BRH

Dierdork. Ugh.

"We lost to the Bears? When was that?"

Someone had many hours of free time. The Jets' one is good though.

Or maybe they have seen enough of EJ this preseason and see no reason for Belichick to see any more than he has to.

On Sunday afternoons in the fall I would sit in front of our little TV with my dad and he would tell me to "watch number 32." In 1976 I went on a summer camp field trip to Niagara University to watch the Bills' training camp. I was seven. Of course every little kid there wanted to see O.J., and of course that was the summer he held out. I went to my first game at Rich in 1979. Steve Grogan threw two bombs to Stanley Morgan and we lost to the Patriots. No matter. I was hooked for life. Loved the '80-'81 Chuck Knox teams. Suffered through the mid-'80s when we went 8-40 over three seasons. Soared and crashed with the four SB teams. Have endured since. My son, now 10, is a dyed-in-the-wool fan. I have apologized to him for this on several occasions.

A brand new ballpark, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, Sandy Alomar, Kenny Lofton and Albert Belle did a little more for that franchise than Major League did.

No truth to the rumor that the Bills are suing him to get last year's salary back?

Fixed.

So much for the "go to Canada and be a folk hero" advice. From Rich Cimini's ESPN.com story: "Jim Popp, the general manager of the Montreal Alouettes in the CFL, said he'd be interested in Tebow if he failed to land a job in the NFL. But he wouldn't be handed a starting job. "If he wants to come to Canada he would be in the same situation as the one he was in with New York," Popp told TSN. "He can come here and compete to be the backup to Anthony Calvillo and learn the game, just like Jeff Garcia did [behind Doug Flutie]. And one day he might be the guy; that's our vision. He can learn from the best." I know, right? What if Rick Ankiel had said "forget that outfielder crap, I'm a pitcher." And not for nothing, but wouldn't you think Tebow would want to prolong his NFL career, and thus his national pulpit, as long as possible?

Like James Hardy?

OK, sorry, not intending to hijack. Still don't quite buy the value analysis when there are four picks on one side and one on the other. Nor do I understand why people still trade with those bandits.

This. It seems to happen EVERY year. WTF, the Pats* got FOUR picks for a pick at the end of the first round. I don't have the draft value chart in front of me but does that really shake out as an even trade? Really? Even if the values match up, four guys to one??

Exactly. I watched McShay this morning and he says nothing with conviction anyway. Just a bunch of canned talking points. He might as well be football's Eklund. Throwing stuff around to see what sticks.

Amazing to watch McShay rip him. "I talked to three guys in the league I trust more than anyone else with quarterback evaluation and not one of them had him going in the first three rounds." What eva

The story I read didn't say he was stopped at a checkpoint. It said he made an illegal U-turn NEAR a checkpoint. Which, unless you're completely gullible, probably means he saw the checkpoint and knew he was probably too messed up to pass it. And the proof he was too messed up is not in the BAC level but in the fact that he thought he could make a u-ey within sight of a checkpoint and get away with it.

Does anyone remember when Brian Brohm was going to be the #1 pick "next year"? How about Jake Locker? Matt Barkley? I fully agree that there are no guarantees in waiting for next year's class.

There are SU fans all over the state. That's why the Garden is a home away from home for them. That's also why they bill themselves as "New York's College Team." I don't think it matters where you put the flagship public school; Syracuse is still going to cast a mighty big shadow. Lansing and Ann Arbor are closer together; so are Manhattan and Lawrence; so are Ames and Iowa City, etc etc etc, and those states have smaller populations than NYS. That said, as a huge Cuse fan and an alumnus of UB's law school who lives in Rochester, midway between the two... I'd love to see it happen. Why couldn't we have our own version of Duke-Carolina or Stanford-Cal? Both those examples are of schools closer together than Cuse and UB. And Rochester would be the epicenter of the rivalry.

Lot of hate for McCargo here, much of it justified. But it's hard to consider any guy taken in the very late first round (26th) a contender for this list, even if we did trade up for him. Mike Williams is the biggest waste of a high draft pick the Bills have ever made. A tackle picked that high ought to be a LEFT tackle, and it turned out that although MW protected Chris Simms' blind side at UT, he just wasn't good enough to play LT in the NFL. The Bills admitted as much right after they drafted him, although they tried to camouflage it as "we'll start him out at RT and move him when he gets experience." Worse, we took him ahead of a REAL left tackle, Bryant McKinnie. It wasn't like MW was the only tackle prospect out there. Even Levi Jones turned out to be a better LT in the NFL and most people made fun of the Bengals for drafting him that high. Plus, dude was lazy. He had no fire and no work ethic and ended up eating himself into a ditch and then out of the league. Mike Williams may not be the biggest reason for our ineptitude this past decade, but he is the most emblematic.

Only one mention of Coy Wire throughout 16 pages, and at safety too. How about when he started for us as a 165-pound linebacker? (Okay, not really that light, but he might as well have been.)

Joke. Absolute joke.

Thank goodness the fans don't vote for this. They voted Howie Long as the other DE (besides Reggie White) on the Pro Football Hall of Fame All-Time Team. Not Bruce Smith. Not even Deacon Jones. Howie Freaking Long.

I have not seen this discussed, but is it possible Brady was trying to make contact with Reed so that he could get flipped, then get up and complain that Reed had hit him while he was sliding? As batshit as we all went over this, imagine what would have happened if the refs had flagged Reed, stopping the clock and moving the Pats* that much closer to the end zone. Given what we've all seen over the years, it very well could have happened that way. Brady is a little b*tch just like A-Rod. I thought of that play in the ALCS where A-Rod slapped Bronson Arroyo with his purse. The difference here, of course, is that Brady really could have hurt Reed with his dumbshit move.

Also, I don't think anyone would consider the teams that they* actually BEAT in the Super Bowl to be among the top half of all Super Bowl participants. The Rams, Eagles and Panthers have a grand total of one other Super Bowl appearance among them. Then when you consider that they* only won those three games by an average of three points, and were proven to have cheated to do so? And before someone brings up the LA Rams and the Jaworski-era Eagles, I'm talking about contemporary appearances that would suggest the teams' cores were good enough to go to multiple SBs and weren't just flashes in the pan.

He cheated. That's not bitterness. That's fact. Why is THAT so hard for people to accept? By the way, I would also wager that fans of the Rams, Eagles and Panthers still remember this. This. Put it this way: Barry Bonds was one of the greatest baseball players ever before he used steroids -- three MVP awards, nearly 400 home runs, over 400 stolen bases, etc. Roger Clemens was one of the greatest pitchers ever before he used steroids -- three Cy Youngs, nearly 200 wins, 3,000 strikeouts, a 20-K game, etc. With Tom Brady, we'll never know. By the time his cheating was exposed, he had amassed enough experience in reading NFL defenses to continue at a high level. Who's to say that he would have gotten to that level if he hadn't cheated in the first place?

I still think Carroll was trying to have it both ways: first by denying he called the TO, then by covering it with the "practice kick" excuse. Here's a novel way to prevent kickers from taking a practice kick: don't call the timeout in the first place.