“Look what I found,” he said eagerly, handing me the calendar.

“The Buffalo Bills, a year in futility,” I smirked. “Sure, let’s get it.”

I didn’t look closely at the calendar until I got back to our apartment. I hold onto my mother’s old superstition that you are not to open a calendar until New Year’s Day, so I wasn’t about to tear off the plastic. Instead, I took a more careful look at the back, which previews every month’s cover athlete.

Hey, it’s Marshawn Lynch! And Bill Belichick’s favorite, Josh Reed! (In case you missed it, check out that link for Belichick’s Reed gaffe from last week.) There’s Shawn Nelson and Roscoe Parrish!

Four of the twelve months of my 2011 Buffalo Bills calendar are absolutely pointless. Lynch, Reed, and Nelson are no longer Bills, and Parrish is on the injured reserve (something no calendar designer could have foreseen, I know.) Two of the others, Lee Evans and Donte Whitner, most likely will not be Bills beyond the first week of 2011.

So half of my Bills calendar could be rendered obsolete by the second week of 2011.

But I don’t blame the calendar’s manufacturer, Turner Licensing. The life of a calendar creator must be difficult these days; your chosen product is consistently threatened by Microsoft Outlook, iCal, Blackberry Calendar, whatever those crazy Droid’s use, and the fact that you can Google “January 2011 calendar” and print out a calendar grid on the office printer for free. Your calendar pages must be prepared months in advance in order to be printed in time for Christmas gift-giving – fine when you’re selling the “Cute Kittens in Teacups” calendar, but a liability when you’re in the sports calendar business. Players get traded, hurt, jailed or, in the case of a one Brett Favre, decide to come out of retirement a week before the season begins.

Thus, I’m not blaming the calendar maker. The have a job not unlike the newspaper journalist, working in a print medium in an internet age. Print prematures the aging of news, and in this case, calendars. Much like newspapers are evolving, maybe the calendar maker needs to change their business model as well.

Here’s my idea for the calendar industry. Either focus on game highlight photos from the previous season or all-time best games so you don’t have the departed athlete issue to begin with, or let us register our calendars online and send us replacement photos via email or mail.

As for me, I’ll just print out Ryan Fitzpatrick and Stevie Johnson photos to tape over the months with Lynch and Reed. Because being a Bills fan seems to be all about improvising at times.

The NFL Snuggie. The horrors.

I never truly believed the apocalypse was near until I saw this.

To celebrate the beginning of the NFL pre-season, HSN has been selling the NFL Huddler (aka an NFL Snuggie) all day. To demonstrate its use, they are continuously showing a group of male and female models sitting on the back of a pickup truck eating with various teams’ Huddlers on.

Oh, because the people tailgating in Orchard Park, Pittsburgh, Philly, or Oakland aren’t going to beat you up for wearing a massive piece of team printed felt with arms while grilling and kicking back beers in their vicinity.

Sports fans, if you fear being cold while watching a game, I would like to introduce you to this nifty invention called a jacket. Last I checked, they worked really well for most of human kind.

As any early reader of this blog might have discerned, I may have been a giant Bills fan as a youngster, but in addition, I was a giant Steve Young fan. After Young won Super Bowl XXIX in 1995, thirteen year-old me asked my father if he thought Young would make the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “Maybe. It really depends what else he does,” said my father.

“Well, if he does, can we go to Canton to see the ceremony?” I asked.

My father, knowing that this was several years down the road at that point, if it happened at all, nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

I’m sure he thought I had forgotten his promise, until I called him on a Monday morning in February of 2005 – ten years later – to tell him I had four tickets to the Enshrinement Ceremony, and that we were going to see Steve Young get inducted.

Being in Canton during Enshrinement Weekend was one of my favorite experiences as a sports fan. It is a true celebration of the sport of football, one that even the most marginal of football fans will appreciate. To read about our trip to Canton in 2005 – the first family vacation my immediate family had ever taken – read the following blog post: “Earning the Fabiola.”

I plan on returning to Canton at some point – hopefully for a 2010 induction of Jerry Rice and Steve Tasker? Rice is next year’s shoo-in, and as evidenced by both Wilson’s and Smith’s speeches this evening, Tasker greatly deserves the honor, but he’s been overlooked by voters for a few years now. Maybe his continued broadcasting career will help him in securing spots in the voters’ minds. All I know is that if I was choked up watching Smith’s induction speech on NFL Network tonight, I would just bawl through Tasker’s.

