If the Bills are to go far into the playoffs(viz: Super Bowl XLIII
champions), they can't continue to sleepwalk like this.
Forget about San Diego after the break... Arizona's offense did a great
2nd-half job in New Jersey last week. That offense looks like the
Brady-led NE Patriots. Buffalo needs to look alive and get their heads in
the game from the beginning.
I say, 34-24 for Buffalo... but they need to be sharp from the word GO.
Current Issue: Artvoice v7n48, week of Thursday November 27 » back issues
Season Ticket |
Four and Countingby Dave Staba |
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Bills fans climb cautiously aboard the bandwagon
With the Buffalo’s professional football team off to its best start since the final year of the first Bush administration, the Season Ticket coverage team took to the street to investigate whether the Bills Bandwagon had started rolling.
If it has, it hasn’t reached the city’s neighborhoods yet. Not my neighborhood, at least.
Despite a dominant performance against Seattle and dramatic rallies past Jacksonville and Oakland, there were only a half dozen patrons in M.T. Pockets on Hertel Avenue in the moments before the 4:05pm kickoff.
There are dozens of similar places in a city where once there were hundreds—the gin mill on the corner where core groups of regulars congregate at various times of day and night, with the occasional newcomer wandering in. And it’s a welcoming crowd—or in this case, small cluster—even if you only make it by once or twice during football season, like I do.
“Let me get a round for the house,” Jim, the an upright, 60-something gentleman standing to my immediate left, told Cheryl, the regular Sunday barkeep, “before anyone else gets here.”
While there was some pre-game chatter around the bar, mostly centering on the starting time, there were no replica jerseys visible and certainly no painted faces. It was a group that might have gathered on a Sunday afternoon in February, May, or July.
“It’s kind of hit-and-miss this early in the season,” said Cheryl, a virtuoso of the deep fryer, talking about her expectations for the afternoon’s business. “The weather is still pretty nice, so people are doing stuff outside. Plus, everybody spent their money on their kids going back to school. But it should pick up later on.”
The game itself was hardly a stirring prospect, despite Buffalo’s uncharacteristically unbeaten record. Aside from the late-afternoon start, which always seems a bit jarring to a football culture historically anchored to 1pm Sunday, there was the day’s opponent.
The Rams’ descent from a two-time Super Bowl contestant less than a decade ago and a .500 team as recently as two years back has been rather spectacular. In each of its first three games, the winless Rams surrendered three touchdowns before scoring one, leaving little reason for anyone to reasonably suspect suspense of any kind.
The Bills came in as eight-point favorites, according to the top-of-the-front-page graphic offered by the “NFL Sunday” section of the Buffalo News, which was once known simply and misleadingly as the “Sports” section. That’s a hefty spread for a team playing on the road, even when it hasn’t lost a game and the hosts have yet to win one.
Things were so desperate in St. Louis for third-year coach Scott Linehan, who correctly believed he would be fired if the Rams stunk again, that he benched quarterback Marc Bulger—a two-time Pro Bowl selection—in favor of 16-year-veteran Trent Green.
