I watched the Music City Miracle game in full last night on the NFL Network for the first time in 20 years. It changed my opinion on the game.

[Bferra13]

Not sure what the point of this thread was besides bashing the Bills before a game against Tennessee.

[Franco_92]

7 hours ago, mannc said:

It’s been 20 years since I watched the game, but I just read your write up.  I had totally forgotten that the Bills were blown out that day.  

 

Give me break...

LMAO. It's been a running theme here all season how our relative offensive/defensive dominance in these very games hasn't been reflected in the score. Why is it suddenly impossible to picture when a guy describes the same thing happening against our Bills in that game? Therefore he could only OBVIOUSLY be describing a blowout, and since it wasn't, he's OBVIOUSLY wrong? 

 

[Just Joshin']

Karma strikes today.

[mannc]

21 minutes ago, arcane said:

LMAO. It's been a running theme here all season how our relative offensive/defensive dominance in these very games hasn't been reflected in the score. Why is it suddenly impossible to picture when a guy describes the same thing happening against our Bills in that game? Therefore he could only OBVIOUSLY be describing a blowout, and since it wasn't, he's OBVIOUSLY wrong? 

 

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

[jethro_tull]

27 minutes ago, Just Joshin' said:

Karma strikes today.

how ironic !  

[reddogblitz]

Flutie starts that game we win going away and probably get to SB and then who knows? 

[Doc]

The Bills should have won that day.  It was an illegal forward pass and I believe it was Adam Schefter who said he had a perfect view of it and saw the ball move forward. 

Edited October 7, 2019 by Doc

[Saint Doug]

Nice fluff written by the OP, and it was nice to read, but games are not won or loss by the “context” of a game. That is, it doesn’t matter which team was dominant that season or who the better team that day was. That stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the score at the end of a lawfully played regulation. In this case, the Bills did enough to win, as judged by the points on the scoreboard, but were robbed of the win by the zebras. This is like saying we were the winners of Super Bowl XXV because we absolutely dominated the NFL that season and even the game. But, no, we did not win or deserve to win that game. 

[CSBill]

Flutie should have been starting. We got what we deserved that day. And then the Flutie curse affected this team for 17 years.

[Orlando Tim]

12 hours ago, 4merper4mer said:

Flutie sucked.  10 trillion words to skate around that fact will never change it.

Flutie did not play-why bring him up?

[kota]

why does anyone care?

 

[muppy]

12 hours ago, Helpmenow said:

Sitting at blind melons in pacific beach with bills fans. Told my buddy it’s not over and then the rest is history 

I was there too right there at Crystal pier yepper. This isnt Jimbo is it? LOL that would be hilarious in a great way....what are the chances?

yeah I saw it was on NFLN last night refused to watch it BAD JUJU and today Im still glad I didnt. I hate that team.

[Rocket94]

 We can try to view that game through a different lens, but we can't rewrite history.

[njbuff]

12 hours ago, JohnnyGold said:

Like most Bills fans my age, I've spent the last 2 decades convinced that Buffalo had a Lombardi trophy ripped from their hands that day, with a terrible call on what was clearly a forward lateral. I vividly remember watching that game and being absolutely devastated when they lost--I was 15 at the time, and it was right up there with Jim Kelly's retirement following the Jacksonville loss as my most disappointing sports moment. Re-watching the game in it's entirety last night didn't necessarily change my view on the throwback, but it put the entire contest in a better context. Here are my thoughts from it (in no particular order  )

 

1) The Tennessee Titans were a VERY GOOD football team.

Somehow, 15 year old me didn't understand this at the time. (In fact, it makes me wonder how many posters on here may be 15 years old and also missing this point about last week's Patriots game, but I digress) The Titans went into that game 13-3, which as they stated during the broadcast was the best record for a wildcard team in history. This was also a point in NFL history when the conferences only had 3 divisions, so the division winner ahead of the Titans, the Jaguars, were even better at 14-2. Buffalo has had only two 13 win seasons in their history, and both times made the Super Bowl--the Titans obviously made the Super Bowl that season. The Titans had young talent all over the field: Air McNair at QB, Eddie George at RB, "the Freak" Jeavon Kearse on D. They had stars, they had a great regular season, and they were a yard away from winning the Super Bowl. What's more, this season marked their arrival as a franchise, and they entered a period of dominance for the next 5 years where they would have campaigns of 11, 12, and 13 wins again, making it as far as the conference championship game. Buffalo, on the other hand, went from this loss to one of the longest runs of futility in NFL history, missing the playoffs for 18 straight seasons.

 

2) The Buffalo Bills were a team in complete disarray.

This was the death of their "dynasty", or at least their years of being a contender, and the self destruction was on complete display. Maybe because those guys were my heroes I was oblivious to it at the time. Maybe the lack of social media/24 hour news cycles didn't catastrophize their collapse as it surely would today. Whatever the case, that Bills team had issues, from top to bottom. As we learned years later, it was Ralph who insisted Johnson get the start over Flutie. Knowing that, it was interesting to hear the response of Wade Phillips when asked by Solomon Wilcox at halftime if he would bench Johnson for Flutie: quote "he said something to me that I can't repeat on TV, but it wasn't very nice." That's not a response you hear from McDermott very often, right? Then there was Andre Reed, who had apparently posted on his website a few days earlier that he felt disrespected and wanted to go to a team that appreciated him. Playing with that hanging over his head would be one thing, but he also wasn't on speaking terms with Flutie, who he said had changed as a man over the course of the previous year. Hmmm... I had never heard that--but it puts the benching into a new context.