When we left last BU’s former starting goalie, Curry had returned to the AHL after impressing in his NHL debut around Thanksgiving. He then went on to set the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins team record for number of wins in a season in March, ending the season with 37 (33 in the regular season, 4 in the playoffs.) Curry earned those 4 playoff wins by leading the Baby Penguins team through the first round of the playoffs against the Bridgeport SoundTigers, but not without suffering a knee injury in Game 5 of that series.  (Of course, the SoundTigers are the team in which Curry participated in the now famous “goalie fight” last year. Can I just tell you that still, a year later, we play that video in the office when we’re having a particularly rough day? Or maybe it’s just me.)

Due to Curry’s injury, backup Adam Berkhoel received most of the starts in the Baby Pens series against the pesky Hershey Bears, which the Bears won on their way to the Calder Cup finals (in which they currently have a 3-1 series lead over the Cory Schneider led Manitoba Moose.)

But why is it then that a detail-oriented hockey fan might find Curry’s name on the active roster for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Finals? Because despite his knee injury, Curry was called up to be the third string goalie for the remainder of the playoffs for Pittsburgh. He is on what sports fans and writers call “the taxi squad.”

The taxi squad is a term used mostly in hockey and football, and means basically the same in both. In the NFL, the taxi squad equals the practice squad – reserve players allowed to practice and be a part of a team in the event of an emergency (if you lose two defensive ends in successive weeks, for example, you can call one up from the practice squad, where he’s already familiar with your coaching style, your playbook, and their teammates.) In my constant effort to make myself feel special, here is where I’ll mention that my second cousin Alan Zemaitis played on the taxi squad of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a few years back.  (Yep, the boy I played blocks with at that random family reunion when I was two technically played in the NFL. No, I haven’t seen him since I was two.)

Where the NFL and NHL differ when it comes to their taxi squad is the playoffs. Because the NFL has no farm league per se, it must never worry about sharing talent with their development system. (And when they did have a development system, NFL Europe, its season was separate from the NFL season.) However, in the NHL, your farm leagues (the ECHL and AHL) and your main league play their seasons concurrently. Thus, once one of your farm teams gets eliminated from post-season play, but you have other teams still playing, you can take a select group from the eliminated team and send them to the teams still in play.

Now, this does not mean that the Buffalo Sabres, who were not in the post-season at all, could send goalie Ryan Miller to AHL’s Portland, who were in the playoffs. The players on the taxi squad have to be on certain types of contracts – like Curry’s two-way deal we spoke of a lot last November – that allow them to be used on multiple teams within the same system.

The Penguins organization in the 2009 postseason is an excellent model in which to illustrate the “taxi squad” idea. The Penguins essentially have 3 teams – the ECHL Wheeling Nailers, the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins, and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. All three teams made their league playoffs. The Wheeling Nailers, home of former BU Terrier Boomer Ewing, were eliminated in the first round of their playoffs, while both the AHL and NHL Penguins won their first rounds. Thus Ewing (along with a few Nailers teammates) was sent to Wilkes-Barre Scranton in the event they were needed due to injury or other lack of players.

The AHL Penguins then were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs, while NHL Pittsburgh advanced. Wilkes-Barre Scranton then sent a selected number of players on certain types of contracts, including Curry, to Pittsburgh for the remainder of the playoffs, to act as emergency backups since the team they would normally be kept active with is no longer in play.

So why is it called a “taxi squad?” Well, for that we turn to the 1940s Cleveland Browns. According to legend, the Browns’ owner, who also owned a taxi business, attempted to circumvent NFL roster limits by employing extra players as “taxi drivers” with said taxi business. Those players probably never drove a taxi, but were ready in the event a Brown’s starter went down.

Therefore, despite injury and Wilkes-Barre Scranton being eliminated from the Calder Cup playoffs, Everyone’s Favorite Goalie has the opportunity to be called up during the Stanley Cup Finals.  And if Marc-Andre Fleury keeps letting up softies like he did on Saturday evening, who knows what could happen if the Penguins-Red Wings series ends up in a seventh game…

“T.O. signs with Buffalo,” it read.

“What?!” I yelled, interrupting my fiance’s rant on Northeastern coach Greg Cronin and his hobby of throwing sticks onto the ice when incensed. “T.O. is a Buffalo Bill?!”