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MOST VALUABLE BILL: Paul Posluszny led the Bills in tackles with eight, but the second-year linebacker’s biggest contributions came on his frequent blitzes up the middle. He got to the ancient Trent Green on the first St. Louis possession, forcing an incompletion on third down. Posluszny also helped create the decisive touchdown when he pressured Green into throwing the ball directly to Jabari Greer, who scored the first points of his pro career. COUNCIL OF TRENT UPDATE: Trent Edwards was pretty average for most of the first half, completing less than half his throws. In the third and fourth quarters, he was nearly perfect, going 7-of-8, including the perfectly placed clinching touchdown to Lee Evans. The St. Louis version of the Council ended as quickly as it began. Trent Green was okay for a guy whose last appearance, a year earlier for Miami, ended with him unconscious. But the Rams failed to mount a serious scoring threat from the second minute of the first quarter until the last two minutes of the game, by which point it no longer mattered much. Rams coach Scott Linehan, who turned to Green in a transparent effort to save his job, was fired on Monday. The first order of business by Linehan’s replacement, former Bills linebacker Jim Haslett, was restoring Marc Bulger as his starting quarterback. AND YOU THOUGHT YOUR BOSS WAS A…: Oakland owner Al Davis didn’t just fire Monte Kiffin, who oversaw the Raiders’ last-second loss at Ralph Wilson Stadium on September 21. The creepiest owner in sports—perhaps in any business this side of pornography—staged a rambling press conference in which he called his ex-coach a “flat-out liar” and a “professional liar,” said “he conned me” and insisted that he would not pay the rest of Kiffin’s contract. Davis then named offensive line coach Tom Cable as the Raiders’ fifth coach in seven years. Speculation about Cable’s replacement began about 30 seconds later. STAT OF THE WEEK: The Rams ran the ball 19 times for 148 yards in the first half. Trying to protect a lead after intermission, they managed just 19 on 10 tries the rest of the day. SOLOMON WILCOTS’ WORD OF THE DAY: You can usually count on the third-tier announcers assigned to perceived mismatches like Buffalo v. St. Louis to expand your vocabulary, and the CBS analyst didn’t disappoint. Early in the first quarter, Wilcots said Trent Green needed to establish his “level of comfortability.” “Did he just say ‘comfortability?’” I asked Jim, who was standing next to me. “Yes, he did,” Jim said, smiling. Dictionary.com does, indeed, recognize comfortability as a word, even if my spell-check does not. And it increases my level of comfortability to know that Wilcots adheres to the first rule of expert commentary: Never use a two-syllable word when you can so easily stretch it to six. THE GRUB: I’ve written quite a bit about the role of chicken wings in the football-watching experience over the years, but wound up indulging earlier in the day while celebrating the second birthday of my son, Oscar James, who is named after both the least-remembered and most infamous running backs in Buffalo football history, Oscar “Okkie” Anderson of the 1920 Buffalo All-Americans and O.J. Simpson. (Note: The above is not true, as much as I would like it to be.) So when Pommy, Tim and I ordered our food at M.T. Pockets early in the fourth quarter, I went with their steak sandwich, quite possibly the region’s finest. The sandwich did not disappoint, but I couldn’t resist the wings, either. Cheryl’s genius stems from a technique whereby she uses an empty basket to hold the wings under the surface of the boiling oil after they begin to float, maximizing outer crispiness while keeping the insides tender. I wound up having about a half-dozen, as well as polishing off the perfectly medium-rare sandwich. And my arteries feel fine. Seriously. |
Green turned in several strong seasons for Kansas City earlier in the decade, including a couple of Pro Bowl appearances of his own. He is best remembered, though, for the 1999 knee injury that short-circuited his first stay with the Rams and created the opening for an unknown former grocery clerk named Kurt Warner to lead the franchise to its first, and to date only, Super Bowl win.
Last year, the latest in a series of concussions led Green to retire after five games with Miami, only to defy the recommendations of his doctors and return to St. Louis.
You know times are tough when you pin your job on a 38-year-old quarterback who is one good bump away from an extensive series of neurological tests.
Then there are the disappointments of recent years. The Bills overcame horrible starts to stage December playoff pushes in 2004, ’06, and ’07, only to fail miserably each time.
So you can excuse Bills fans for being less than worked up about a game that looked like as sure a thing as you can find in today’s National Football League.
Things opened according to form, with the Bills defense stuffing the first St. Louis drive. On Buffalo’s initial offensive snap, Trent Edwards pinpointed a strike to Lee Evans, a 49-yard gain that seemed to signal the commencement of a blowout, especially when Marshawn Lynch tore off a 12-yard gain on the next play.
Buffalo, it seemed, would quickly eradicate the imaginary eight-point lead the odds-makers had bestowed on the Rams—and then some.
A holding penalty on Jason Peters—who probably should have attended training camp, given his decidedly non-All-Pro form since ending his holdout shortly after the really hot weather subsided—wiped out Lynch’s jaunt, giving the first indication that something was amiss.
Thanks to Peters’ malfeasance, what appeared to be an easy opening touchdown wound up as a mere field goal.
In another job-saving bid, the Rams coach had ordered his defense to blitz Edwards at every opportunity and from every angle, while inserting quite a bit of trickery into his offensive game plan.