 

3) Bruce Smith was the best player on the field, he's the all time sack leader, and the best Bill of all time

I wish I was old enough to appreciate that man's career. Seeing highlights of the greats doesn't do them justice, you need to see them on every play dominate a game. And boy, that's what Bruce did. A pure physical freak. At one point spun around the O lineman and got pressure on McNair with a move that would be replayed 10 times today, but was just a typical play for him in that game. Maybe younger me took it for granted that he was a Bill, or didn't realize how good he was compared to the rest of the league, or hadn't watched enough football yet to appreciate it, or all of the above, but wow. If the rest of his career looked like that (and I'd be willing to bet it was better), you could make a case that he's one of the 10 best players to ever play professional football. Am I crazy for saying that?

 

4) The Buffalo Bills were sloppy that day, the Titans were disciplined. 

The Titans didn't commit their first penalty until well into the second half, the Bills were jumping off sides with reckless abandon from the opening gun. This isn't a conspiracy theory either, in that the refs weren't calling it both ways. No, the Bills had 2, 3, maybe 4 defensive linemen literally jumping off sides anticipating snap counts. At one point Bruce ran across the LOS, made no attempt to get back and negated an Eddie George fumble. There was an egregious holding call ON THE DEFENSE of a field goal attempt that the Titans missed going into the half--they then made the retry. Obviously, every defender was out of position on the Homerun Throwback. Hey, I can say with confidence from posting here: If a McDermott team showed up to a playoff game like this---it would be a long offseason on here.

 

5) The Titans were a better team, and played a much (much) better game.

First: Rob Johnson was terrible. Absolutely, unequivocally awful. I don't know what his final stats were and it doesn't matter. He didn't throw a single pass with zip, with touch, or with accuracy. He didn't move the ball all day. Both touchdowns were the results of the ground game and field position. Were people open? I have no idea. But it was, maybe, the worst performance from a Bills QB that I have ever seen. Second: McNair didn't do much better, but their ground game was significantly better than ours. They were picking up big chunks with ease. Yes, their drives stalled (often), but they had bursts and "the momentum" for almost the entire game. They didn't protect the football well, and turned it over a bunch (some negated by Bills penalties), but they moved the chains and scored the ball all day. Many here hang on to the notion that that Bills defense was elite--Super Bowl worthy, even, but the Titans D outclassed us that day. 

 

6) The Universe righted itself with that Homerun Throwback--it was almost cosmically right. Not a pox on our house, but fair just dues for the Titans.

There's no other way to put it. I don't mean to sound like I believe in Atlantis, but that Homerun Throwback almost had to happen. When the greatest comeback ever took place, Buffalo was the better team than the Oilers, and how would we have felt if they nailed a field goal in overtime to beat us? Terrible right? The same could be said if Christies "game winner" bounced the Titans from the playoffs that year. They were the better team. They played better all day. They dominated us. They deserved to win for all of the above reasons, and that was their season to make the Super Bowl. We can dissect the rest of the conference for the rest of our lives: would the Bills have beaten the Colts the next weekend? The Jaguars? Even the Rams in the Super Bowl? What I finally came to the realization of last night is: it doesn't matter, because they DIDN'T beat the Titans, and didn't deserve to! The Titans were the better team, and beat the Bills all day long up and down the field. Somehow, someway, the Bills took the lead, for about 6 seconds of game time, and then lost it in historic fashion again--but they never should have had the lead to begin with, really. 

 

 

So there it is. Sorry if I need to hand in my fan card after this, but I have to admit, it's nice to make peace with that loss. Watching it again, after 20 years of accumulated football knowledge, makes me see it the way the rest of the NFL has seen it. A great play for the Titans in the context of their Super Bowl run. As a Bills fan, I've always viewed it as emblematic of the curse on our franchise, and a day when we were robbed of what may have been a championship season. But it's not that. We were simply a dysfunctional wild card team that got outcoached and outplayed on the road, and lost to a better team in heartbreaking fashion. Oh well. Life goes on.

 

Are you slightly ret@rded or something?

 

The Titans were ripping off chunks of yardage on the ground at will? They had 194 yards of total offense the entire game.

 

My God.

[Buffalo716]

Bunch of bubkis

 

The universe righted itself with the Home run throwback? 

 

What kinda crock of **** is that...

 

It was an illegal forward lateral end of discussion.. homerun throwback??? I need to jump head first through a table

[dollars 2 donuts]

Regardless, I think if they win that game then the win the AFC.

[Drunken Pygmy Goat]

12 hours ago, Sammy Watkins' Rib said:

 

I agree. Just curious as to how and when we become fans. My becoming a Bills fans was total luck or unluck as I like to mock it sometimes as I have spent all of my life in California with no relations to Buffalo. Dad just casually got into betting on the Bills during the start of the glory years and I've been hooked ever since. And of course Dad now hardly follows the Bills at all but does consider them his team. Just not a die hard fan like my brother and I were sucked into.

 

I was born in WNY, whole family from there. We moved to Florida just before I turned 5. The Bills were already pretty good then. Being so far from home, watching Bills games made us feel "at home". And being good, they were on TV here a lot, especially since the Jaguars didn't exist until 1995.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Drunken Pygmy Goat

[IronyAbounds]

12 hours ago, 4merper4mer said:

They could have started Steve Urkel and Flutie still sucked.

It's kind of funny, Allen really hasn't played all that well but people point to his 9-7 record as a starter as evidence that he's a Franchise QB. Flutie had a 21-9 record as a starter and many Bills fan think he was a crap QB. Maybe Allen is great an Flutie sucked, or maybe its somewhere in between, but it's interesting that consistency has never been a hallmark of a message board (and I'm probably as guilty as the next guy).

[Ga boy]

I agree Titans were better team, but that doesn't mean they deserved to win.  If that's the case, Bills should have beaten Giants in our first SB.  I think if we'd played them 10 times, we'd won 9.