(CBS Sports)
By Justin Young
It’s nearly kickoff Bills Mafia! Did you all get a good night sleep? This season being the exception, normally I go to bed angry on Sunday nights, so that by Monday morning I’m hungover on a Bills loss.
This morning however, I’m a big ball of anxiety about this primetime game tonight against the reigning Super Bowl champions. You too? Do we officially miss the longstanding tradition of 1pm kickoff on each and every Sunday throughout the season? Yeah, me too.
I was able to see some of you were handling this second consecutive Sunday off well—being productive with your day and exclaiming “this isn’t so bad” and “I could get used to this”.
Stop it. Get some help.
The rest of us were left to fend for themselves completely left outside of our comfort zones for a ritualistic October football Sunday. For me specifically, I felt I couldn’t remove myself from the habitual mid-season form of waking up early enough to get my weekend chores out of the way (laundry and cleaning mostly) and begin the pre-game tailgating by 10am. Yesterday was no different, with of course the major exception being no Bills game. It had a similar feel to the emptiness that comes along with a bye week, but without the lack of stress and anxiety. Watching the day’s slate of games had me feeling like I was cheating on my girl—nothing could fill the empty hole in my heart.
Justin, you’re telling me that you enjoyed an entire day full of football games, with good food and drinks and friends, and you’re complaining?
You’re god damn right.
It got me thinking about what brought us to such a wacky and derailing Bills weekend in the first place: the Tennessee Titans.
And honestly, just thinking about them yesterday brought my blood to a rolling boil. So much so, I had to stop and ask myself, “do I now hate the Titans more than the Pats?”
You’re god damn right.
So, I began listing reasons to hate each team back and forth on a yellow legal pad while ‘Big Ben’ and the Steelers gave Baker and the Browns a proper stomping. Let’s get started with the Patriots, as they are naturally the more familiar rival with Bills Mafia.
It really begins and ends with a scrawny tall guy named Tom Brady.
*roll end credits*
No really. We don’t hate the Patriots, we hate Brady, and what he has done to help transform the Patriots into the cynical dynasty that we know of. Allow me to explain.
The Patriots present to the rest of the league the appearance to have been giftwrapped arguably the best quarterback to ever play the game. Yes, I know you might say “31 other teams passed him up four to five times each before NE finally selected him in the 6th round”, but that’s my point. New England also passed him up a total of six times before finally selecting him with the 199th pick. No one, not even the Patriots, had Tom Brady pegged as becoming the prolific passer of the football that he is. You don’t sleep on a quarterback until the 6th round if you think otherwise.
(via Twitter)
Then it’s how the Patriots were able to force him onto the field. I’m not sure Brady would have ever survived being Drew Bledsoe’s backup if Mo Lewis never knocks Bledsoe out. Just to rub dirt on the open wound that was the Bills’ decline since the retirement of Jim Kelly, we had to watch Drew Bledsoe come to the Bills and lead a super talented roster to zero playoff appearances and just a 23-25 record. Okay, I know wins aren’t a QB statistic, but with a 2004 roster that was absolutely FILLED with household names such as Travis Henry, Willis McGahee, Eric Moulds, and Lee Evans on the offense, and Sam Adams, Pat Williams, Aaron Schobel, Takeo Spikes, London Fletcher, Nate Clements, and Lawyer Milloy fronting the defense... oof, it really makes me sad just thinking about the under achievement. It’s hard to say Bledsoe’s personal decline since “the hit” had nothing to do with it.
Speaking of “QB wins”, I needed some help to make sure I wasn’t getting too emotional with my analysis. Because at this point, I was listing down quite a few good reasons to why we should still hate the Patriots. So, I reached out to my number one source of “intellectual truth” within the Bills radio/podcast circle: Bruce Nolan of The Bruce Exclusive Podcast on the Buffalo Rumblings podcast network. He assured to me that “there’s a legitimate argument to be made that Bills Mafia should hate the Titans more than the Patriots and it centers around victimization.”