My fiance laughed, not looking at the screen. “Stop changing the subject. That would never happen.”

“He signed with Buffalo.  Look at the screen.”

In the nearly four years we’ve been dating, I have never seen the guy’s big brown eyes bug out of his head as much as they did when he looked at the screen. “What?!” He immediately opened another tab on the browser and typed in ESPN.com. There it was, the main story: Two days after being cut by the Dallas Cowboys, Terrell Owens had been signed by the most improbable team ever, the Buffalo “We Don’t Spend” Bills. The team who spends less money than me at the last week of every month as I try to make my ridiculous Boston rent.

“It’s not April Fools Day,” he said.

A day I never thought I'd see: T.O. with the Bills

I shook my head. “Did Ralph Wilson pass away? How did this happen?”

We set about reading the article. I quickly glanced through it, read enough to realize that yes, this was true, Owens had actually signed a legitimate contract with the Buffalo Bills, a sense of euphoria came upon me.

I looked at my Patriot fan fiance, who was still reading, who probably hadn’t digested the idea of Owens ever playing in his own conference, let alone for my favorite team no less.

“In your face!” I exclaimed. “You try to beat us with your bum-kneeed Brady now!”

As I did a happy circle dance in my place next to him, which involved me hopping around in a circle to a tune I was making up on the spot that had to do with Edwards passing to Owens, TD, AFC East Champions, Super Bowls, and whatever came to mind, I heard him say, “I have to put up with this all off-season now?”

**********

There is a lot of bad that comes with Terrell Owens – the outlandish statements, the diva behavior, the Sharpies – that immediately turn fans off to his existence. So if he was going to stay in the NFL for his 15th season, it was going to be one of two places. One, with a coach with just as big of an ego or mouth as his own, which seemed to be the most obvious option. Secondly, with a team so down in the dumps, with absolutely no personality, with no voice, and thus no one for Owens to rebel against. But the only team that fell into the second category – Buffalo – was mired in that category because they continually refused to spend money and take chances. So how would Owens ever come about in the royal blue and red of the Bills?

The Bills can handle everything that comes with Owens because it has a big gaping hole in its exsistance. The Bills had become a laughable, meaningless franchise, with nothing to make them memorable. Owens’ history and personality can fill a gorge as large as the Bills’. So he’s going to make outlandish statements here and there, maybe offend an opposing teams’ fan base, probably get in an argument or two with his teammates. If it gives the Bills’ heart or some reason to exist, then I am okay with it.

The negativity could only hurt a franchise that had a good thing going in the first place. When you have a franchise complacent and meaningless, Owens’ negativity is either going to inspire the rest of the team against him, or inspire them to be with them. And either way, it’s inspiration where inspiration didn’t exist previously.

And really, things couldn’t get any worse for the Bills. So even if the grand T.O. experiment blows up completely, it’s not rock bottom, because at least they got out there and took the chance where they hadn’t previously.

***********

T.O. once played with my favorite QB, and now he'll play for my favorite team. (Photo: Jamd.com)

I’m eager to see the Owens led Bills for not only the excitement factor it is already bringing to the franchise, but because he seems to be bookending his career with my two favorite teams. Owens entered the NFL with the San Francisco 49ers, and was one of The Reason I Like Sports (aka Steve Young)’s favorite receivers in the twilight of his career. And now, in year 15, Owens is heading to the Buffalo Bills, to try to salvage his floundering career.

Many sportswriters – including the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle’s Bob Matthews, who I’ve had a love-hate relationship with since I was ten -  have already analyzed the Owens move as one of the most shrewd marketing moves an NFL team has ever made. The timing and execution of the deal was perfect. For one, it was a relatively slow sports weekend, in comparison to the next few weeks of March Madness and the start of the baseball season.  Then throw in how quickly they had him available for a press conference, and how quickly my email box was flooded with emails from the Bills Store and the organization themselves, telling me about Owens jersey pre-orders and ticket office hours. And then they give him jersey number 1. If that’s not a good marketing move, or an excellent concession to Owens’ ego, I don’t know what is.

This team had reached rock bottom. It had become irrelevant to the rest of America. It had become meaningless to those in Western New York. And the few fans it had left felt absolutely hopeless. In a matter of hours on Saturday, however, the Bills became relevant again to all parties.

