BillsFanSD

This is a problem for the Bills to sort out. Washington played a game in between Sean Taylor's death and his funeral. We should be able to play this Sunday.

I love Josh Allen, but don't let him call it.

Makes sense. There's no realistic way to make up a Monday night game in the same week, and then turn around and play the following weekend. Now they need to make a call on how they're handling this game overall, so that teams know where they stand going into the last game of the season.

So every team except the Bills and Bengals get an extra bye week. No thanks.

"The integrity of the season" went out the window the second they postponed the game. There is no actual way to set things right without disadvantaging somebody. Postponing the game was the right decision, but now we're in a position of having to figure out how to choose among a variety of alternatives each of which is unfair to somebody. I'm always reluctant to make predictions about what the NFL will or won't do, but I'm very skeptical that the league will rearrange the entire rest of the season when they could just call it a forfeit or tie or whatever and be done with it.

So what if they do? Every team in the league theoretically has that option right now.

I don't think the Bills organization will object to this decision. Everything I've seen from the Pegulas, Beane, and McDermott tells me that they are mature adults who will bite the bullet on this because it's in the best interests of the league collectively. Obviously I'd also be fine with giving both teams wins or going on winning percentages too. I'm just pushing back on the argument that this game "has" to be made up. It doesn't, and that's not even a good option.

Too late. That ship sailed as soon as they decided to postpone the game last night. There is literally no solution at this point that doesn't create a competitive advantage for somebody. Right now, the league should be thinking about how to minimize the damage. There is a very high likelihood that they'll determine that the least-bad outcome is to give the Bills a forfeit. That will suck as a fan, but it will just be Bills fans who are put out by that decision and most of us will be okay with it. Fans of CIN, KC, BAL, NE, MIA, and JAX are all fine with that approach. It's a better all-around solution than trying to squeeze in a makeup game in the middle of the week, or rescheduling the playoffs, or stuff like that.

This completely screws up the logistics of 16 games. We don't even know if stadiums are available the following week.

This is an underrated point. The league needs to make a decision promptly. Like today.

I think there's like a 99.9% probability that this week's games go off as scheduled. They probably aren't even under discussion. Why would they be? Lots and lots of NFL games have been played in the wake of one tragedy or another. This year's week 18 will join that list, unfortunately.

I'm just talking about not playing last night's game. I don't care what term the league uses for it.

I'd stop it with this. Anybody who cares to do so could track down scores of plays in which Bills RBs/WRs/TEs made the exact same play. Higgins did nothing wrong.

"Forfeit" is one type of cancellation though.

This is too complicated and heavy-handed. Far simpler to cancel and figure out a solution.

I think I would prefer every solution that involves cancelling last night's game vs. every solution that involves rescheduling it. I mean, the worst case scenario is that we get stuck with a forfeit. That's preferable to trying to make up the game IMO. I guess if we made up the game, won it, and got the #1 seed that would be the best outcome for us, but the Bengals would rightly feel disadvantaged by having to play multiple games on short rest heading into the wild card round. I wouldn't want that either. As hard as it is to take our "fan" hats off, I don't think that making up this game is something anybody would be pick if we were making this call in the offseason and didn't know the teams or stakes involved.

I'm starting to come around to the view that the fairest outcome is just to determine last night's outcome by coin flip. Any other solution is going to feel (rightly or wrongly) as having been engineered to advantage certain teams. "Coin flip" doesn't require reworking any schedules or squeezing in a makeup game, and it removes human decisionmakers from determining the outcome.

I gained a lot of respect for Taylor and the Bengals organization last night. They did the right thing and handled a difficult situation with class. We all know there are teams in the NFL that would not have done it this way. Glad to see the Bengals aren't among them.

Yeah, "win percentage" isn't a very good solution here. That just hands the #1 seed to a team that lost to both of last night's teams. That's dumb. Deciding the game by a coin flip would be more fair.

Come on, man. Nobody thought anything of the score at the time of Hamlin's injury. The game had barely even started.

This isn't about how best to honor Damar Hamlin. It's about finding a solution for the rest of the season that 32 teams will consider reasonably equitable. It may be that the fairest, most equitable solution is to treat it as a Bills forfeit. That's not the outcome that I'm hoping for, but it's not like it throws the universe out of alignment or anything -- it's the same outcome as if we had just lost a tough game to a good opponent.

When you think through how this would work, I honestly think taking a forfeit is "better" for the Bills than trying to make up this game. I'd rather just have the #2 or #3 seed than have to play another game with multiple quick turnarounds.

Nobody is disrespecting anybody. We're just thinking through how to navigate an unprecedented situation with as little unfairness as possible. Getting all emotional doesn't help.

I was thinking about this last night while trying to sleep. Giving both teams a win seems like a pretty fair solution to me. The Bengals and Bills are both made no worse off, and KC doesn't unjustly benefit. The league could (if it wanted to -- this is fine with me) specify that Cincinnati gets a H2H tiebreaker over the Bills so that next week's games are still meaningful for everyone. We would still need to take care of NE to get the #1 seed. Really though, I don't think there's a solution that will be universally regarded as fair. Lots of solutions that would be equitable for BUF and/or CIN in isolation are grossly inequitable for KC. It would be very easy to stumble into a "solution" that basically just hands Kansas City the #1 seed despite losing to both competing teams. If I were a Chiefs fan, I would not be comfortable with that outcome considering how we got there.

Why would Bills players still be at the stadium?