Belgium_Bill

Happy Thanksgiving to ye all out there in the US from Belgium, where it is just another working Thursday... Funny how one’s mood can change in a few days. Before Sunday’s Broncos game, I thought to myself, win this one, go 8-3 and then on Thursday you can enjoy a stress-free game. After all, the situation now is most probably win 2 more and you’re in, and of the 5 remaining games the least important one is Dallas since it’s an NFC opponent. Low and behold, there is obviously a lot more media attention for this Thanksgiving game and watching all of that in recent days, seeing how it is all about the Cowboys and Jerry “J.R.” Jones and the whole “mweh” attitude towards the Bills’ chances, I am now getting so pumped up that I hope we thrash those damned Cowboys. On a totally unrelated note, this will be a next step in my 30-odd years of fan experience as a Belgian Bills fan, which reads a bit like a history of technology, going like this: - Buying a foreign (British) Monday newspaper hoping to find the results - Staring at monochrome update texts on my commodore through a crackly ISDN line - Listening to Van Miller and John Murphy on Bills radio network through the internet - Doing that simultaneously with slightly improved play-by-play graphics on a PC, with varying levels of delay - Play-by-play updates on NFL.com - Watching all games live on NFL Gamepass Now tonight, for the first time ever, I will watch the Bills on a sports channel on my TV with commentary in my mother tongue. Wonder what that’ll give…. Go Bills !

Thanks man, it's a lonely place to be a Bills fan over here...

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Well, you won’t have to worry about me ruining the board and starting up endless threads as I never really post anything anyway, a logical consequence from me being probably the loneliest Bills fan in the world. I am Belgian, I live in Belgium, and I have never ever come across another Bills fan here. I lived in England in the 1990’s, watching some NFL on the local channels there, picked up the Bills in that era as my favorite team and have been following everything since. It has been a long road of reading match reports, then listening to John Murphy on the local radio station via a crappy ISDN internet line, accompanied by some lousy graphics that came on the PC screen with a 30 second delay (that is how I lived through the music city miracle, it still turns my stomach), all the way up to being able to see every Bills game through NFL Gamepass. I have not missed a minute of a Bills game since and not a day goes past without me checking the NFL and twobillsdrive websites, and enjoying reading the board here. One day I’ll come to a game in Buffalo, so far I have only seen them live once, a few years ago in London, a game which was a fitting metaphor for my Bills fandom in the past decades, which I always describe as “a quest for mediocrity” Regarding the draft well, what can I say, I know absolutely nothing about college football, hell, I wouldn’t recognize Josh Allen if he stood next to me in the lavatory of my local pub. Yet somehow, bitten by the bug, I end up reading all these mocks and reports for weeks. Seems like every year this thing gets so pumped up that we are lead to believe there are several Aaron Rodgers in the draft. Whether that is the case or not this year, we’ll know in a couple of years. I for one have faith in the current regime. They got us an extra first round pick with last year’s trade while we still got a top 10 talent in Tre’Davious White. That is looking at it a year later when you can really evaluate a draft and not like all these B+ or C- minus grades we will see in a few hours… And to all those on here that have bemoaned the Jets trade and feel that they shafted us, well, the Jets were crap last year, that is why they had the 6th pick, and they gave up huge draft capital to get to 3. We were in the play-offs, and boy was I glad that finally happened. So stay positive, have an enjoyable evening, and spare a thought for me trying to have an enjoyable night and a tough day at work tomorrow, since the first pick is at 2am my time… Let’s hope we make the right choice not just for today but for the next 5 or 10 years. And when we win a Super bowl you’re all invited round to my place for some real Belgian waffles. GO BILLS !

Well, on January 8, 2000, while the refs were reviewing the music city nightmare play, John Murphy had me totally convinced that it was a forward pass. You have to appreciate that in those days, there was no NFL network allowing me to actually see any of the games from the outback hole in Belgium where I live, so I had to rely on a crappy ISDN line sending through the Buffalo Bills Radio Network commentary where John was the color analyst back then. As a consequence, John Murphy postponed the depression that I have been in since that moment for at least 3 minutes. There, I have said something nice about him !

Ghent, Belgium. No idea if there are any other NFL fans around here, let alone Bills fans. Clay pigeon shooting is probably a more popular sport over here... But hey, we fly the flag, go Bills!