Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Comparing the Two Winter Classics
Next story: Max Bill

Gone With the Wind

How will the Bills sell hope for next year?

As the first quarter turned to the second on December 28, those among the masses packing Ralph Wilson Stadium despite a cruelly meaningless game and a torrential wind storm who happened to turn their attention to the enormous video board above the eastern end zone were treated to an interesting advertisement.

You, too, the towering letters suggested, could be a season ticket holder in 2009.

A little more than half an hour later, the 2008 version of the Bills demonstrated just how daunting it will be for the franchise to sell hope—as ever, the most alluring product in sports or politics—for next year.

As you know if you were in Orchard Park or watched at home that day, or have caught a local television sportscast, picked up a newspaper, or turned on almost any local radio station in the week-plus since, it went something like this:

Despite the horrid conditions, which made any sort of precision in any phase of the game unthinkable (unless it involved New England quarterback Matt Cassell on a fourth-down attempt, of course), Buffalo coach Dick Jauron, his team trailing 3-0, decided to call for a sequence that left no margin for error whatsoever.

Facing third-and-five from the Patriots’ 12-yard line with 22 seconds remaining before the half, the timeout-bereft coach thought the best course of action would be running Fred Jackson up the middle—a strategy that offered a minimal chance of reaching the end zone and no possibility of stopping the clock—before rushing the field-goal team on to the field.

Like just about everything else Jauron and his assistants tried over the final two-and-a-half months of the season, it didn’t come close to working. Even if everything else had gone smoothly, center Duke Preston got himself into a junior-high level shoving match near the goal line, grappling for his manhood over some slight, real or imagined, as the clock ran down to zero.

Buffalo would never come close to scoring again, going on to lose 13-0 in the first home shutout suffered by the Bills in a quarter-century.

“What,” I asked Tim, the venerable Season Ticket correspondent, as we stood in front of our seats, located three rows from the top of the stadium named for the team’s owner, “was that?”

“What Was That?” could be the title for the half-hour season yearbook the virtuosos at NFL Films will be forced to produce in the coming weeks. Buffalo’s journey from a 4-0 start and the object of league-wide buzz to last place in the AFC East and a pitiable afterthought on the national scene remains as mystifying as it was agonizing.

The most obvious, and deserving, target in the weeks leading up to the finale and the days since has been Jauron.

Were the high-risk, no-benefit call just before halftime against New England an aberration, a third straight 7-9 finish might have been forgivable.

What was to be quarterback Trent Edwards’ first full season as the starter was interrupted twice by injuries. Buffalo’s most acclaimed defensive player, two-time Pro Bowler Aaron Schobel, sat out the final two-thirds of the season with a foot injury, watching as his team lost eight of its last 10. And Josh Reed, Edwards’ most reliable target for much of the year, missed the three straight November losses—to the New York Jets, New England, and Cleveland—during which the Bills went into free-fall.

But all NFL teams endure injuries and even the healthiest squad could not have overcome the most grievous of Jauron’s choices, from running three times with the ball on the outer edge of kicker Rian Lindell’s range on a frigid Monday night against Cleveland to the series of short-yardage pass calls near San Francisco’s goal line to the most horrid of all, the decision to let the helpless J.P. Losman attempt a roll-out pass with an apparent win over the Jets mere moments away.

In most front offices around the league, any one of the blunders ordered by Jauron and his staff would have been a firing offense. In many, there would not have been a second opportunity to fail, much less a fourth, before a head or heads rolled.

The day after the season ended, Eric Mangini and Romeo Crennel were removed by the New York Jets and Cleveland Browns, respectively. Two years ago, Mangini led the Browns to the playoffs, a strange and wonderful land where the Bills have not ventured since the first days of the millennium. Crennel had the Browns on the brink only last year, just missing with a 10-6 record—a better mark than Buffalo has achieved in the last nine campaigns.

A day later, Mike Shanahan was fired by the Denver Broncos, who he coached into perpetual playoff contention, including two Super Bowl titles a decade ago. Like the Jets of Mangini, the Broncos had a chance to qualify for the postseason heading into their final game.

Still, as news was spreading of the dismissals of Mangini and Crennel (who compiled a 3-0 record against Jauron’s Bills this year), Wilson made his marketing department’s job that much more daunting by confirming reports that had circulated around the NFL since October and tortured fans through the team’s late-fall disintegration, announcing that he had indeed given his coach, he of the trio of 7-9 records, a three-year extension.

