Tim Graham Defends Mike Rodak. Says Bills Fans Treat Him Unfairly

[Gugny]

[nucci]

Many writers are babies...they can criticize and blast anyone but something comes back at them and they start crying

[billsbackto81]

Because if you were just to sit there and take it, I think it would be a miserable depressing existence

------------------

I disagree with this assessment as far as Rodak being defensive towards the comments from Bills fans.

 

I think he'd lead a miserable and depressing existence even if he wasn't the Bills beat writer. ?

[Scorp83]

8 hours ago, BillyWhiteShows said:

http://moranalytics.com/ep-100-tim-graham-the-athletic/

 

Listened to a great interview with Tim Graham of The Athletic.  He speaks openly about his departure from the BN, WGR, and of course his current work at the Athletic.  But I feel the most interesting quote was about his friend and co-host Mike Rodak.  Rodak famously gets a ton of backlash from Bills fans.  I never got the Rodak hatred, but many times I thought that this tweets were phrased very poorly, as to take the piss out of Bills fans.  Graham basically confirms that's the case.

 

I know that very few will listen to the his comments but you can find them at the 35 minute mark.  But here is what Timmy said:

 

Pat Moran:  "You mention MIke Rodak.  I like that dude.  I feel like Bills fans gave him such a bum rap his first couple years in Buffalo because where he came from, but that kind of has turned now.  

I sense now fans consider him one of their own." 

 

Tim Graham:  "Not quite Pat.   I still see and hear about the grief that he gets.  He'll tweet something along the lines of 'Buffalo Bills sign Jordan Phillips to a contract extension.'  Just a tweet.  Just an update.  And within 5 minutes someone will say 'kill yourself,' 'move back,' 'get out of town,' 'please leave."  And he does play the bit of the troll, a little bit, but I think part of it is, and I'm speaking for Mike here and he's been on your podcast, so this isn't anything that I haven't discussed with him over beers but....I get it because it's got to be a bit of a defense mechanism.  Because if you were just to sit there and take it, I think it would be a miserable depressing existence...just to constantly told that you suck, when you know that you're doing good work, which he does.  If it comes time for him to leave at some point, I think the quality of work that he does in terms of breaking down the Bills, the transactions and the data, the position battles and covering the hard stories....like he's all over the LeSean McCoy legal stuff when a lot of others haven't (myself included).  But he's taken the bull by the horns there, and he's done great work.  But if he had just absorbed all the punishment and never gotten to a point where he's got to have a little "FU" in him, then I think that he'd be in a fetal position somewhere."  

Somebody should tell Tim Graham this is the main reason people don't like him. He chooses all the negative stories about the Bills. It's not about where he's from for me, it's about all the negative stories he does for the Bills. I mean God forbid, he takes a good story that will uplift the Bills & fanbase. He's all over Shady cause it's negative, he was all over the Lynch taking $20 story, all over tv home games being blacked out when it was such a thing. Dude is just negative period.

[Magox]

Timmuh hasn't changed one bit from when he posted here years back.   As thin-skinned as ever.

[BruceVilanch]

6 hours ago, MJS said:

Those poor, unfortunate souls. In pain. In need.

 

They just want to be accepted by bills fans!

Dropping an Ursula reference, well done.

[BeginnersMind]

9 hours ago, Virgil said:

Tim is shockingly sensitive considering what his job requires of him to the public eye. 

 

 

Understanding the norm on the anonymous Twitter, message boards, and comment sections is "Go kill yourself" doesn't make it OK or something anyone should do. The vile rhetoric is hurtful. I'm sure Tim and others are used to it--but there's a difference between being used to it and accepting it or enjoying it. 

[Mr. WEO]

8 hours ago, oldmanfan said:

Entertaining until you dare to suggest he might be wrong on something.  Then he acts like a three year old.  A very talented writer but a child in some ways.

 

 

Reminds me of another journalist.....

