Buffalo Bills. AFC champs for the first time in 25 years. Just say'in.
Just for you, Marie! Jason Gay is one of my favorite sports humorists. FYI "Grumpy Lobster Boat Captain" is who Gay likes to say Belichick resembles!
The Buffalo Bills Have Won the AFC East. This Isn’t a Misprint.
A resurgent franchise takes its first divisional title in a quarter-century. The playoffs await.
WS Journal by Jason Gay, Dec. 20, 2020
The planet shuddered, perceptibly, Saturday night. Perhaps you felt the rumble. The Buffalo Bills thumped the Denver Broncos, 48-19, and clinched football’s AFC East.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate what has happened here. This is the first time the Bills have captured this division since 1995—a long ago time, when Bill Clinton was President, Americans would trudge through snow to return Jean-Claude Van Damme VHS tapes, and the computer would excitedly scream, in a human voice, across the room when you received an email.
The Bills used to win this division a lot back then. The NFL was different. The New England Patriots were regularly quite crummy.
Buffalo back on top? It feels like both a throwback and a breath of fresh air. If you know and love a Bills fan, especially a long-suffering Bills fan, who’s proud but also slightly haunted by the whole lifetime experience, call to congratulate him or her. Maybe not first thing Sunday a.m.—maybe they were at the Buffalo airport, in the cold, greeting the team, like a whole bunch of others—but call.
And yes: call. Don’t text. Maybe even call on a rotary dial phone, or a Nokia shaped like a brick, to stick with ’90s vibe.
We should talk about how they got there. There’s nothing flukish about this squad. The Bills have been a team on the verge for some time, often maddeningly so—to be a Bills fan in recent years has been to experience flashes of hope, and then watch those flashes ritually crushed—but in this pandemic-disrupted, no-fans, Covid-chaos season, they finally made the leap, establishing themselves not only as the class of the division, but as a potential Super Bowl contender.
Yeah, I said it. Yes, I know the Kansas City Chiefs have a say. The Bills are 11-3, my friends. They’re utterly legit. I’m just reporting facts.
They’ve done a lot of this on the arm—and legs—of Josh Allen, their sturdy young quarterback, 24 years old and 6-foot-5, from the University of Wyoming via Reedley College, who, in his third year, and not without some wobbly formative learning, has proven himself not only as the type of quarterback who can manage a football game, but also have bona fide moments, bespoke, Josh Allen Moments, Josh Allen doing the kind of things that Josh Allen only does. He had a few of them in Saturday’s rout over Denver, in which he threw a pair of touchdowns, and ran for a couple, too, including a 24-yard dash early in the second quarter.
Allen’s a new kind of thrill, but the whole Buffalo team is like this—intriguing, not the same-old familiar. Stefon Diggs, a wide receiver acquired from Minnesota, has given Allen a steady principal target. The Bills defense is gaining strength, hunkering down as the weather turns frigid. Sean McDermott, the 10th Bills head coach since Marv Levy stepped down after the 1997 season, has impressively built upon last year’s 10-6, playoff wild-card campaign. Hot coordinators Brian Daboll (offense) and Leslie Frazier (defense) are likely to get head coaching looks this winter.
And sure, we should talk about Them, too, because Their sudden decline is a factor in this story—the Patriots, the habitual AFC East heavies, are in a rebuild year, or at least what for them is a rebuild year, as Tom Brady vamoosed and Bill Belichick’s team fell to Miami Sunday, and will miss the playoffs for the first time since the 2008 season.
It was the Patriots, with Brady, and the Grumpy Lobster Boat Captain, who won AFC East the last 11 times, and 16 of the last 17 times, routinely sucking the soul out of promising Bills (and Dolphins, and Jets) teams and making regional dominance look like a dull chore. A Patriots comedown felt inevitable, but it sure took forever.
Still: Buffalo’s story is more the story of a rise than a fall. You can only play the dealt hand. The Bills didn’t ship Brady off to Tampa. Buffalo had to capitalize, and they did.
It’s a minor crime against the Football Gods that none of this is happening with fans present—unless restrictions are lifted, (and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is open to the possibility), the Bills will host a playoff game with no warm souls in the stadium. That feels a little wrong, as game day in Buffalo—especially a playoff game in Buffalo—is a special kind of circus. The opponent is to be named, but this will be the first home playoff for the Bills since 1996. 1996! Again: the world was different then. I drove a Mercury Topaz with a missing front badge, and got magazines delivered in the mail.
I’m assuming Bills fans, marooned at home, can make up the difference, no matter where they watch. As said, it’s been a while, but the seasoned among them know what to do. The most important games are coming, and the Bills are back. Like, really back. It’s happening. It’s like old times and new times, all at once.
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