The Buffalo Bills Are a Mess, But Sean McDermott's Firing Was Totally Justifiable

I’m a Chicago Bears fan, with a classic American sports allegiance origin story - my father was born in Chicago. If you’re bothering to read this post you will be aware that you Bears experienced a playoff loss recently that would be considered to be of the classic “rip your heart out” variety, except for the convenient fact that quarterback Caleb Williams just completed his second year and offensive guru head coach Ben Johnson just completed his first. That means that a potentially-gutting playoff loss feels, instead, like the start of a great adventure. I’ve been telling my Bears fans friends to try and enjoy this moment, because this situation is rare and doesn’t last long - the playoff loss that leaves you excited rather than devastated. You can find a team that long ago moved from the first category to the second in the other team I follow closely, the Buffalo Bills.

My interest in the Bills echoes past years with particular investment in the Green Bay Packers and the St. Louis Rams. You see, I’m in a semi-keeper fantasy football league (we can keep three players each year) that started, if you can believe it, in 1992, when I was ten years old. This was before any online fantasy leagues existed, so we had to hand-score games out of the box scores in the paper. For that reason, it has been and remains a scoring-only league; we only get points for touchdowns, field goals, extra points, and safeties, nothing for yards or catches. (Plays do count double if they’re more than 50 yards, though.) Such a system is so antique that most fantasy sites that develop player rankings don’t offer it as an option. But we’re old and we like it that way. And what happens in a league where you might keep a star quarterback year after year is that you become invested in his team to an unusual degree. Because of how important your quarterback is to team success in a league like ours, if you hold onto a guy year after year, his team sort of becomes your secondary rooting interest. (Conveniently, the Bears and Bills are in different conferences and rarely play each other.) That happened to me with Kurt Warner when he was an MVP-caliber quarterback, it happened to me with a decade of Aaron Rodgers, and now it’s happened with Josh Patrick