Well, I WAS....

The trope always starts coming around like clockwork within an hour or so of the close of Labor Day. For fans of one particular team based in southern Erie County, it always has a semi-ironic meaning:




Most early Septembers, my answer to that is a decisive Aw HELL NO!

There are a couple of reasons. One, generally, is the sense of wanting to deny the end of another summer, of which I only have a limited number remaining. More tangible, though, is that usually September isn't my month for the start of a sportsball season but for beginning the exciting conclusion to one: the baseball pennant race. Although the Mets have made the postseason fewer than a dozen times in their history, in at least one year for only one game, I usually retain my cockeyed optimism until that night, usually in late September, when they are finally mathematically eliminated.

Not this time. They are still theoretically able to break off a winning streak and sneak into the final wild card playoff spot. There’s even a Facebook group that is even more Pollyanna-like than I am, tracking every game in their 2023 downfall in comparison to their improbable “you gotta believe“ comeback of 1973 when they made it to the World Series. They are within a game or two of that 1973 record. It doesn’t matter. Even though there are far more available playoff berths this year, there are too many other eligible teams not sucking nearly as much as they have been. I briefly checked on the score of their game in Queens last night, mainly because of a morbid “parlay” that the DraftKings gambling site briefly put out to “honor" the anniversary of 9/11:

The Yankees got rained out in Boston, and while the Mets briefly had a lead on Arizona in their game, their horrible bullpen managed to blow it to put an end to that “tribute.” We shall speak of that last part of the parlay later.

That inappropriate marketing campaign was just one of many signs that the terror of that day 22 years earlier is no longer resonating quite as much. The New Yorker had always commemorated the occasion with a mournful cover on the issue coming out on the anniversary week.  This year, on the actual September 11 date, they went with this:



I'm sure it's still bigger in New York, though, and one way the NFL recognized that was to put both of its (sort of) NYC teams into the primetime spotlight, both the night before and the night after the morning anniversary of the tragic event.  The Giants and our former Shea Stadium roommates the Jets now share a humongous gridiron in the New Jersey Meadowlands. Big Blue went first on Sunday night, and with a staff and roster largely filled with former Bills personnel, they lost 40-0 to the hated Dallas Cowboys.  The stadium personnel then had about 12 hours to turn all the blue into green to make it the Jets' home field for the first Monday Night Football game of the year...

against us.

----

At this time a year ago, expectations for Da Bills were sky high. They'd been knocked out of the 2021 season-ending playoffs via a fluky set of circumstances known in local lore as "13 seconds," when Kansas City came back to tie the game, then win a coin toss and the game in overtime without Josh even getting another chance to touch the ball. For the first half of 2022, Buffalo looked invincible, and the Legend of Josh grew bigger and bigger. But you got a sniff of some curse in the air.  Tre'Davious White, a cornerstone of their defense until a bad 2021 injury, finally returned- only to see four other guys in his secondary suffer injuries ranging from troubling to life-threatening. Their biggest off-season acquisition on defense, Von Miller. was also lost to injury midway through the season and still isn't back. Plus there were three ridiculous Buffalo weather events in November and December that moved one home game to Detroit and stressed the shit out of everybody for the Christmas weekend road trip to Chicago.

By the time the Bills had clinched the division but were half a game short of clinching home field, they had to play two home playoff games where they just didn't look like themselves.  After squeaking by a third-string Miami quarterback in the first round, they faced the Bengals- the team on whose field one of the Bills defenders almost died three weeks earlier- and got almost literally run over in a whimper of a playoff exit.  There was woulding-coulding-shoulding about how to fix it.  We only lost one significant starter to free agency, the injured players have all been on the road to full recovery, and some other signings and player draftings looked promising.

The 2023 season began four nights earlier in Kansas City, where the defending Super Bowl champions lost to Detroit.  I expect there's some of the same second-guessing among their fans, but nobody does it as well as we do it and it's done to us:



Things got weirder Sunday. Those same Bengals, who just signed their Josh-level quarterback to a big extension, lost their opener and Joe Burrow stunk out the joint. The Steelers, who whupped us in a preseason game, got themselves majorly whupped at home. Ending it all before the Monday night game was the Dallas Drubbing of the Gints by that near-record 40-0 score.

As I've mentioned many times, I do not gamble money on any such outcomes, but I have joined a free-to-play pool sponsored by ESPN. Officially known as an Eliminator Challenge but colloquially as a "survivor" or "death pool" event, it's short and simple: each week, you pick the one team you are the most confident is going to win, which really is a reflection on who you think is most likely to lose.  No odds or point spread, just the straight-up W keeps you alive. When you're wrong, you're out of the competition, Last year, when the Jets were really bad, I picked them to lose their first two games. They accommodated me the first week, but I then stupidly overestimated the Browns to beat them and I was done.

I wasn't going anywhere near Bills-Jets as the Week 1 option this week, but I did see the action on the event. The good news is only three percent of the participants in my group picked the Bills to lose. The bad news? Only one percent of them thought the Jets would.  (A full TEN percent bet on Detroit to lose to Kansas City, and they were all done after one game.) I went with a safer and correct pick of Houston losing to Baltimore, so I'm still in that competition.

Whether the Bills are is another question. And the players in that one percent were absolutely right.

----

There are three components to any professional football game: offense, defense and special teams. The Bills sucked in all three.

Offense: Josh couldn't get decent protection against a very tough Gang Green defensive front, made a couple of mistakes and a LOT more bad decisions, ended with one touchdown, three interceptions and a badly timed and placed lost fumble.

Defense: Despite their new hero quarterback Aaron Rodgers being lost to the Jet offense four plays into the game (and, we now know, for the season), their doofus signal caller from last year Zach Wilson somehow matched Josh for TDs, only threw one pick and managed the rest of the game well enough to come back from a 13-3 halftime deficit to tie and then go in front with under 2 minutes remaining.

Special teams: Somehow, Josh got enough of his mojo back to engineer an under-two-minute comeback, just in time and distance for their kicker Tyler "Wow That's Terrific" Bass to barely dink the ball over the uprights as regulation time expired. Then, though, Tyler's companions on special teams blew it. Despite the Bills getting the ball first in overtime, Josh was rattled by a penalty against his line, an uncalled penalty or two on the other team, and a stupid playcall in between; then, the punt back to Gang Green was returned for a walkoff touchdown. Game over. Season not over, but only because of the other teams who lost and the QB on the other team who is now also lost.

We will rebuild and recover. At least I think we will.