Rooting for the Bills

Well, I’m not going to lie: That was a daunting experience. As you know, I’m in the process of choosing my new NFL team, and I’m trying a new one on for size each week. Through an intricate process involving detailed and proprietary analytics, I believe I am down to five teams, I think. In alphabetical order:

— Buffalo Bills

— Detroit Lions

— Kansas City Chiefs

— New York Jets*

— Philadelphia Eagles

*Or Giants … I keep going back and forth between the Jets and Giants.

Now, there are many people out there who say that this whole thing is a sham and that I’ve already chosen the Kansas City Chiefs as my team … and by a “whole lot of people,” I’m mainly talking about my oldest daughter, who is a big Chiefs fan. But I can assure you that I’m trying to fully experience each of these teams. In doing so, I have come to realize that I’m just not going to become a Bears fan, a Panthers fan or a Bengals fan. They just didn’t quite fit.

So what about the Buffalo Bills?

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Well, like I say, it was a daunting experience rooting for the Bills as they annihilated the much-despised Pittsburgh Steelers 38-3 and played what was, to my eye, more or less the perfect football game. There’s a glorious scene in “Mad Men” where someone was on the plane with Don Draper — I think it was Salvatore — and a beautiful flight attendant hit on Don in a big way. Finally, at some point, Salvatore (or whoever it was) said to Don something like, “I’ve flown a few times, I’ve never actually seen a stewardess act like that.”

And Don said, with true shock in his voice, “really?”

Don simply had spent an adult life getting hit on by beautiful flight attendants.

That’s what it felt like rooting for the Bills, like I was somebody else entirely, the sort of somebody who gets hit on by beautiful flight attendants and gets to watch his team play heavenly football without even the slightest touch of anxiety or unease. It was oddly disquieting.

Now, I do understand that the Bills’ history is thoroughly haunted; the whole history of Buffalo sports is thoroughly haunted. I get the four Super Bowl losses, the very recent 17-season playoff drought, the fact that the Bills have been stopped by the Kansas City Chiefs in each of the last couple of seasons.

But this team is so damned good …

I felt guilty jumping aboard now.

Let’s talk for a couple of minutes about Josh Allen. At some point during the game, CBS put up this graphic:

Sure, it is tempting for me to use this as an opportunity to make fun of the Browns and Baker Mayfield — which I will do in a minute — but I need to be straight: I was scared to death that the Browns would take Josh Allen. All I knew about him was that he was a big and reportedly inaccurate lug from Wyoming or maybe North Dakota State*, and that spelled “B-U-S-T” in my mind.

*No, sorry, this was Carson Wentz.

I didn’t appreciate that Allen is a striver. He had desperately wanted to play football at Fresno State, which doesn’t seem an unrealistic dream for a guy with his talent, but they didn’t want anything to do with him coming out of high school. Instead he went to someplace called Reedley College, which is where Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox went to school, and he was good enough that Wyoming gave him a shot.

Allen was good at Wyoming, really good, and it sure looked like he would be the Browns’ No. 1 overall pick — Mel Kiper Jr. thought so. But the Browns, after probably doing as much research as I had done, decided instead to go with Mayfield, who is probably five inches shorter, 20 pounds lighter, considerably slower and with roughly half of Allen’s arm. They figured, I guess, that Mayfield would make up for all that with his mind.* The Bills, meanwhile, seeing their opening, desperately traded upward to get Allen and, in the process, changed everything in Buffalo.

*I don’t say this criticizing the Browns because, as mentioned, I fell for it too. Sure, I’d like for the team I root for to be smarter about football than I am, but the point stands. It wasn’t until Sunday that I fully realized something about Baker Mayfield: He is bad at playing quarterback. You would think that I would have noticed this before, but there was something — his charisma, his hunger to win, the way the Browns coaches worked around his weaknesses, his funny commercials — that blinded me to the obvious.

Allen is developing into an unstoppable force. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

Allen’s rookie season with the Bills highlighted his flaws as a quarterback — he really was inaccurate, he made questionable decisions, he held on to the ball way too long, he gave up on plays too quickly. But there were other things, too. He was a ferocious runner. He had probably the best arm in the NFL; one analyst called it the best arm in the HISTORY of the NFL. And he led the Bills on some game-winning drives. There was plenty to work with.

And he worked. You kept hearing and reading stories about how hard Josh Allen worked with then offensive coordinator Brian Daboll to get better, how much time he spent studying, how determined he was to become a winning quarterback. The guy was named team captain at the start of his second season.

And not to throw dirt on Baker Mayfield or Sam Darnold (one of Allen’s closest friends) or Josh Rosen, but you just didn’t see as many stories about how hard they were working. Maybe they were working every bit as hard. Maybe they weren’t.