Just call it the Buffalo Bills’ Stimulus Package. No matter how this ends, Bills fans will be talking about this move for years to come.

A sad Dolph-fan after Sunday's game. (Photo from Yahoo Sports)

After a few minutes of him telling me about a play in the third quarter that had gone awry, one that could have definitely changed the tempo of the game, he paused, looking for an encouraging word.  I didn’t know what to tell him.  I’ve been there before – as a Steve Young fan in the late 1990s, there were many early playoff exits that I just wasn’t okay with, and nothing anyone tried to console me with in the days following would make me better.  I usually didn’t recover until I would go on my self-imposed Steve Young hiatus for Lent in mid-February.  (This did include me thumb-tacking a sheet over my bedroom wall shrine to Young.  To adolescent me, this was more of a sacrifice than giving up anything else – giving up my lust of a Mormon quarterback to fulfill my Catholic religious obligations.)

So what was I going to tell the Dolph-fan? “Give up Chad Pennington for Lent?” The Dolphins shouldn’t be hanging their heads. They went from finishing the 2007 season 1-15 to winning the AFC East the next. Sure, having Bill Parcells on your side never hurts – I’m convinced that he could lead a Pop Warner team to beat an NFL team in the Super Bowl just merely by being involved.  But Dolph-fans shouldn’t stay crushed and depressed. So much progress was made, and if they hadn’t suffered some very key injuries at wide-out the last half of the season, I am sure we would have seen a different result this past Sunday.

Thus, there was only one point of solace I could share that would somewhat console the Dolph-fan.

“Look, it could be worse. It’ll be okay. At least you’re not a Bills fan.”

And with that, I think the Dolph-fan finally put things in perspective.

See, it’s after receiving emails like this from your local Bills Backers group that you feel like you’ve reached the lowest depths. There is no place worse than this state of mind in fandom. Even Detroit fans may have more hope than the overall sentiment put forth in the following message.

From the Bills Backers of Boston season wrap-up email, received January 2:

Hi everyone,

A season that started with so much promise ended in yet another disappointing finish.  And to top it off, Bills fans everywhere were insulted by the team that they love with the word that Mister Mediocrity, Dick Jauron, will be returning to coach the Bills in 2009.  With one simple press release, the 2009 season has been ruined even before the 2008 season has ended.

We all sympathize with Tony Bogyo, a member of our chapter since the good-ol days, when he said, “I have truly never felt so low as a Bills fan. I know what next season holds, and it isn’t pretty – it’s the same as what we’ve seen the past 3 seasons.” (Read his entire article on Bills Daily, here: http://www.billsdaily.com/articles/bogyo/2008/jauron.shtml).  No matter what happens in the offseason, the Bills will still be buried in the AFC East basement, their weak and spiritless coach defining their personality.

The Bills Backers of Boston will certainly be back next season, but will the fans?  Time will tell.

Well, don’t we all feel like jumping for joy after that missive.

Despite my initial reaction that this message was a tad on the melodramatic side, after more thought, I understood their point. How can you be a fan of a team that seems to be most interested in exploring depths of depression and incompetence unseen by any other professional sports teams in the history of professional sports teams? I think fans of the Washington Generals carry more hope in their hearts than those that the Bills’ collective fanbase now possesses. We have a quarterback of the future who shows a troubling propensity to injuries. We have a star wide receiver who admittedly only likes playing for the washed up backup quarterback.  Our offensive and defensive line corps are dropping like files. Our owner is elderly, a miser, and might think the year is 1969, not 2009.  His family has already stated that they want nothing to do with the team after he passes on.  We tried to showcase the team to Toronto, who rightfully turned their nose at the inferior product.

At least Lions fans get to scrap it all and start over. While I’m not ready to lay all of the blame on Dick Jauron, I would have been okay with the Bills firing the man my mom affectionately refers to as “Sketlator.” I think getting rid of him, along with Turk Schonert (despite his funny name), would have begun an overall shakeup of the team that may be needed.  As my father kept saying during my sojourn back to Western New York for the holidays, the players only like Jauron because Jauron doesn’t work them hard, doesn’t demand much of them, and was okay with their late season lack of hustle. I think the Bills needed to make an overall statement and send a message that, “The way that this season imploded was not okay.” And the best way this could have been done right away was by firing Jauron.

