At the sound of the final gun, I heard people say “The Buffalo Bills are in first in the East.” The look on people’s faces at the Ralph seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Then I realized, “this was the look we all had on our faces when the Bills were competitive for a division title.” It had been so long ago. How could I have forgotten? Eddie Vedder once said, “Everything has changed, absolutely nothing’s changed.” How right you are, Eddie.

If I told you the following information, what year would you think it is? The Bills are tied for first with a guy named Kelly leading the team. There is a war in Iraq and a president named George Bush. There is talk about tax breaks going the way of the dodo, there is a running back in Buffalo who people wouldn’t touch in the draft because of a bum knee. There is a Bills game early in the season in Florida that shows some horrible flaws in team chemistry, and there is talk of Bills mutiny. U2 and the Rolling Stones are on tour with people willing to pay $1000 to get a ticket. A massive hurricane hit the states and shocked us with its destruction. There is a wide receiver named Reed on the Bills, There is a QB who sucks and goes by the name Vinny Testeverde. The Jets are going to spiral out of control like….um….a jet. There is a Supreme Court nominee that no one really knows about. See, you can’t tell if it’s early 90’s or 2005. I’ll give you a hint though. M.C. Hammer is not cool and people aren’t running around screaming, “you can’t touch this.” Additionally, no one knows what has happened to the Snapple Lady.

While the win was really exciting, I’m not drinking the Kool-aid yet. I want to, but I can’t shake this horrible feeling. I can’t quite describe the feeling, but I believe it has to do with allowing a washed up RB gouge the Bills defense for 148 yards including two gigantic scampers. I think it might have to do that they played two really bad teams at home back to back, so in reality Buffalo hasn’t proved anything. Something isn’t sitting right, but I want to believe.

The Buffalo Bills’ offense looked pretty decent. They took some insanely hard to swallow penalties. One which took away a first down and the next play was a Holcomb INT to set up a TD. This has been prototypical Bills football for 5 years. I think most of us have just gotten numb to it. None of us complain about the penalties anymore. We barely even listen to the post game, “We need to review the film and work out our mistakes” spiel. We fans just accept 13 penalties for 99 yards as average. This is sloppy football; don’t you forget it.

Outside of that, this was the first time that the Bills offense ran play after play with some confidence. Up to this game three plays for the Bills looked like this. Run Mcgahee for 2 yards, throw incomplete, throw pass short of first down marker, punt. Or the first down and second down plays would be reversed. Sometimes third down involved a broken play where the dump-off pass resulted in a loss of yards or loss of life depending on how high and long the pass floated in the air for.

This week it was run, run, run, first down. Run, high percentage pass, run, first down. It was quite enjoyable. In fact even the Bills seemed like they enjoyed what they were doing. In weeks past, the Bills offense just ran the plays called out, much like how you had to make a presentation in school when your lab partner did all the work. You just read the index card and got back to your seat and hoped no one had questions.

This week the Bills offense did stuff that you can see the team built off of. They essentially said, “We aren’t going to try to be cute (sans the Moulds as QB play, but more on that down below).” They said, “We are good enough to do the following 6-8 plays. Feel free to try and stop us, but we’re just better at it than you are at defending it.” That is an offense that Bills fans really like to see. So if we can do that against some of the hard opponents in hard locations like the next two weeks, then I think we can let the guys go to Minnesota for the bye week and hang with the Viking players as reward.

Outside of that, I’m really at a loss of what to say. Historically for the last five years, any time anyone has said, “We can build off this”, we’ve typically disassembled the whole thing. We’ve laid out a clunker. That’s what makes drinking the Kool-aid so hard. It’s like reading the Dear Abby columns.

Every week there is some woman asking if she should leave her man. The man either cheats on her, chooses his kids over her, would rather have a dog than her, but never explicitly tells her to leave him be. “Dear Abby, I have been seeing this team “Bills” for the last 27 years or so. Each year, specifically the last 5, they tell me they are going to the playoffs. And each year they tell me they are going to try. And occasionally they put a couple wins together and I believe them. But then they fold like a bad hand and leave me with nothing. Should I stay Abby? I really do love them. Signed Broken in Buffalo.”

And for any clear minded person like Abby, the answer is leave. Leave, you idiot, leave. They aren’t changing any time soon. But we’re the mouse-y fans too invested to leave now. I just hope that the Bills are true to their word and can build off these two easy win games.

Additionally, this feeling of being tied for first is so new to me. I feel like I am one of the family members on Extreme Makeover home edition. I’m without words and so grateful. But how long is this charade going to stay together? Two weeks ago beating Oakland and the Patriots seemed impossible. Now, they are very winnable games. The only real hard part is that they are road games. But now is the time we have to use some of the confidence and parlay it up to bigger things. Oakland has Randy Moss injured and a team that has no real game plan. Let’s get this thing moving forward. The Pats are slowly unraveling. Let’s keep tugging on the string. And now we must really develop the Killer attitude. I want to drink the Kool-aid with my pinky up and go into the bye week believing that the next three games aren’t something we should fear, but should be a game that KC, San Diego, and Carolina fear. Oops, perhaps I’ve already starting sipping.