[Hapless Bills Fan]

8 hours ago, BillyWhiteShows said:

What is BBMC?  Also did Tim Graham post here?  I can find anything By Tim Graham

 

BBMC = BBMB buffalo bills message board, when the poster mistypes one letter

 

Yes, Tim posted here.  Had some cleverly disguising username like, TimGraham.  Last seen in, 2010 or so.  He was (IMHO) kind of thin-skinnedly defending himself by snarking at people who were raising reasonable points and announced loudly he was gonna take his ball and go.  Led to several other long-term posters departing because they felt he should have been treated with more courtesy. 

 

Others felt that "courtesy is as courtesy does" - media members such as John Wawrow who snark at times, but will respond reasonably to reasonable points and just snark when it's pretty much return fire.

[Ol Dirty B]

9 hours ago, Virgil said:

Tim is shockingly sensitive considering what his job requires of him to the public eye. 

 

I didn’t even know where Rodak was from, but all of his articles came off like Pats propaganda and the Bills were a waste of his time.  His Bills coverage was never more insightful than what you’d read on a ticker. 

 

Neither are missed for me. 

 

I mean just wow... that reads like a bold faced lie. How anyone can be on this board and now know rodak is from Boston just because of all of the whining posters do about him on here is beyond me.

 

A segment of WNY has an inferiority complex and is sensitive. I honestly don't care what they think. Call it a dump, Siberia, the tundra...

 

Who cares? It's just dumb sports. You think Jay Z and Beyonce are playing green bay? Sports people are dumb and narrow minded.

[Hapless Bills Fan]

10 minutes ago, BeginnersMind said:

 

Understanding the norm on the anonymous Twitter, message boards, and comment sections is "Go kill yourself" doesn't make it OK or something anyone should do. The vile rhetoric is hurtful. I'm sure Tim and others are used to it--but there's a difference between being used to it and accepting it or enjoying it. 

 

Oh, absolutely.   But Graham would lash out at people who basically just asked reasonable questions about something he said.  Essentially he'd treat "reasonable fan with a reasonable question" as though they were all saying "go kill yourself"

 

3 minutes ago, Ol Dirty B said:

I mean just wow... that reads like a bold faced lie. How anyone can be on this board and now know rodak is from Boston just because of all of the whining posters do about him on here is beyond me.  (....)

Who cares? It's just dumb sports. You think Jay Z and Beyonce are playing green bay? Sports people are dumb and narrow minded.

 

Generalize much?

 

Also seems like you're contradicting yourself.  If "who cares?" is appropriate, then it could be entirely reasonable not to remember where Rodak comes from - do you remember stuff you don't care about?

[HOUSE]

[Ol Dirty B]

6 hours ago, purple haze said:

Whatever.  

 

Many folks can go too far.  At the same time, the reason many don't appreciate Rodak have been evident

over the years.  Being seen as needlessly negative will cause blowback.  It always struck me as Rodak doing

it to play a heel, a character, not as a defense against criticism from fans.  All people need to do is

find news from another source.  No need to get online and act a fool.  Don't click on his articles; that would

be worse for him than insulting him on social media.

 

I'm not sure what he has supposed to be positive about. This fanbase criticizes Murph but I really think that's all they can handle.

 

Or listen to that thin skinned Sal Cappacio.

5 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Oh, absolutely.   But Graham would lash out at people who basically just asked reasonable questions about something he said.  Essentially he'd treat "reasonable fan with a reasonable question" as though they were all saying "go kill yourself"

 

 

Generalize much?

 

Also seems like you're contradicting yourself.  If "who cares?" is appropriate, then it could be entirely reasonable not to remember where Rodak comes from - do you remember stuff you don't care about?

 

I mean that's pretty much my point, I guess I should have been more specific to people who get paid to comment on sports are dumb and narrow minded. They really are for the most part. 

 

And saying who cares completely works for me. Because I don't care where he's from, I don't really care what he says. Some articles I think are good, some are bad, i never read it as patriot propaganda.

