THERE’S SNOW BUSINESS . . .
The Bills weathered a storm last week, but they still have to close with a flurry,
Everybody loves a snow game. Sure, you get your occasional rain games in places like Miami where players get tackled and hydroplane across the turf, sending up great slices of water like drunken water-skiing college students. Eh, Miami.
But a good snow game is childlike absurdity, and last week the Buffalo Bills won a real snow game over Indianapolis to somehow stay in the playoff picture. Eight inches of snow fell between noon and the end of the game four hours later, and it was all slipping and sliding and snowbanks. If Buffalo had managed to lose that game to the lousy Colts, leaving their hardcore, incredible fans to trudge out and clear the snow off their cars and drive home in exhaust-and-ice traffic hell, it would have been so awful, so Bills. But they didn’t. Buffalo is used to real snow, of course. Let’s check a list of the world’s 10 snowiest cities on accuweather.com. Hey, Buffalo’s 10th.
“Famous for annual snowfalls and located east of Lake Erie, Buffalo kicks off the list with an annual average of 95 inches of snow. The city is home to 259,384 residents and sits at the head of the Niagara River. President William McKinley was shot in the chest twice during an assassination attempt by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the PanAmerican Exhibition in Buffalo on Sept. 6, 1901. McKinley would die of his wounds days later; Vice President Theodore Roosevelt would then take up the presidency.”
Jeez. Among U.S. Presidents, Millard Fillmore lived in Buffalo before he was president, and Grover Cleveland was mayor there once, and Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in as president there. But no, Accuweather, you had to go straight to the president who did get shot in Buffalo.
Anyway, Buffalo is a hard-luck city, and its football team is perhaps the best annual example of this. Their league-long playoff drought is currently at 17 seasons, three years ahead of Cleveland, which at least had the euphoria of its stolen team being returned at the start of the streak, so they could ease into the crushing monotony. Buffalo’s last playoff appearance was the Music City Miracle: the last-second 75yard lateral kick return that broke the Bills for a generation, or may as well have.
But now, they have a chance. With three games left the Bills are 7-6, along with Baltimore and the L.A. Chargers, but they hold the final wild-card spot because they hold the tiebreaks, for now. Buffalo’s schedule reads Miami, New England, and at Miami.
It’s daunting. Buffalo needs at least two wins to get there, you’d think, and maybe three. The Chargers have won seven of nine games; Baltimore has Cleveland-Indianapolis-Cincinnati left. As for Buffalo, well . . . hey, quarterback Tyrod Taylor has practised a couple times this week after missing last week’s game, and he has a 121.2 quarterback rating against Miami in their last four meetings. New England looked mortal last week against . . . OK, Miami’s pass rush, but yeah, OK.
At least it’s not impossible. The Bills get buried in the snow every year, and their fans — their crazy, hardcore, unbreakable fans — keep coming back. Longtime Bills defensive lineman Kyle Williams told reporters after that snow game, “I want to say that our fans and the people here are the toughest damn people in the world. They’re why I’ve been here so long, and the reason I enjoy being here so much. They deserve as much credit as anybody, and I love being here. I love playing for those guys. It’s amazing.”
Wouldn’t it be something, if they actually didn’t fail?
One of these years, maybe. One of these years.
Last week this space went 7-9 again. Classic Bills number. As always, all lines could change.