This, after all, is Buffalo, where such floundering is not only tolerated but rewarded, in both coaches and elected officials.

Stripped of the most reliable source of off-season inspiration, the fresh start, the Bills find themselves searching for something, anything to attract the ticket-buying public:

■ Marshawn Lynch had a second strong season, rushing for fewer yards but catching nearly three times as many passes, while retaining his knack for getting into the end zone with a team-high nine touchdowns, six more than any teammate. He combined with Fred Jackson for more than 2,100 yards, as well as 84 receptions.

■ After a blazing start, the key to Buffalo’s 4-0 opening, Trent Edwards, got knocked the heck out against Arizona, stumbled around for a few weeks after returning, then found his bearings late in the season in wins against Kansas City and Denver, two of the worst defenses in all of sport. Though the Council of Trent was in thorough disarray for much of the season’s second half, expecting continued improvement in 2009, his second full season as starter, is far from delusional.

■ It didn’t help the runners or Edwards that the offensive line, manned by two of the team’s highest-paid players in Derrick Dockery and Langston Walker, and a third who believes he should make even more, Jason Peters, performed more like a collection of castoffs.

Or that Roscoe Parrish, exciting as he can be with a punted football in hand, again showed himself to be little more than an offensive gimmick, averaging fewer than 10 yards on his 24 catches and giving way to rookie Steve Johnson as the team’s third receiver in the season’s final weeks.

■ The special teams, particularly punter Brian Moorman and seemingly whoever returns a kick, retained their game-breaking potential, particularly in the early going. As the offense and defense lagged, though, it became clear that an explosive kicking and runback game can augment the other two phases, not carry them.

■ The defense had its standouts—free-agent acquisitions Marcus Stroud up front and Kawika Mitchell at linebacker, as well as a young secondary that could prove outstanding with any hint of a consistent pass rush. While Buffalo improved from 31st to 14th in yardage allowed, the Bills were helpless to stop good offenses, or even lousy ones like Cleveland’s, at key times. And with few big plays produced by the defense, Buffalo fell from a plus-9 to minus-4 in the all-important giveaway/takeaway category.

The franchise’s singular achievement of 2008, then, was in selling out each of Ralph Wilson Stadium’s 73,967 seats for all seven games played there, as well as filling the Rogers Centre for the first NFL regular-season game ever played outside the United States.

To do so again will require some help from the owner and the men he has put in charge of the operation. The owner indicated that chief operating officer Russ Brandon will be getting additional advice in the personnel area from Tom Modrak, who has orchestrated drafts that nabbed Lynch, Edwards, and Lee Evans, but also burned high picks on Parrish, J.P. Losman, and Mike Williams, the least-accomplished first-round pick in franchise history not named Al Cowlings.

Without big signing bonus money to lure free agents, any splash will likely have to come through the draft. Buffalo’s needs are myriad—offensive line, defensive end, linebacker, wide receiver, tight end—and therefore give Modrak and his underlings plenty of options.

Filling enough of those holes to make the Bills a real contender next year, or any time before the young talent they already possess hits free agency, will be an enormous task.

The final 10 weeks of 2008 and what transpired immediately after leave you wondering if any of that really matters. The team’s ticket buyers have shown again and again that it doesn’t take much to raise our hopes, to believe that Buffalo’s team can compete against bigger, more prosperous regions and their wealthier teams. This, even though the Bills have won precisely one playoff game since reaching the Super Bowl following the 1993 season, the first since the league adopted a system of true free agency.

The great Bills teams of the early 1990s were built through the draft, and Buffalo could keep the likes of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith, and Andre Reed around as long as they pleased, since even the best players had few options and little leverage. Changes in the business of football have rendered replicating such sustained glory highly improbable anywhere and all but impossible in a place like Buffalo.

As we left the stadium on December 28, after New England scored a third-quarter touchdown to make it 10-0 (though there was always the chance the Bills might luck their way into one touchdown against the Patriots, most likely by way of a timely gust of wind or incredibly lucky bounce, there was no way it was going to happen twice), Tim, his brother Ernie, and I headed east toward the Erie Community College parking lot. For about a mile, we walked directly into winds strong enough to hold you up, even if you leaned ahead and let your weight go forward.

We finally reached Tim’s car and headed back to Buffalo, bent on reaching Kaisertown and the sublime breaded wings at Wiechec’s on Clinton Street, leaving another season of false hope and crashing disappointment behind.

Until next year, at least.

blog comments powered by Disqus