As a life-long resident of the suburbs surrounding and the metropolitan area of Buffalo, New York, I'm not precisely what one might deem a 'hometown boy' when it comes to my sports teams. I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan when it comes to the gridiron, and they kicked some ass today against the St. Louis Rams. Sure, there were a few times when I worried for their seeming inability to COMPLETE A FUCKING TACKLE on a runner, but they did good.
However, there was another game on in the NFL that kind of blew me away today, and that was the complete and utter annhililation of the Kansas City Chiefs at the hands of my hometown Buffalo Bills.
When one mentions the Bills, one does not typically think of a capable team. One actually tends to recall that Buffalo is known as a big bar town, a big drinking town, where most of the athletics fanatics are drunk due to shame and horror at how terribly its sports teams perform. I mean, these guys haven't just been bad, they've been the stuff of legendary suck.
Except that today, on their season-opening game in Kansas City, they walked on to the field and systematically picked the Chiefs apart. Or at least, that was how it looked at first glance. If one has been watching football as long as I have, one might realize that the blowout was the result of two major contributing factors. Factor one, Buffalo came to play, they really did. They executed, stayed in it, and didn't falter at any point, as they've done in years past. They stuck with the game 100% of the time, and finished it out in the appropriate style, with a punch to Kansas City's eye.
Factor number two, however, and quite possibly more key to Buffalo's victory than their own stability, was the sloppy, undisciplined play of the Chiefs. This was a team that just showed up to earn its collective paycheck, it would seem. The sidelines showed little if any emotional reaction from either players or staff; the fans were clearing out of the stadium before the game was even five minutes into the fourth quarter; the silence in that stadium could have been used in a horror film to give a haunted house its creepy atmosphere.
When teams play piss-poor football, they're going to lose, period. What really helped the Buffalo Bills win their season-opener was the combination of sloppy play from their opponents and sturdy, steady play from their own squad. But if they want to compete in the AFC as a whole, or even just in their own division of the AFC East, where they face the New England Patriots, they cannot simply rely on steady play. They're going to have to become stellar.
It's early in the season yet, so nobody's sure who the league's superheroes and superzeroes are going to be as yet. I mean, just look at how badly the Pittsburgh Steelers got trounced by the Ravens! But man, it's going to be interesting to see as yet another season of the NFL rolls along.
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