 

I think someone who would say his articles as patriot propaganda probably know where he's from.

 

And again, I say something like sports people are dumb and someone goes "hey I'm not dumb". Instead of thinking about all the dumb things people from this board never said.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Ol Dirty B

[Mark92]

Nobody should ever be told to go kill themselves!  Now that that's out of the way, Mike Rodak would get a lot more support from Bills fans if he actually would write something positive about the team.  He is a glass half empty guy when it comes to the Bills for sure.    

I don't know how many of you also listen to the " Bills Beat Podcast" with Joe Buscaglia and Matthew Fairburn ( if you don't you should  be the guys are great) but they hammer on Rodak almost every episode and they work with the guy.  Tim Graham is a guest on there sometimes and I am almost certain that he leads the charge against Rodak at times.   I come from a family that unfortunately deals with mental illness so telling someone to go kill themselves is just repulsive to me.  I 100% agree with Tim about that.  However if he wants everyone to respect the way Rodak writes I think he needs to actually read Rodaks stories or tweets and hear where we are coming from.  

[Chandler#81]

9 hours ago, BillyWhiteShows said:

Really?  What was the snit?  Also are his posts still live?  He's an entertaining dude on Twitter

 

with apologies to DC Tom, he’s an idiot.

yes, Tom, your royalty check is in the mail.

[Hapless Bills Fan]

9 hours ago, BillyWhiteShows said:

Right and Tim is basically says that some of work deliberately was pro-NE to stick it to the Bills fans who gave him such crap

 

This strikes me as revisionism by Rodak's friend Tim.

 

Maybe if Rodak from the start didn't "stick it to the Bills fans" with his NE-centric spin, he would have built respect.

 

It's not like Bills fans are uniformly all over journalists.  There are several who write good stuff and are sorely missed or respected/almost revered here.  Ty Dunne and John Wawrow come to mind.

[SlimShady'sSpaceForce]

Its the friggen Internet where #######s will be #######s.

 

Roadhack is better tan he was when he first got the Bills assignment.  

 

Graham is still miffed he was chased off of TBD.  

 

[HOUSE]

Mike Rodak's spin on positive moves by the Bills is always the same. It was a reach, the Bills overpaid, there were better options, the sky is falling...etc

[scribo]

Neither Tim nor Mike like Bills fans, as a whole. It is that simple. Tim can write his ass off. Mike, not so much. Incidentally, Tim was fantastic when he was the beat writer for ESPN. Mike, not so much.

[SlimShady'sSpaceForce]

23 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

This strikes me as revisionism by Rodak's friend Tim.

 

Maybe if Rodak from the start didn't "stick it to the Bills fans" with his NE-centric spin, he would have built respect.

 

It's not like Bills fans are uniformly all over journalists.  There are several who write good stuff and are sorely missed or respected/almost revered here.  Ty Dunne and John Wawrow come to mind.

Agreed.

 

Rodak didn't do himself any favors.  Maybe he was hoping his Bills coverage wouldn't last long..  

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

42 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

BBMC = BBMB buffalo bills message board, when the poster mistypes one letter

 

Yes, Tim posted here.  Had some cleverly disguising username like, TimGraham.  Last seen in, 2010 or so.  He was (IMHO) kind of thin-skinnedly defending himself by snarking at people who were raising reasonable points and announced loudly he was gonna take his ball and go.  Led to several other long-term posters departing because they felt he should have been treated with more courtesy. 

 

Others felt that "courtesy is as courtesy does" - media members such as John Wawrow who snark at times, but will respond reasonably to reasonable points and just snark when it's pretty much return fire.

 

The whole episode was quite humorous to many of us who were here LONG before Timmy showed up.

 

Oh, precious Timmy.