The Bills could still send this message.  They could make a splash in free agency and move for a big name quarterback, wide receiver or running back.  I love Edwards and Lynch, and don’t mind the wide receivers, but they aren’t the best in the NFL, so the Bills can justify bringing a big name in any of those positions on board. That might announce to the rest of the league that the Bills don’t want to be the next Detroit Lions.  That they’re sick of losing to the likes of the New England Patriots 5000 to 6. But my sneaking suspicion is that such a big deal is just not going to happen.

Let’s be frank about the whole Bills situation. The Bills can’t sign big name players without revenue, and the revenue is no longer there. The Bills are a small-market team without any money who  haven’t won in a long time. They don’t have many, if any, star players.  They can’t win their division. Their owner is a laughing stock because of his age.  The team lacks the keys to make money, and lack the leadership to make needed changes to the franchise. They are not taken seriously.  Thus, merchandise isn’t going to sell, season tickets aren’t going to sell, training camp activities aren’t going to sell, jerseys aren’t going to sell, individual game tickets aren’t going to sell, parking at the Ralph isn’t going to sell – this team will continue to make no money. As a franchise, what do you do when you have this scenario on your hands?

The sports marketing tendency when you have a mess of a team like this on your hands is to gimmick the heck of of the games. Let’s give out Governor Rod Blagojevich bobble-heads. Let’s offer to pay a lucky fan’s mortgage. Everyone bring your disco records and let’s blow them up.  Sometimes, these gimmicks work.  You’re looking at the girl who attended a North Shore Spirit minor league baseball game to get a Doug Flutie bobblehead (it was for my father, I swear.)

But after a while, your intended audience wisens up, no matter what they may have initially fell for. To be blunt, if you are putting out garbage on the field, ice, or court, there’s only so many ways you can pretty it up and spray perfume on it before people notice that it’s garbage. The marketers around the Bills are going to start having to gimmick around the team to make them somewhat viable.

Thus, I fully expect to get all of these coupon deals and buy one-ticket-get-one-ticket free offers from the Buffalo Bills braintrust next season.  I expect Rian Lindell to greet my unsuspecting mother at many a Tops.  And you know what? We’re not going to fall for it.

We’re the Buffalo Bills. We’re led by Dick Jauron. We’re quarterbacked by Trent Edwards. Our owner is Ralph Wilson. And that’s the football equivalent of my mom telling my grandma while bouncing baby me on her knee back in 1982, “We bought a house. But it has no closets, no yard, no driveway, bad plumbing, and only one bedroom.”

So Dolph-fans, put your chin up. You’re a million times better off than us.

It's GusGus (and I don't mean the mouse from Disney's Cinderella.)

Oh, the quarterback woes of…well, half the teams of the NFL.  The latest team to play quarterback musical chairs is my dad’s childhood fave Minnesota Vikings, who today benched Tarvaris “I Can’t Seem To Make a Name For Myself, and Will Probably Continue to Follow the Unsuccessful Career Path of Daunte Culpepper” Jackson for Gus Frerotte.

As much as I think this move by Brad Childress is questionable (the Vikings weren’t the worst team in the NFL last week, they just came out on the losing end of a bad call on a Joseph Addai touchdown), I welcome the continuation of Freotte’s career because it makes me feel young.  Frerotte has been an NFL quarterback since I was 12 years old.  I am now in my mid-late twenties.  It always makes me feel better about my age when a quarterback from my formative football watching years is still active on a NFL roster, and there is a fair share of them – Frerotte, Brett Favre, Mark Brunell, Brad Johnson, Trent Green, Todd Collins…heck, half of me expects Rick Mirer to still be on the Oakland Raiders roster somewhere!  (You’re telling me a thirty-eight year old Mirer wouldn’t be an improvement over JaMarcus Russell?)

Frerotte, along with many of the quarterbacks I listed above, have taken the term “journeyman quarterback” to a whole new level.  The quarterback draft classes of the early-mid 1990s make older quarterbacks, like former journeyman definition setters Steve DeBerg and Steve Beurlein, look lazy.  Frerotte’s travels include stops at the following NFL teams:

1. Redskins
2. Lions
3. Broncos
4. Bengals
5. Vikings (1st stint)
6. Dolphins
7. Rams
8. And now, the Vikings again.

Will Frerotte really make a difference for the Vikings this Sunday and for the rest of the season?  I doubt it.  But do they need a grand, long pass throwing quarterback, or just a competent enough guy to hand-off to Adrian Peterson every play (except when you hand it off to Chester Taylor just to shake things up a bit)?  They just need someone to hand the ball off and manage the game.  Their receivers are too poor to expect otherwise.  And if Childress believes Frerotte is better at handing off the ball, then so be it.  I think the majority of his players think otherwise – for example, in reports, wide receiver Bobby Wade seems very surprised by the move – and it could hurt the cohesiveness of the offense moving forward.  However, Frerotte starting makes me feel younger, so I can’t complain too much.

