Patriot Opponents Record: 7-17
Dallas Opponents Record: 6-19
Who really knows how good either team really is. Read this excerpt.
In other news, nothing good has happened to Buffalo since the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Sure, the Bills twice won the old AFL in the 1960s, but how many of Buffalo's citizens were even born when that happened? As the country has boomed since World War II, greater Buffalo is among the few urban regions that has lost rather than gained population. The city's economy has been contracting for three decades. Rust-belt industries move out, but unlike in other places that happened, high-tech industries don't move in. Buffalo offers a fantastic corporate-relocation value: top-quality housing stock at far below the median U.S. price, ideal summer weather, a strong cultural scene, the last open-for-development urban waterfront in the United States, a human-scale city where you never waste one second of your life stuck in traffic jams. And sure, it snows. But they plow. Having lived in Buffalo, Chicago and Washington, D.C., I can attest that snow is less disruptive to daily life in Buffalo than in Chicago or our nation's capital. Yet despite how attractive Buffalo seems as a corporate destination, companies don't come, and the city keeps spiraling downward.
All true sons and daughters of Buffalo cherish a magic-realist belief that if only the Bills would win the Super Bowl, the city's fortunes would be transformed. Actually, I think this would turn out to be true! Instead, what Buffalo has is an NFL team that lost a game Monday night by surrendering nine points in the final 20 seconds. You might have gone off to bed, but as the clock struck midnight on the East Coast, the Bills completed one of the worst collapses in football annals.
You've probably heard that Tony Romo threw five interceptions despite facing Buffalo's injury-depleted secondary -- the Bills' secondary has so many injuries it should be called a tertiary -- but Dallas rallied to win on a long field goal on the game's final snap. Buffalo was plus-5 in takeaways, and had three touchdowns on returns, yet still managed to lose. You have to work very hard to blow a game when you're plus-5 in the takeaway column and score three times on interceptions and kickoffs. Work hard to lose Buffalo did, and central to the collapse was coaching error, not player error.
Leading 24-16, the Bills faced third-and-8 on the Cowboys' 11 with 6:21 remaining. Buffalo had been using a simplistic, high-school-style offense of runs up the middle and hitch passes. The Bills threw down the field exactly once while throwing sideways or ultrashort 30 times, and ran outside twice (for a 5.5-yard average) while running straight up the middle 22 times (for a 3.1-yard average). Owing to turnovers, Buffalo took possession in Dallas territory three times on the night, but owing to the Bills' predictable offensive game plan, they netted only one field goal. Nevertheless, the Bills found themselves with an eight-point lead and deep in Cowboys' territory with 6:21 remaining.
Had Buffalo simply run up the middle for no gain, then kicked a field goal, the Bills almost certainly would have won -- they would have held an 11-point lead and kept the clock moving, and Dallas didn't score to pull within an onside kick of victory until 20 ticks remained on the clock. Instead, Buffalo offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild called a pass that was intercepted, ending the team's chance for a secure lead -- and it wasn't even a decent gamble because the Bills' ultrashort passes to that point were netting 4.6 yards per attempt. There were at least 20 coaches on the Buffalo sideline and in the press box. Somebody is supposed to stay on top of evolving stats like net passing -- on well-coached teams such as New England and Indianapolis, you'd better believe the guy making the calls gets evolving stats during the game. But with a secure lead just one snap away, Buffalo needlessly put the ball into the air, and needless to say, it was intercepted.
Then the Bills got possession again, still leading 24-16, and faced third-and-7 near midfield with 3:58 remaining. Again they threw -- incompletion -- again stopping the clock. Dallas didn't score its touchdown until 20 seconds were left: Had Buffalo simply run up the middle for no gain on either one of its late-fourth-quarter third downs, keeping the clock moving, the Cowboys would have run out of time and the home team would have won. In Week 1 -- when the Bills also lost on a field goal on the final play -- on a third down with about two minutes to go, the Bills also threw incomplete and stopped the clock; the Broncos kicked the winning field goal as time expired. TMQ's Law of the Obvious holds: Sometimes all a team needs to do is run up the middle for no gain, and things will be fine. Buffalo, 1-4, would be 3-2 today -- and talking about its monster upset of the Cowboys on "Monday Night Football" -- if the Bills' coaches had simply kept the clock moving with runs when holding late leads against Denver and Dallas. You have to work really hard to lose a game in which you were plus-5 on turnovers, but the Buffalo coaching staff was equal to this challenge.
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