DVD Extras

• So if you are anything like me, you probably wondered how a team could be so stupid and so desperate that they’d call Vinny Testeverde to play for them at the age of 41. Well after my boarding my flight at 10:10 Sunday night, I figured out why the organization is so stupid. You have to look at their fan base. Of the 8 games I travel home for, this Jet’s game flight is by far the worst year in year out. The last three years the Jets have lost, and the flight is full of Jet fans still in their jersey’s and still as obscenely drunk as they were at the game. All the other flights you have a couple stragglers. They might leave their hat on, but they’ve showered and are ready to go home. Not Jets fans. If I had video footage that I could provide, I think that would be more telling on why they are such idiots. I can’t really capture it in words here, but let it be known that for most of the flight one guy kept announcing the starting line up to the 1986 New York Mets. All his fat Jet friends snickered and laughed. Out of the 30 or so Jet fans on this flight there are approximately 4 Beavis’s and 26 Buttheads. They mocked the flight attendants, they talked as though they were still in the Ralph and 70,000 Bills fans were cheering loudly. Before boarding they were asked if they were going to be able to handle being on the flight or they would be removed. It happened to be an idle threat because they kept their heckling up down the jetway. And to make matters worse, their gas was without doubt the most painful part of the flight. Jetblue could have flown on empty and we would have arrived with a quarter tank. So with a bunch of morons like these, its no wonder the management can get away with promising that Pennington is worth $15 million in signing bonus despite not having a rotator cuff. They just don’t know any better.
• My plea to Bills fans is buy the Jets game tickets next year. Please, if not for me, then for my nose.
• I asked Evan, my sober Jets’ fan buddy, how can these people maintain such drunken inebriation for so long. His response, “How much do you think we need to drink to get through a season like this?” It’s funny on paper, but it was funnier when you heard the truth in his voice.
• Before the now dreaded flight, I was slightly impressed with the Jets fans who came out to the stadium. Would I go the Meadowlands if JP and Holcomb were injured and the Bills asked Alex Van Pelt to come back? Probably not, and I consider myself one of the biggest Bills fans out there. Then after the flight, I realized that they aren’t huge fans as much as they are drunken fans who don’t know much about football.
• Jet’s managed to slip on two of the TD passes. Made me wonder if they had the Bills’ shoes. On the flip side of that, the Bills managed to stay on their feet for the entire game. Finally, we are starting to make adjustments with shoes and offense in the second half.
• Nate Clements had a spectacularly horrible game. Out of position, missed tackles, and the pass interference (questionable call). It was very un-Nate like. Hopefully he sorts that out by next week.
• Out of TV timeout, they bring Moulds in as QB. What a strange play to lead a drive. The Jets know you are going to run. Wouldn’t it have been harder to adjust if they saw the Moulds play after a couple regular plays? The Jets get a little winded, and then see Kelly line up in Eric’s spot and then you have confusion and missed assignments. It makes the reverse that much harder to stop. It just seemed ill timed. Perhaps the Bills are show casing that in order to really throw teams off for when Moulds throws the ball next time!
• Willis’ riding of the horse was awesome. If you are going to be picky, he starts off with the whip hitting the back of the imaginary horse. That looked right for a jockey. But then he starts doing the whipping motion in front. I’ve never seen a jockey do that. In fact it kinda looks like he’s doing something else not particularly fit for the Tops Family corner (luckily that was on the other side of the stadium). In the end, I guess that means that Willis will have to keep getting into the end zone until he does the dance right. Oh well.
• Willis is such a character. The entire team is kind of blah and very politically correct. They can’t answer a single question without using a million sports clichés. Willis on the other hand actually discussed his dance to reporters. “You've got to ride the horse, baby. I had the whip going and everything.” Sure, Willis, sure. Never mind that we wondered how you felt with carrying the ball about 30 times a game or if the offensive line looks better to you this week than weeks past. You had the whip going and everything. Such a sweet kid, he is. He seems like one of the only guys who actually looks at each week as a game and some time to have fun. It can be slightly maddening when the team loses 3 in a row, but it puts a bigger smile on your face when they kick a divisional opponent in the teeth.
• Sam Adam’s sack of Vinny near the goal line. He disrupted a handoff. How crazy is that? He literally got to the quarterback before he could hand the ball off. That’s insane. Every couple games he gets one of those and each time, I’m just in shock.
• Overall the rush got to Vinny, but a more mobile or remotely talented QB would have still had enough time to make something happen with his feet or with his arm. It leaves me thinking that the team still has a ways to go on pressuring the QB. There were two times Vinny took the sack when a gigantic hole opened in the middle from over pursuit on the outside. Perhaps the Bills allowed that to happen in this game because it was Vinny, but I believe I’ve seen that hole a couple times this season. Gus Frerotte made his way through one of those holes last week for like a 12 yard gain on third and long.