The first evidence of the latter came on the second St. Louis possession. Green, crafty old-timer that he is, faked a handoff to Steven Jackson, the powerfully dreadlocked runner who had already begun tearing at the innards of Buffalo’s run defense, and flipped the ball to wide receiver Donnie Avery.
Between the play’s misdirection and the fact that Avery had touched the ball as a professional just three times previously, the Bills were flummoxed. Thirty-seven yards later, the rookie landed in the end zone.
After a trade of punts, throws by Edwards and runs by Lynch again positioned Buffalo for a control-seizing touchdown, only to see their own more-acclaimed rookie receiver, James Hardy, fail to make the very red-zone play for which he was drafted. Twice.
By this time, frequent Season Ticket contributor Pommy had arrived, but without his “Council of Trent” T-shirt, a sporty gray number with blue-and-red print paying tribute to Buffalo’s second-year quarterback, as well as the 16th-century series of meetings at which the Roman Catholic Church defined and condemned Protestant heresies.
“I couldn’t find it,” he said, looking a bit guilty. “It’s got to be somewhere in the laundry pile.”
I thanked him for not digging it out and wearing it, unwashed, but, being a superstitious type, said, “This can’t be good.”
He shook his head in agreement.
The next St. Louis drive bore this out. Linehan’s second attempt at subterfuge, a pass thrown by wide receiver Dante Hall, fell incomplete, but seemed to further rattle Buffalo’s defense.
Hall picked up 10 yards on his team’s second reverse of the first quarter—which itself represented a bit of football heresy—before St. Louis extended its lead by way of the simplest possible approach. On a four-play sequence bridging the first and second quarters, Green gave the ball to Jackson again and again and again and again. On the fourth try, he broke free and raced 29 yards to make it 14-6.
By that point, Tim had joined up with us and we decided to shake things up by making our way around the neighborhood. At both Gecko’s and the Wellington Pub, though, an air of dread gathered over the similarly modest crowds.
It lifted just as quickly, though, when Buffalo moved purposefully down the field after the second half kickoff, with Lynch and Fred Jackson alternating carries until the latter broke free off the right side and scored on a 22-yard run to pull the Bills within a single point.
Then the defense took its turn putting the Rams in their place. Safety Donte Whitner snuffed a long St. Louis drive by sacking Green deep in Buffalo’s end. Then, as we walked back into M.T. Pockets at the beginning of the fourth quarter, Bills cornerback Jabari Greer caught a hideously thrown pass from Green and made his way into the St. Louis end zone, giving Buffalo the lead for the first time since Avery’s surprise touchdown back in the first quarter.
By that point, the bar had filled up with a more typical Sunday crowd. High-fives were exchanged, shots were poured.
Greer’s defensive touchdown convinced the Rams that their earlier impudence had been fraudulent and they meekly surrendered a pretty touchdown pass from Edwards to Evans that wrapped it up and a Rian Lindell field goal that just rubbed their noses in it a bit.
The Bills have another late-afternoon road game on Sunday, this time in Phoenix, then take a week off before returning home to take on San Diego, a popular preseason choice to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl.
Buffalo, though, has the conference’s best record, along with Tennessee. If that’s still the case on October 19, expect that bandwagon to pass through a neighborhood near you.
Reader Comments
Lloyd A. Marshall, Jr. 02 Oct 2008, 21:05
Lloyd A. Marshall, Jr.
07 Oct 2008, 12:47
I'm off today, so I'm posting now. The Bills didn't put their best effort forward, never mind the Edwards injury. Arizona exposed Buffalo for their lack of urgency from the word GO, and it showed. Why the Bills didn't cut Dick Jauron loose, and why they didn't try for a trade of JP Losman, I'll never figure out. Someone please tell Ralph Wilson that Buffalo fans are joining the likes of Pittsburgh/Green Bay/Giants fans... this playoff drought of eight years is unacceptable! Leave a Comment:
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Issue Navigation> Issue Index > v7n40: Crude (10/2/08) > Four and Counting This Week's Issue • Artvoice Daily • Events Calendar • Classifieds |
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