In year two, Allen had transformed into a good quarterback and the Bills won 10 games. In year three, he had transformed into a great one. Suddenly, he was hitting about 70% of his passes, throwing touchdown passes galore, rarely getting intercepted, breaking off long runs at will, this guy is absurd. My pal Mike Schur often talks about sports figures who are more like RoboCops than actual human beings, athletic aberrations who 30 years ago would have been viewed as aliens.

I’d say that right now, the top RoboCops in each sport is:

Football: Josh Allen
Baseball: Aaron Judge
Basketball: Giannis
Hockey: Connor McDavid

On Sunday, against a truly bad Pittsburgh team that should be 0-5 right now, Allen could have thrown for a 1,000 yards and 10 touchdowns if he wanted. As it was, 424 yards and four touchdowns was more than enough.

And the Bills are 4-1, they probably should be 5-0, and they look pretty close to invincible. They have allowed, by far, the fewest points in the NFL. They have also scored the most points in the NFL (though Kansas City could catch them tonight). They are brilliantly coached by Sean McDermott, their fans are absolutely awesome, I love the city, I love the gray Buffalo sky, because it reminds me of Cleveland (seriously, they had a shot of the sky and it made me feel so good), I’ve been invited to Buffalo for a game and some wings and a beef on weck, I mean, it all seems too good to be true.

And that’s the big question, isn’t it? Is it all too good to be true?

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And a few random NFL thoughts:

— I like the New England Patriots SO MUCH MORE when they are wearing their old red uniforms with the Pat the Patriot helmets. I mean it’s shocking how much more I like them. They wore those uniforms on Sunday, in a 29-0 destruction of the Lions, and I didn’t really feel any of the sadness I was expecting. The uniforms completely disarmed me, I didn’t think about Belichick or Brady or all the many gates they committed through the years. Instead, I thought about Steve Grogan and Sam Bam Cunningham and Irving Fryar and Andre Tippett and lost all of the anti-Patriots sentiment that flows through me. Strange the power of a uniform.

And on top of all that, their quarterback was a guy named Bailey Zappe.

— Speaking of that game … I guess Belichick can still design a crushing defense when he feels like it. The Lions came into the game with the highest scoring offense in the NFL. And they got shut out.

Were they completely stifled by some brilliant Belichick plan? Not exactly. They put up a fair amount of yards. They ran the ball with reasonable effectiveness. No, instead, it was a true Lions experience.

• Lions had the ball fourth-and-1 near midfield on their first drive. Jamaal Williams was stuffed for no gain.

• Lions moved the ball in the red zone, first and 10 at the New England 18. Jared Goff threw an interception.

• Lions moved the ball into long field goal range and decided to go for it on fourth and nine. Jared Goff got sacked, fumbled, and the Patriots returned it for a touchdown.

• Lions moved the ball to the New England 32, fourth and 2, Goff’s pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown was short of the marker.

• Lions moved the ball to the New England 5, fourth and goal, Goff’s pass was incomplete.

• Lions moved the ball to the New England 31, fourth and 1, Justin Jackson lost a yard on the run.

• Lions moved the ball to the New England 18, fourth and four, Goff threw to the end zone incomplete.

This one ended, by the way, with Jared Goff kneeling on the ball — I’m sure that’s happened before, where the losing team takes a knee to end a lost game, but it just struck me as very Lions.

— The end of the Browns-Chargers game was flat-out bizarre, which I suppose is all you can expect when you see two plagued teams like the Browns and Chargers play. The Chargers led by two, and the Browns seemed ready to score the go-ahead touchdown when Jacoby Brissett threw a horrendous goal-line interception. The Chargers then picked up a first down and seemed in position to run out the clock. But the Browns used all of their timeouts and the two-minute warning to put San Diego in a fourth-and-two from their own 45 yard line.

The Chargers decided to go for it … but only in a lame effort to get the Browns to jump offside.

Then the Chargers REALLY decided to go for it, which was a gutsy decision, one I liked until I saw that they had absolutely no idea what play to run, and they ended up running this no-chance pass play that had no chance. That gave the Browns the ball with 1:14 left and only a few yards away from field goal range.

And then the Browns completely botched that drive, set up their rookie kicker Cade York with a 53-yard field goal for the win. He pushed it right. One of those rare games neither team deserves to win.

— I’m digging these New York Jets. It’s a team filled with cool names — Breece Hall, Braxton Berrios, C.J. Uzomah, Sauce Gardner. It looks like Zach Wilson can play. I’m looking forward to my Jets week.

— The Carolina Panthers fired Matt Rhule on Monday after a disastrous and embarrassing 37-15 loss to the 49ers. I must admit, I didn’t understand at all why the Panthers thought Matt Rhule was going to be a successful coach just because he had some moderate success at Baylor. It felt like a super-weird hire to me, but so many people seemed to like him that I thought: “OK, maybe I’m wrong.” I mean, I was wrong about Josh Allen.

In this case, however, I wasn’t wrong.