• Do you get the sense that Mularkey may be a new Wayne Fontes. Remember this guy from the lions? Every year his team would suck, and then they’d issue “Playoffs or your fired Wayne.” The team would put something together, he’d save his job and they’d get torched in the first playoff game. To a lesser extent we have Mularkey starting slow in his first two seasons but seemingly getting stuff on track. How long that lasts this season, remains to be seen, but in my books he’s slowly developing into a less sucky version of Wayne Fontes. I could be completely wrong, but I want to put that down now.
• Mularkey said in the post game that he’s going with Kelly next week (yeah, as a reader’s note, I’ll be referring to Holcomb as Kelly after wins, and Holcomb after losses). That rubbed me the wrong way. For the last two weeks you tried selling it to us that JP is capable and going to go back in, but you just want to throw some teams off by not letting them know who the starter is. And now after his second win without reviewing the tape (Mularkey’s favorite response when he doesn’t want to answer the question) he’s named Kelly the QB. Ok. Why not just keep up the original lie about two capable QB’s so that JP’s not feeling like the odd man out. Talk about drinking the Kool-aid, now that he’s won two games, JP is out, and he is ready to ride it all on Kelly. Obviously as long as we keep winning, who cares who starts, but I can’t help but feel this is going to be detrimental for when we need to bring JP back through injury or just for developmental purposes.
• The Bills have a habit at letting the washed up have one more great performance. There was the Thurman Thomas 100+ game as a Dolphin, last year it was Emmitt Smith with the Cardinals, this year it was Curtis Martin. He had 148 yards on 18 carries. That is 8.2 yards a carry. Granted you take away the 41 and 49 yarders and his average for 16 carries is about 3.6 yards. That’s still more than the 2.8 that everyone limited him to in the season. The run defense has to get better or we have to keep taking the ball away at a nearly unthinkable 3 times a game. It tempers my enthusiasm for the team.
• Are you fairly certain that Teddy Bruschi will return in primetime with the horrible tandem of Theisman and Maguire hailing him as a hero? Are you going to be surprised when he has an all-star performance justifying his return? Are you going to be shocked when he goes on IR the week after and doesn’t play another game this season? It’s so painful to know that the chances of that happening are about 80%. I think he’s rushing it. The man had a stroke. All football aside for a moment, he had a stroke. I don’t know if people come back to office jobs in 8 months from a mild stroke. I think the doctor who recommended that Bruschi can play also diagnosed Terry Schaivo.
• Just a final point to the Bruschi debate, I realize he is a football player and playing the game is in his blood. It must kill him to have to sit there and watch. If he wants to potentially die on the field that should be his choice. It’s a romantic notion to go out doing the thing you love. Teddy is a father and husband, though. He should put those two roles in perspective and complete those jobs with the same enthusiasm that he has for being a field general.
• Last week, my Bledsoe tracker comment apparently got me in trouble with one poster. So first off, I’d like to apologize to Drew’s mom. I would have figured she’d stop checking Bills Zone with her son’s release, but, hey, some of the articles on this site are pretty amazing. I kid the crazy Bledsoe-loving poster. What I did want to say was that I wasn’t wishing ill will on Drew Bledsoe. I was playing the role of a sports economist. I took the past data, I looked at the current data, and I extrapolated what the future data will look like. Like a meteorologist, an economist, the President, a GM for the Bills or Sabres, I could be completely wrong and I’ll still have my job. You can waive your finger and scream angry words at me, but I’m still entitled to my opinion. The good money based on historical norms and other factors such as age and mobility has Bledsoe’s resurrection cooling off at his first prime time game.
• A friend of mine, Evan, told me to not even get into this QB debate because “It’s like talking about abortion with someone who has the opposite stance.” It was hilarious because it’s true. If you are a JP guy, a Holcomb guy, or Bledsoe guy, there is nothing a fan with a different opinion can say to you to sway your opinion. It’s just too touchy a topic. You know you are completely right, your friend knows they are completely right and the argument goes on until both players prove they weren’t worth arguing over. Case in point the 7-11 controversy with Doug and Rob. Not worth it.
• That all being said, Bledsoe wouldn’t have succeeded this year here either. He’s now in an environment that plays to his strengths better. And without all the negativity in a new town, he’s getting to play his game as a pocket passer much better. We never developed a line like that for him. So it really comes down to the two guys we have. Who knows who the better choice at this point is, but the ship seems to be sailing a little smoother with Kelly at the helm.

I hope we continue down this 1990 like road.

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