Atlanta Falcons should be easy pickings for buffalo bills in Toronto.
Atlanta Falcons should be easy pickings for this 4-7 team
Let us check in on the Buffalo Bills, who visit Toronto this week to wrestle the stinking whale-corpse of the Atlanta Falcons.
Last season the Falcons went 13-3, beat the surging Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs, and then blew leads of 17-0 and 24-14 against San Francisco at home. Now they’re 2-9 and beached and waiting for the seagulls to come, or maybe the highway engineers. In 1970 a team of Oregon highway engineers semi-famously attempted to use dynamite to get rid of a 45-foot whale on a beach. I encourage you to seek out the local news report on YouTube, if only for the phrase, “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”
The Bills have been a little more exciting than usual, but not run-for-your life-here-come-the-flying-chunks-of-blubber exciting. Buffalo is 4-7 with a one-point win over Carolina, a three-point win over Baltimore, a two-point win at Miami, and then a victory where the Bills were the highway engineers and the Jets were the whale. That was not a reference to Rex Ryan, who should be commended for dropping a lot of weight. That, in turn, was not a reference to either Tim Tebow or Mark Sanchez, the latter of whom got cornrows last week. He lost a bet, I think.
There were also a twopoint loss to New England and a three-point loss to Cincinnati, so you can say the Bills were about two plays from being 6-5 and sitting in the final wild-card spot. Alternatively, you can say they are probably three plays from being 1-10, and having the worst record in the NFL. Tomato, tomahto.
But no, they’re somewhere in the middle, which is the usual thing. Since they last made the playoffs in 1999, the Bills have gone 8-8, 3-13, 8-8, 6-10, 9-7, 5-11, 7-9, 7-9, 7-9, 6-10, 4-12, 6-10, and 6-10. That’s a combined 82-126, or an average of 6-10 or so. Not coincidentally, they own the longest playoff drought in the NFL.
But is this year different? Rookie quarterback E.J. Manuel has shown promise, and the defence isn’t a tire fire, and Buddy Nix is gone. Nix, of course, became a first-time GM at age 70 in 2009, and eventually got catfished by two 20-year-olds pretending to be the GM from Tampa Bay. Nix replaced Russ Brandon, who came from marketing, and who had never been an NFL GM before, either. Before that, it was an 80-year-old Marv Levy for a couple of muddled years. The new GM is 40-year-old Doug Whaley, who is also a firsttime guy, but who at least is not terribly old, or from marketing. Hope! Of a sort!
Anyway, it’s not hard to explain why Toronto has never been excited about the Bills in Toronto series, which has been a flop year after year. The Bills aren’t exciting, and even when they are, it doesn’t matter.
Last week this space went 8-6. Usually, this space looks a LOT more like a Buffalo season, but once in a while it finds some Doug Flutie magic, and bam. But then it’s back to Ryan Fitzpatrick and J.P. Losman and Alex Van Pelt and eating my feelings.