PERTINENT DATA: 4-12 last year; 150 to 1 odds to win Super Bowl XLVI.
BEST CASE SCENARIO (Neil): Uh . . . come on now, you don’t really think there’s hope here, do you? Okay, fine, fine, let’s say everything breaks right in Buffalo for a change. Let’s say that Ryan Fitzpatrick manages to prove slightly better than competent, that Fred Jackson and C.J. Spiller manage to provide the running game with a kick-ass one-two punch, that Stevie Johnson emerges as a true number one receiver, that the offensive line manages to not get Fitzpatrick, Jackson or Spiller killed and that Shawne Merriman manages to be revived in some sort of Frankensteinian experiment, runs wild, sacks everything in sight and Kyle Williams actually gets some fucking help on defense. Let’s say all of that miraculously happens. I think at best that makes the Bills an 8-8 team. And that’s the best case scenario. The Bills fucking suck, man, and the sooner you come to terms with that, the easier it will be to help pack them up when they inevitably make the fulltime move to Toronto.
WORST CASE SCENARIO (Raven): It's really not hard to imagine the worst case scenario, because as the Bills piddle around in upstate New York, the Jets and Patriots have started their own ridiculous free agency gold rush ala Yankees/Red Sox, and basically the Bills are like the Baltimore Orioles - with like two good young players they can be like, "Hey, look at these two good young players we have! You should come root for them and watch them get pounded by everybody!" Seriously, the Bills will be lucky to win four games this year. It's going to be ugly as fuck, and the fact they wear shitty looking uniforms and play in a decrepit upper armpit of America only makes it worse. Have you noticed how when LA. is like, "We're going to get a team!" and people say, "Oh yeah, what team?" Buffalo never comes up in the conversation... That's because there's nothing sexy about this team. It would be better off to be absolved and just give Los Angeles a new franchise from scratch next year, were Ralph Wilson to die.
PLAYER TO PULL FOR (Neil): Kyle Williams was the lone Buffalo Bill to make the All-Armchair Linebacker Team, and as such, he is the one player you should all pull for. The reasons here are the same as the reasons there. He’s an awesome player on a shitty team playing in a dead city that can suck a man’s soul clean out of his body and then wipe its ass with it while snow falls, banshees howl and tears freeze in the ill wind of that frozen hell. It takes a special sort of dude to thrive in those conditions. It takes a special sort of dude to be awesome even though the whole world around him is decaying and dying. Kyle Williams was that sort of dude last season, and I’m rooting for him to continue rising above it all, for him to outlast the Failure Demons and to keep his head from sinking beneath the frozen muck of Buffalo. I’m rooting for him because I have seen what losing does to a man. I have seen what a crushed soul looks like and it sucks. I have seen my city’s greatest football hero drown in a river of tears and I have seen what it looks like when Hope dies, frozen like a bum huddled inside of an abandoned building with no windows and only the ghosts of some former half-forgotten glory to keep him company. I know that shit. I know it too well, and I know that those same ghosts are whispering awful things in Kyle Williams’ ears and I want him to continue to ignore them and to fight, fight, fight until somehow, someway, he has beaten his own monstrous and miserable fate. It’s not even about him. It’s about all of us who have found ourselves trapped by the Failure Demons, who have had our football souls tortured in hell for so damn long that we barely even remember what being happy as fans feels like. It’s about one of our own breaking free and . . . and . . . just surviving, man. Just surviving. Root for Kyle Williams because he has managed to survive so far. Root for Kyle Williams because he defies those same hell beasts who have hunted so many of us for so long. Root for Kyle Williams because Kyle Williams is a warrior of light in a dark and forgotten ice kingdom. Root for Kyle Williams because he is you and he is me and he is everyone who has ever tried to rise above the pain that comes with being a part of or being a fan of some shitbird team.
PLAYER TO HATE MOST (Raven): Shawne Merriman is a black dude with a fauxhawk kinda thing going on and he used to be romantically involved in a serious sense with Tila Tequila. That's a nebulous netherworld of underclass humans, like juggalos, except even juggalos had the common sense but black hearts to pelt someone like Tila Tequila with bottles and shit. Merriman belongs to an even scummier world of like wealthy juggalo-types, who did not come by their strange scumminess as the last badge of honor they could find from a shithole, hopelessly hopeless rural midwestern upbringing. These Merrimans and Tequilas and Lil Jons and Jersey troll people and Will.I.Ams are scummy in a strange pretend fashionable way, not because they are scraping to find anything to be proud of, but because they lack souls. Shawne Merriman has no soul, and whatever little bit of it there was he diluted with human growth hormones and whatever god awful shit is the next level of performance enhancement, because if they're going to be testing for HGH, that means players are on some next level Brave New World bullshit where they have alien/pig hybrid blood cultivated on the space station because gravity-less fluids attain maximum regeneration rates or some Dr. Mengele in the year 3000 bullshit like that.
BEST NAME ON TEAM: Mansfield Wrotto.
IN A PERFECT WORLD (Neil): Shit, in a perfect world, Buffalo would be walled off and ignored while its people were forced into cannibalism and then a giant dome could be built over top of its ruins as a monument to the death of the American dream. We could even make it a giant public works project. Poor people and Mexicans could build the damn thing during the day and then get all fucked up at night and light giant bonfires and dance around the ruins of Buffalo, and screw each other stupid and fight and laugh and cry. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Bills could finally find some sort of hope in the welcoming arms of Canada. Exiled to Toronto, they could try to forget the misery of the past and reinvent themselves as the team of a whole nation. Sure, it’s a nation full of weird Geddy Lee enthusiasts who worship an old lady from England and freeze their dead in ice coffins awaiting a magical day foretold by their holy men when the ice will finally melt and the reanimated souls of the dead will emerge and conquer the world in Canada’s ungodly name, but it sure beats the fuck out of having to live and play in Buffalo, you know?
PROGNOSIS (Raven): The Bills will finish up 2-14, and win the Andrew Luck sweepstakes, which will be unfortunate for Andrew Luck, because it's still going to be Buffalo. Really, ever since the O.J. thing cashed out all of Buffalo's franchise juice, they've been hard-pressed to gain any psychic momentum. They should just go back to the throwbacks all the time, have everybody on the team wear #32, and play all their games in Toronto, and be like, "Fuck America, you fat lazy racist fucks. We now only serve imam-approved foods at our games," and just go straight buckwild. Ralph Wilson is an old white guy though, and in fact most NFL owners are either old white guys or white guys who will afford the health care to get old, so it kind of keeps cool shit like this happening because they won't ever approve selling the Bills to like Bumpy Johnson or Frank Lucas or something. We truly are an uptight country, aren't we? At least the Bills went ahead and got themselves some gay ass Canadian Football League uniforms this year, which somehow look futuristically retro, in order to hopefully start this plan in motion.
No comments:
Post a Comment