going to keep eating there because that’s what a good fan does. That just doesn’t make sense. Being a “fairweather friend”, only there to support and help a friend in good times, is a bad thing to be. But fandom isn’t friendship. Never has been, never will be.

Believe me, it can be a real downer to hang around with football fans the Monday after a representative Bills game of late, which is another reason I stopped watching. Why would I want to feel like that, when I can do something else instead? One fan friend of mine questioned this once, saying “Well, it’s not like I’m doing something great and important with those three hours,” to which I replied, “Nobody said you had to cure cancer in that time, but maybe doing something else means you’re not spending the rest of Sunday and Monday morning in a funk over a football game.” Seems to me that, all things being equal, subtracting things from life that regularly make us angry is a good thing.

So go ahead, Bills fans, or fans of any crappy team out there! Turn them off! Watch something else! Do something else! And if your “fandom” gets questioned, so what? If and when your team wins the Ultimate Championship, there will be no Fan Police in the streets to stop you from dancing because you didn’t watch each and every crappy game they lost six or seven years earlier. When you die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls you will be denied entry because you chose not to witness every down of their fifteenth consecutive losing season.

It’s OK to jump off the bandwagon, and get back on it. The team won’t notice you’re there. You don’t owe them shit. You have zero moral obligation to watch any more or less of a team’s games than you want to, and nobody gets the right to judge your “fandom” on the basis of their personal yardstick for voluntary suffering. For those calling me out for not watching this team, I hope you’ll remember this next time you’re sitting inside on a stunning fall afternoon watching your team lose 38-10 in the fourth quarter, or in December when you’re insisting on watching every minute of a 42-3 laugher as the Bills fall to the Broncos.

I note now that this advice goes both ways! If they’re crappy and watching them brings you no enjoyment at all, it is totally OK  to turn them off! But if they’ve been crappy for years and you stopped paying any attention because really, why spend three hours a week staring at a turd floating in the porcelain bowl, but now they’re actually good again and watching them not only doesn’t fill you with torpor and existential ennui but actually starts making you feel something akin to actual joy, go ahead!

And if there are people around you who chose to suffer for all those years who are now getting pouty because you’re back on the bandwagon, enh, screw ’em! Jump on that bandwagon! Be a fan, if you want! Screw the gatekeepers! There are no gates!

(But don’t do that table-jumping thing. God, that is some dumb shit.)

Go Bills!**

*I didn’t actually live in Buffalo during the Super Bowl run, so I’m kind of guessing as to what the local mood was. During those years I alternated between college and my then-home in the Southern Tier.

** I’m not especially in love with our regional adoption of “Go Bills!” as a greeting of choice for all social scenarios. I’m sticking with a mix of Detective Sipowicz‘s mechanical “How’s it goin'”, or Wayne‘s “How are ya now?”

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Ryan Fitzpatrick for the HOF!!!

NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick has announced his retirement after a 17-year career. Fitzpatrick was drafted in the 7th round of the 2005 by the Rams, while they were still in St. Louis, after playing college ball at Harvard. He then proceeded to play for nine teams, occasionally being the starter and sometimes having some astonishing games in both directions. He was never a winner–his record is an unimpressive 59-87-1–but strangely, he was.

Ryan Fitzpatrick was one of those quarterbacks who always knew what he wanted to do in any situation, and he always had the confidence to try to do it. He was never once a guy who shrank from the moment. But sadly, he was also a guy who often didn’t have the physical skills–either the arm strength or the speed or the dead accuracy–to make it happen, so the results would sometimes be very, very bad.

With Ryan Fitzpatrick playing, you knew there was potential on every play for something worthy of a highlight reel to happen. Problem was, it could be his team’s highlight reel, or the opponent’s. He might have been a winner someplace, had he landed with a team with a historically good defense–think Jim McMahon or Trent Dilfer–but he also always provided strong leadership and a good presence for the fans. Ryan Fitzpatrick was never great, and everywhere he landed he was generally viewed as the placeholder until the team, whichever team it was, could draft the “Franchise Quarterback”.

That never stopped him, though. Never once did Ryan Fitzpatrick’s confidence flag or falter. Late in his career he played for Tampa Bay (before that team made its own deal with the devil), and he would appear at postgame pressers like this:

Now performing “More Than a Woman”, we have….

But he was also absolutely beloved every single place he went. Nobody ever hated him, and it shows in how he remains beloved in every place he went, after he left. Just this past offseason, Ryan Fitzpatrick attended a playoff game for a team that wasn’t even his, and he took his shirt-off in sub-zero temperatures to cheer the home team, because he had actually played for that particular team ten years prior.

This happened here. Ryan Fitzpatrick played four years with the Bills ten years ago before moving on, and this past year he was with the Washington Football Team…and yet, there he was when the Bills played the Patriots in the wildcard round, shirtless and exuberant:

He never won here, but he did beat Tom Brady’s Patriots here one time, snapping a losing streak to that team that felt like it started in 1938. He had huge plays, and gigantic gaffes. And yet he was beloved, because of stuff like this. He remains beloved, because of stuff like this.

Which is why I think he should be in the Hall of Fame.

I’m being kind-of serious here. I know, I know: the Hall is meant for indisputably great players, and there are statistical thresholds one expects of players in the Hall. And I know, because Fitzpatrick’s stats are hardly gaudy, he’ll never get there. But I submit that it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Stats. The Hall of Fame does not exist merely to honor numerical excellence. I’m a storyteller, and stories are why I love the Hall of Fame–in fact, stories are what I love most about sports in general. Who doesn’t love sitting with friends around a beer or two, swapping stories about great games and great players or even players who weren’t so great but had some great moments?

