Thursday, January 03, 2008

Eagles 17, Bills 9

I suppose I should post about the last game of the Bills' 2007 season, mainly for the sake of completeness.

Woo-hoo!


:: The Bills finished 7-9 with one of the NFL's youngest and most injury-prone rosters. There's some talent here to build on.

Meh.


:: Bills quarterbacks. Sure, Trent Edwards has shown promise. So did JP Losman and Rob Johnson, once upon a time. I'm not bothered by Edwards's play in those two games with horrible weather; he seems like a smart and competitive guy, so maybe he learns better to handle that stuff. I dunno.

D'oh!


:: Defensive line getting run down.

:: Offensive line often getting dominated.

:: Offensive playcalling: early in the season they'd call daring plays at really bad times while late in the season they seemingly stopped calling daring plays at all.

So there it is: they went 7-9, which is what I originally figured was the very best they could do. And yes, I do take a "glass is half full" view of this team; there's talent here and they're closer, I think, to being good than they were two years ago.

But Marv Levy has just resigned, leaving the team behind again after two years as General Manager, and the worst thing is that for claiming that he was never going to serve in that position for more than two years, he didn't have a successor ready to step in and carry on the work. So now there's uncertainty in the front office again.

And even more pressing is that Ralph Wilson, the team's owner, is still getting older. I really think that he'll be dead within five years, and when that happens, unless something dramatic happens in this area, I have come to think that the Bills are almost certain to leave. When that happens, I very much doubt my interest in football will continue.

This is almost certainly the last football post I'll be writing for this season, because I'm just not that interested in the playoffs or in continuing to try to invent new ways to call the Patriots names. As promising as the Bills were this year, I'm increasingly finding the NFL a joyless, mechanical affair, so much so that my posts on the subject are also joyless and mechanical. So, while I'll still watch football, I probably won't be blogging about it any more.

Thus, as long as they're still in Buffalo, go Bills!

2 comments:

All Things Jennifer said...

I'm just going out on a limb here, but when I met Marv in September, he didn't look well. I bet it has to do with his health...

teflonjedi said...

I'm going to miss the Patriots name-calling, you know...