 

[DaBillsFanSince1973]

10 hours ago, BillyWhiteShows said:

http://moranalytics.com/ep-100-tim-graham-the-athletic/

 

Listened to a great interview with Tim Graham of The Athletic.  He speaks openly about his departure from the BN, WGR, and of course his current work at the Athletic.  But I feel the most interesting quote was about his friend and co-host Mike Rodak.  Rodak famously gets a ton of backlash from Bills fans.  I never got the Rodak hatred, but many times I thought that this tweets were phrased very poorly, as to take the piss out of Bills fans.  Graham basically confirms that's the case.

 

I know that very few will listen to the his comments but you can find them at the 35 minute mark.  But here is what Timmy said:

 

Pat Moran:  "You mention MIke Rodak.  I like that dude.  I feel like Bills fans gave him such a bum rap his first couple years in Buffalo because where he came from, but that kind of has turned now.  

I sense now fans consider him one of their own." 

 

Tim Graham:  "Not quite Pat.   I still see and hear about the grief that he gets.  He'll tweet something along the lines of 'Buffalo Bills sign Jordan Phillips to a contract extension.'  Just a tweet.  Just an update.  And within 5 minutes someone will say 'kill yourself,' 'move back,' 'get out of town,' 'please leave."  And he does play the bit of the troll, a little bit, but I think part of it is, and I'm speaking for Mike here and he's been on your podcast, so this isn't anything that I haven't discussed with him over beers but....I get it because it's got to be a bit of a defense mechanism.  Because if you were just to sit there and take it, I think it would be a miserable depressing existence...just to constantly told that you suck, when you know that you're doing good work, which he does.  If it comes time for him to leave at some point, I think the quality of work that he does in terms of breaking down the Bills, the transactions and the data, the position battles and covering the hard stories....like he's all over the LeSean McCoy legal stuff when a lot of others haven't (myself included).  But he's taken the bull by the horns there, and he's done great work.  But if he had just absorbed all the punishment and never gotten to a point where he's got to have a little "FU" in him, then I think that he'd be in a fetal position somewhere."  

[ALF]

I think Rodak evolved as he got to know the Bills and it's fans. At the start Roadhack was deserved but he has since done a good job  imo

[Southern Bills Fan]

My opinion of Rodak is that even when he's just trying to report Bills news on ESPN, he seems to constantly put a negative spin on it. I don't ever agree with telling anyone to kill themselves because some people actually end up doing it. I also don't do twitter, it's poison.

[buffaloaggie]

8 minutes ago, Southern Bills Fan said:

My opinion of Rodak is that even when he's just trying to report Bills news on ESPN, he seems to constantly put a negative spin on it. I don't ever agree with telling anyone to kill themselves because some people actually end up doing it. I also don't do twitter, it's poison.

Agree that Rodak always spins things negatively. That has always been my comment on his articles. I'm sure someone, sometime, has really bad-mouthed Rodak, but my worst comment is he's a hack. Nothing personal, just he brings nothing special through his writing, and, especially as a Patriots fan, he does seem to resent having to write for the Bills, as does Graham, who I believe is a Dolphins fan. Graham just has more writing talent than Rodak.

[TC in St. Louis]

His editors may be too disinterested to dig into his articles.  The Bills seem to have been irrelevant so long that this assignment sucks to most writers.  It's sort of like that scene in Animal House when they kept putting the pledges into the corner with Jugdish and his friends.  Once we start winning again, it will be a fun assignment and they'll put somebody else on it.  Even when we made the playoffs a couple years ago all people wrote about was how lucky we were.  Which was true.  But we held Jacksonville to 10 points on the road....and a week later they rang up 40+ in Pittsburgh.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cSYNuEmHQk

[Pasaluki]

Tim Graham although whiney, was a decent writer. Being a good writer covers a multitude of sins.

 

Rodak has no insight about the team, has no sources on the team, and isn't a very good writer to make up the difference. He has a great job that many would be very passionate about, yet he is completely dispassionate. 

[C.Biscuit97]

There definitely some very sensitive Bills fans who feel personally attacked if you say something bad about the Bills (the cult of Josh Allen for instance).  Then they lash out and make it personal with the reporter.  Rodak looks like a weasel but some fans take it too far.  Face it.  We’ve been a bad franchise.  Why sugar coat it?