*********

After tonight’s Red Sox loss to the Rays, in which Tim Wakefield pitched poorly – big surprise there – may I hearken back to a blog post from last September, where I implored Boston just to let Wakefield go?

Look, Boston, the guy is old. In Buffalo, when guys are old, they trade them to places like Green Bay, San Diego, Washington and Miami, where they continue to have quiet, mediocre ends to their careers (Don Beebe, Steve Christie, Bruce Smith and Thurman Thomas, I’m looking in your directions.) So do like Ralph Wilson, and trade Wakefield already. Put him out to pasture. Let him fade gently away, until he decides to write a large print hardcover autobiography about him finding G-d especially when playing for the Packers (that time, I’m specifically looking in Don Beebe’s direction. And yes, my father owns his autobiography.) And then you still really won’t remember him all that much.

Can we finally put Wakefield out to pasture?  He’s not doing the Red Sox any good.  Sure, you can chalk up some of tonight’s loss to relief pitching, but still – Wakefield screwed up enough to let the Rays get ahead in the bottom of the first, and it just continued from there.  Look, I know I’m not the world’s most knowledgable baseball authority – I’m still relatively new to the sport – but I know when someone needs to hang it up.  And Wakefield needs to hang it up.

This morning, while sipping my delicious Brighton Cafe iced coffee (which is more like coffee tinged sugar cream, which is just the way I like it), I snagged a look at ESPN.com. I glanced through the Boston.com sports headlines. I read through my numerous NFL blogs on Google Reader. I was left with one glaring question:

Did the Buffalo Bills play a game yesterday? Were they maybe the game that got postponed?

I see that the Jacksonville Jaguars played a game yesterday. They lost. Who did they play? Oh, I don’t know. All I know that on NFL Network the only news conference I saw clips of was David Garrard’s and on NBC’s Football Night in America, they only showed Jack Del Rio’s (no leather coat in sight for once.)

I learned all of this from this morning’s headlines: Aaron Rodgers had a great day, and maybe the Packers had it right all along. The Giants wrecked the Rams. The Broncos and Chargers dueled it out to the last seconds. The Pats and Jets played a boring game, but Matt Cassel didn’t implode. There was a lot of wind during the Steelers-Browns game, but the Steelers still won their tenth regular season game in a row. Miami lost again. Kurt Warner looks good for the Cardinals. There’s a game tonight – Eagles and Cowboys.

Not a millimeter of copy devoted to the Bills. Unfortunately, I think all Bills fans are used to this. For example, take Lord Calvert’s quote yesterday on Yahoo’s Shutdown Corner Blog:

Let me see if I understand this correctly…Trent Edwards goes 20/25 for almost 250 yards and a game winning come from behind TD pass against a team considered to be a Super Bowl contender and you’re willing to waive the HoF requirement for Rodgers because he beat up on the pathetic Lions?

Same as usual. If you’re a Bills player you have to be five times better than anyone else before anyone will consider you half as good.

Sure, Trent Edwards isn’t Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, or whomever. He’s just the closest thing

Sure, he's not Peyton, Eli or Tom, but he's better than a lot of quarterbacks right now.

the Bills have had to a good quarterback in over a decade. The Bills are winning football games. They aren’t winning them on flukey calls (like the Broncos and Colts did yesterday.) They are winning because they have a good, young football team. They are winning games because their special teams and defense are great, and their offense is catching up. They beat the Jags, for heaven’s sake! People were picking the Jags to win the Super Bowl this season! They make Garrard run out of the pocket for losses of yardage, they took advantage of the holes in the offensive line (my favorite line from yesterday was Steve Tasker reporting that he had spoken to Garrard on Saturday and asked him how he felt about his o-line and Garrard didn’t know the name of one of his guards because he had only been there for two days), and they adequately controlled Maurice Jones-Drew (although they could have done better with Fred Taylor.)