We don’t love sports because of stats. Stats help and they’re fun in themselves, but stats aren’t what connect us to sports at the most basic level. Stories are why we connect with sports: stories that we can share, stories that we recall collectively, stories that bind us together in fandom either in love for this team or, yes, hatred for that team or player, the one that always drives in the knife.

I submit that sport is more about story than it has ever been about statistic, and on that basis, I have to say that Ryan Fitzpatrick belongs in the Hall of Fame, because…well, anyone who ever watched him play will have a twinkle in their eye and a knowing smile as they remember his exploits. Sport is compelling because of its stories: its good stories and its happy stories and also its terrible stories, its tragic stories, its sad stories. Numbers are great and important and even essential, but there’s a reason nobody sits around the bar or the campfire with a beer in their hand swapping yarns about the time that one banker did something. There’s no stories in that.

Ryan Fitzpatrick was a great story. There are guys with Hall-worthy stats whom fewer and fewer people will ever talk about again, but I guarantee people will be talking about Ryan Fitzpatrick for a long, long, long time.

That’s a Hall of Famer, in my book.

(I was hoping the Bills would bring Fitz back here for just one season, as Josh Allen’s backup. To see him come back here and maybe get a ring? That would have given his story the sheen of fairy tale, wouldn’t it?)

(And yes, by my definition, my Hall of Fame would have to include Tom Brady. But my Hall of Fame would have a Wing of Pure Evil….)

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Forty-four percent

I see that he has finally exited the stage, after tormenting the nation for twenty-two years, or fourty-four percent of my life. He’s gone. It’s over, at long, long last.

I look forward to eventually learning the real secret of his strange longevity, but that’s about all I plan to think about with regard to this guy.

Oh, and the Greatest Of All Time is still Mr. Montana.

That’s all I have to say about that.

 

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The problem with the playoffs is only one team gets a happy ending.

I haven’t written about football in this space (well, not this space, but you know what I mean) in years. I stopped watching football regularly more than ten years ago, and now I only watch if I happen to be someplace where it’s already on someone else’s teevee. But one would have to live under a rock to not know that a recent renaissance has taken place for the Buffalo Bills, after a long seventeen-year-long stretch of never making the playoffs and often being downright bad.

I’m not going to do a deep dive of any sort into yesterday’s playoff loss, a 42-36 defeat by the Kansas City Chiefs. You can find that sort of thing elsewhere–especially analyses of the self-inflicted wounds that were the special teams and defensive playcalling in the last 13 seconds of regulation time, when the Bills–owning a three point lead and just that long away from advancing–instead gave up a field goal to force overtime, and then a touchdown in OT to lose. What a sequence.

(I did not watch the game, by the way. I follow games online at times, seeing social media reactions and checking the box score in-progress. Why not? Sports got along just fine with most fans not seeing the games on teevee for decades.)

I will note, though, that the NFL’s overtime rules continue to be absolutely insane. It is inexplicable that they continue with overtime that makes it possible for a team to win while the losing team never so much as touches the ball. This defies all reasoning, and no other sport does it that way. Basketball and hockey have extra periods, and baseball just tacks on additional innings as needed, so the home team always gets one last at bat. Not so the NFL, which has decided that if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, the game ends. But the game does not end if the first team only scores a field goal. This ridiculous kludge of a rule was what the NFL did after another notorious playoff game, one involving the San Diego Chargers and the Indianapolis Colts, if I recall correctly. The Chargers got the ball and won immediately on a field goal, while Peyton Manning, then one of the game’s biggest stars, watched in sullen silence before heading for the locker room.

The same thing happened last night: Buffalo’s Josh Allen, one of the games brightest stars these days, never got a chance. You can’t tell me that the NFL wants it this way. There’s a reason they scheduled Bills-Chiefs as the late game on Sunday of Divisional Playoff Weekend: because that’s the game most people would want to see. And yet, it ended in a lame coronation because of the league’s stupid overtime rule.

The way to fix this is, for me, fairly obvious: add ten minute periods as needed, and just keep playing until time expires and there’s a winner. I’d keep play moving by awarding no timeouts to either team, and I would eliminate the coin toss by simply positing that the visiting team gets the ball first. (Oh, and I’d also eliminate the opening coin toss as well. In baseball, the home team always bats in the bottom of the inning, and I’d do likewise in football: the visiting team receives the opening kickoff in the 1st, and the home team receives in the 3rd.)

A game’s stars need to play. The NFL’s current system allows for a possibility of the game’s stars being spectators to their own defeats. This is just absurd.

Also, on Josh Allen: my God, can you imagine having a quarterback put up the postseason that guy did, and still falling short? It’s astonishing, and it reminds me of a scene from Star Trek:

What’s happening here is that the Enterprise is participating in some simulated war games, pitting Picard against Commander Riker. But as they get underway, Data has just lost a strategy game like chess to some guy, leading him to conclude that he must be malfunctioning. Picard finally has to go tell him that no, he’s not malfunctioning, he just got beat.

Anyway.

That’s about all I have to say about last night’s game. It’s time for the offseason. The draft is in three months. Training camp’s in six. Better luck next year, Bills.

 

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