Here’s what Bruce had to say:
The Buffalo Bills in the 2000s have been indirect victims of the Patriots: Tom Brady being popularly thought of as the greatest quarterback of all time has capped the divisional ambitions of scrappy upstart Western New York professional football teams, but SpyGate, DeflateGate, and the direct concerns surrounding New England have more directly affected individual games against opponents not named the Bills.
Though there is still reason to feel distaste against the Patriots for their involvement in two cheating scandals, it’s worth noting that DeflateGate was mostly Brady’s doing (another check in the Brady-is-the- stem-of-all-hatred column). They cheated, and they were caught, and being in the same division as said cheaters will give valid reason to a volley of hatred launched their easterly direction. To me though, it doesn’t help that there’s been this fuel provided by National media coverage drooling over what’s called the “Patriot Way”.
Now we have TB12 out of New England and playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the narrative couldn’t be fueled even more by Brady’s lack of immediate success with his new team. Still, the Pats are now only 2-3 with a solid two games (hopefully three by tonight) gap behind our first place Buffalo Bills. It feels harder to hate a team that’s bad, yet I feel I can safely bask in the petty sun watching them fall apart against the Broncos. In the end though, I’m noticing I’m paying more attention to TB games in order to witness the decline of the greatest one. It’s Brady. It’s always been Brady.
And Belichick. Okay, so we can still hate them, but it’s only half of what we knew to hate them.
Now there’s a new bully in town and they’re starting to grab the attention of Bills fans and the rest of the NFL. Bruce on why we should now hate the Titans more:
The Titans, however, have directly impacted the Bills multiple times in a negative fashion. The Music City Forward Pass and this season’s COVID-19 protocol disregard stand chief among them, but even the Tennessee fans themselves have gotten in on the act, stealing a Fox Sports ‘best fans in the NFL’ poll with bought Twitter votes at the last second. When you add in the fact that Bills fans could easily talk themselves into a ‘guilty by association’ situation with Titans’ coach Mike Vrabel and his mentor and Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick and the classic antagonist that is Taylor Lewan (complete with the occasional villainous mustache), fans of New York’s only football team have a case to be made for the bigger rival making their home far south of Buffalo rather than to the east.
I’m absolutely triggered just reading what Bruce had to say in response. It certainly doesn’t help with how the NFL played this whole COVID-19 outbreak within the Titans organization. The Kansas City against New England game was cancelled for that week, leaving the Bills uncertain if the NFL was going to cancel theirs against the Titans and flex them into playing the Chiefs last week instead. The NFL released statements the weekend leading up to the game saying if another positive test came about within the Titans organization, that the league would investigate cancelling and possibly forcing a forfeit from Tennessee. Another test did come back positive, but the NFL spun it to say that because it wasn’t a player the Bills and Titans matchup would go on as planned for Tuesday. Meanwhile the Titans only had two options: prepare to play the Bills or receive another week off and begin prepping for the next team. The “adversity” narrative poured on by the national sports media didn’t help things either.
(USA Today)
I feel victimized just writing this thing out today—that I feel I just HAD to get this off my chest without being able to enjoy a football Sunday. Watching the Pats lose 18-12 to the Broncos certainly helped a little, but seeing the Titans beat up on the Houston Texans brought me right back to why we’re here: rivalries evolve just as much as the teams that make them up.
Pretty soon we may be able to think of the Patriots rivalry the same way we now think of the Dolphins: faded away into the abyss of mediocracy. Don’t get me wrong, after all I’ve said today, I wanted to end with a full reminder that THIS IS ALL A GOOD THING. Competition stems rivalry. When you’re the big dog in the AFC East, you begin looking for bigger and badder things to play with. It means we’re finally looking outside of our division, much like how the Patriots would look at other division leaders as their major rivals. It’s all about the playoffs now. It’s begun already with us and the Titans, but it won’t be long before we begin to say the same about our Bills and the Chiefs.
Bills by a billion.
Huge thanks to Bruce Nolan. Please go follow him on Twitter: @BruceExclusive.
You can find me on Twitter as well. For more Bills thoughts: @theYoungish.
Comentarios