So basically, sports media, where is the love? The Bills love? Can we get over Brett Favre? Can we finally lose the Matt Cassel story? Can we forget about Peyton’s “ability to make the big plays when it matters?” (which is laughable, considering the Vikings were definitely rattling him yesterday)? Could someone, anyone, give the Bills credit?

No?

Fine. I’m used to it.

Dan Marino was both loved and hated in my household growing up.

Picture my family’s house in 1993 – which, if you know the house I grew up in, is easy to do, because it is a complete and total shack that you don’t know how people live in it, let alone how it’s still standing – and the characters inside. My mom, the Jim Kelly devotee; my little sister, the Dolphins fan because she liked aquatic animals at the time; me, the Steve Young obsessed 49ers fan; and my dad, amused that he lived with three women obsessed with professional football, although it was all his fault that we did. (My little brother wasn’t born yet.)

On that Sunday afternoon, I believe we had just watched a Bills 1pm loss, and my mother was livid. The Dolphins were up with a 4pm game against the Browns, and my sister had brought her stuffed animals out into the living room so that she could play with them while watching the game.

My mother stepped down into the kitchen from the living room, and I was sitting on the arm of the couch. She turned to me and, in her unmistakable Canadian accent (which comes out in all Rochestarians when they’re either excited or angry), said, “I guess all I can wish for is for Dan Marino to get hurt. If he got hurt, and was out for the season. That’s the only way this is going to end well.” She then turned and went into the kitchen to do dishes.

My dad and I sat on the couch, while Megan sat on the floor in her little Dolphins sweatshirt that my Uncle (a Jets fan – talk about a family with schizophrenic team allegiances) had given her. We were all barely paying attention to the game – I was watching while doing homework on my lap, I believe my dad may have been reading Issac Asimov, and my sister, never one to pay attention to any sport on TV despite her amazing athletic ability, was playing with the before-assembled stuffed animals.

“And Marino is down.”

All of our heads snapped up and looked at the TV. Dan Marino was on the turf, in obvious pain. Withering not unlike Brady did this past Sunday afternoon, there was no doubt in our minds that Marino had suffered a serious injury.

My dad and I were quiet, until I realized that the water in the kitchen was still running. “Mom…” I called.

My mother turned off the water and came over to the living room with her dish rag in hand. “Yes?”

I gestured to the television set. “You wanted Dan Marino to go away?”

My mom looked at Marino being helped off the field. She was silent for a moment, and then turned to me. “Oops…I didn’t mean to hurt him. I didn’t know I had that kind of power.” And with that, my mom scurried off to finish the dishes.

“Mom, did you hurt Dan Marino?” called out Megan.

“I didn’t mean to!” yelled my mother from the kitchen.

My sister gasped with drama befitting of a seven year old.  “But I lllll-i-i-ike the Dolphins!”

“I am not a witch! I did not hurt your quarterback!” Mom called back, while she continued to wash the dishes.

Megan pouted, grabbed the stuffed polar bears and seals, and stormed off into our bedroom.  And with that, Megan was done with football. Her tenuous like of the sport faded away. To this day, the only football she ever watches is the Super Bowl, and only because everyone around her is watching it and/or because she’s working at the pizza place that evening and has to time orders to halftime. (Insert gratuitous plug for Pontillo’s Pizza in Rochester, NY here.)

While my mother does consider Halloween her favorite holiday and Salem, Massachusetts a cool place to visit the rare times she gets to visit me, I highly doubt that she is any type of witch or spellcaster. But the timing of her comment and Marino’s injury was uncanny. So when I was speaking to my dad on the phone a few weeks ago and forecast that either Brady or Randy Moss would be hampered by a serious injury this season, he recalled my mother’s comment. “You aren’t going to do what your mom did to Dan Marino, are you?”

I laughed. “Of course not, Dad. As much as the Pats annoy me, Brady’s too hot. I couldn’t do it to him.”

Fast-forward to Wednesday evening. My father calls. “I’ve been telling all the guys at the tool shop that you called it. My daughter called it. How did you know Brady was going to get hurt?”

“I have no idea, Dad.  He did miss the entire pre-season, and he’s thirty-one.  Something was bound to happen.  I just didn’t expect it in week one.”

“You didn’t say anything like your mom said about Marino, right?”