 

and I can’t stand TG.  Dude kills people (see that BS he did with EJ after his rookie year) and then cries when someone criticizes him.  Most sports media is a joke.  Dudes with no talent, criticizing people with real talent.

[Yav]

Tim Graham is a tool.

He tends to post ***** without any real knowledge of the subject and then will defend his BS as if he's an authority on the subject. 

 

I personally can't stand that jackass. 

Edited March 19, 2019 by Yav

[oldmanfan]

8 minutes ago, C.Biscuit97 said:

There definitely some very sensitive Bills fans who feel personally attacked if you say something bad about the Bills (the cult of Josh Allen for instance).  Then they lash out and make it personal with the reporter.  Rodak looks like a weasel but some fans take it too far.  Face it.  We’ve been a bad franchise.  Why sugar coat it?

 

and I can’t stand TG.  Dude kills people (see that BS he did with EJ after his rookie year) and then cries when someone criticizes him.  Most sports media is a joke.  Dudes with no talent, criticizing people with real talent.

Agreed.  The incident with EJ prompted my email to him where he got all snarky.  I felt he made himself part of the story, and to me journalists should not do that.

[Mark80]

Tim Graham sucks too.

[BuffaloBillsGospel]

I'm not a fan of most social media, watching people write "go kill yourself" because of a sports team is pretty sick imo and most people hide behind a keyboard.

[SlimShady'sSpaceForce]

3 hours ago, DaBillsFanSince1973 said:

Not small enough 

 

[Lurker]

Yawn.....Big Whoop.

[purple haze]

4 hours ago, Ol Dirty B said:

 

I'm not sure what he has supposed to be positive about. This fanbase criticizes Murph but I really think that's all they can handle.

I don't expect journalists to be cheerleaders for the teams they cover.  That's not their job. However,  there have been many times over the years when the Bills won a game or signed a player or did something that was generally positive and Rodak comes along bringing up some statistic or makes some comment that he ties into the positive that just happened to intentionally lessen its impact among fans.  That's ass-holery in action.  I'm not a fan of it, therefore, I go to other sources who cover the team.  I don't harass him on social media or call him out of his name.  

 

He can do what he does and, in turn, I'll do what I do.

[Gugny]

59 minutes ago, C.Biscuit97 said:

There definitely some very sensitive Bills fans who feel personally attacked if you say something bad about the Bills (the cult of Josh Allen for instance).  Then they lash out and make it personal with the reporter.  Rodak looks like a weasel but some fans take it too far.  Face it.  We’ve been a bad franchise.  Why sugar coat it?

  

and I can’t stand TG.  Dude kills people (see that BS he did with EJ after his rookie year) and then cries when someone criticizes him.  Most sports media is a joke.  Dudes with no talent, criticizing people with real talent.

 

My knock on Rodak is that everything he writes is either garbage or "no ****, Sherlock," material.  He offers literally nothing.  Zero.

 

My knock on Timmy G., is that he's an arrogant a-hole who doesn't like to be challenged - even in a professional/respectful manner.  Classic douche, really.  The place is better without him and his ridiculous little cult who followed him like lost puppies.

[Bill from NYC]

11 hours ago, eball said:

 

Yeah, I think Lori is in love with him

I wish that she was still here.

[BillsVet]

Just now, Bill from NYC said:

I wish that she was still here.

 

Another outstanding member of the forum driven away.

 

I cannot believe the loss of civility that's taken place here where even simple debate is practically impossible. 

 

I really think the board serves as a microcosm for where society is going, and it's not good.  Incessant arguing, an inability to listen, or the ability to agree to disagree.

 

Some people ultimately decide to leave and replaced with those who have never heard the word decorum.

[Saint Doug]

People getting unduly criticized on the internet? Nope. Never happens. 

[Canadian Bills Fan]