“No, Dad.” I reassured him.  “Of course not.” And we continued on about the Bills supreme performance against the Seahawks, and how we hadn’t seen the team look that dominating in years.  It was like watching another team.

Before we hung up, my dad asked again, “You sure you didn’t say anything about Brady? Anything?”

“No, Dad, we aren’t quarterback witches.  If I was, wouldn’t I have said something about Troy Aikman for like six years back in the 1990s?”

“Very, very true.”

Sad, Pats fans? Forget about Brady, and come join Robert Royal and the best fans in football.

I can’t believe it.  I just heard Cris Collinsworth say he “now likes Buffalo in the AFC East this season.”

What the littlest tap on a shin can do to an entire NFL division.  After the absolutely wimpiest knock on a leg since my little brother ran into my leg with his Big Wheels when he was three years old, the entire AFC East, and to some extent, the entire NFL, seems to be turned on its head.  Tom Brady is injured, the Patriots don’t have the dominant defense they once did (thanks free agency and old age), and thus this marks the end of the world.  Well, maybe not, but you would think it was the way the local Boston stations are covering Brady’s injury as I type.  “A disapointing start to what was to be another dream season for the Patriots,” led off Channel 7′s late news.  Wow, Channel 7, I didn’t know that the season’s result was predetermined.  Usually a team has to play games to determine if a season is a “dream season.”

Now Channel 7 has opened a viewer poll asking if the hit on Brady was a dirty hit.  It was according to half the guys in the sports bar where I was watching the game this afternoon and some of the Pats players.  I massively disagree.  It wasn’t a dirty hit.  If you would like to see some dirty hits, why don’t you watch some of the hits the Pats defense routinely puts on opposing quarterbacks?  Those hits that don’t ever seem to get called, because the Pats bring in way too much advertising and promotional item money for the NFL for them ever to be penalized.  It was a fair hit on Brady, and I’m sorry he got injured.  But Brady wasn’t going to be infallible forever.  As I said a few days ago, either Moss or Brady was going to go down this year.  They are too old and have gone too long without a major injury not to have something like this occur.

Two of my three stars of the Bills-Seahawks game - Brian Moorman and Rian Lindell.

Because of Brady’s injury, the steamrolling the Bills did over the Seahawks this afternoon is being overlooked as much as teenage me was by guys.  I ventured out to a local sports bar with NFL Sunday Ticket to watch the slate of 1pm games this afternoon, meaning I actually got to see the Bills game.  As usual, I was the only Bills fan in the room – there were quite a few Eagles, Dolphins, Jets and Steelers fans there.  As always, the Bills held true to Marv Levy’s mantra that special teams can be the key to winning a football game, as demonstrated by the stellar performances of Roscoe Parrish, Brian Moorman and Rian Lindell, my three stars of the game.  (On a random note, is anyone else as intrigued with the name Rian as I am?  Why isn’t this name as popular as Aiden and Connor?  I don’t get it.  It’s Irish, has a unique spelling – don’t those two qualities define half of the top baby names these days?)  The defensive unit kept Seattle from converting third downs, and made Matt Hasselbeck’s afternoon miserable.  Trent Edwards looked shaky and nervous through the first quarter, but settled down soon afterwards. It’s obvious that he works much better with his offensive line then JP Losman ever did. My only concern is his timing in the pocket – he overthrew or kept the ball too long a handful of times this afternoon.

I am always proud and impressed with the level of dedication of Bills fans.  At the end of the first quarter, the skies in Buffalo opened up, and it appeared that sheets of rain were falling down upon Orchard Park.  The majority of fans stayed glued in their seats – not budging, not heading for the concourse.  They stayed and celebrated everytime the Bills scored.  High-fiving, body slams, player leaps, screaming – it was wonderful!  The sound of the game wasn’t on at the bar, but you didn’t need to hear the noise to know the level of excitement in Ralph C. Wilson Stadium today.

Unlike Cris Collinsworth, I am not ready to declare the Bills AFC East Champions just yet.  I think the Jets are going to get better as Favre gets more acquainted with his receiving corps.  I think the Dolphins will have an improved running game, and that will make them a threat all season long.  And I know – unfortunately – the Patriots will never go away.  But they will be muted, muffled, and not the dominant force of previous years.  And that’s good news for us Bills, Jets, or Dolphins fans.