By Mike Vallee
The majority of Patriots games I write about and analyze are consumed from the comfort of my couch or the friendly confines of Gillette Stadium but this week three of my friends and I decided to go behind enemy lines and head out for a little football road trip to the jewel of Lake Erie: Buffalo, New York.
The Trip: Nothing like starting your weekend with a nice long trek down one of the most boring highways in America, I-90. Unless you are one of those people that actually schedules an annual trip to New England to experience fall foliage, there isn’t much to see between Boston and Buffalo. As four lifetime New Englanders that have lived virtually their entire lives in or around a major city, we were less interested in the colors of fall and more fascinated by the large number of depressed former mill towns that pepper the I-90 landscape. Do people actually live in these places? What do they do for work? Why do they stay? How many Walter White’s do you think live there? Unless buying a three-bedroom ranch for 68.5K and living light years from modern civilization appeals to you, then you probably want to stay away from the I-90 corridor.
Thankfully the monotony of the trip was reduced by two hours because my friend Dave is apparently under the impression that the speed limit is 90 mph. The navigation system estimated 8 hours – we arrived outside of Buffalo in just over six. Or at least that’s what the map said. Five miles outside of Buffalo there is virtually no indication that you are moments away from an actual city.
Buffalo: Arriving in downtown Buffalo has all the charm and excitement of pulling into Hartford Connecticut. It presents itself not-so-much as a city but as a small collection of medium size buildings – almost an oversized town. There was nothing to indicate an NFL team plays there and if not for the miracle of revenue sharing, I can promise you, they wouldn’t. Prior to the trip, one of the few things I knew about Buffalo was that they didn’t have Uber, which seemed strange, until we spent about 24 hours in the city and realized it would be hard to support a service like Uber without any people. Buffalo is an absolute ghost-town. There are literally no people on the streets. We went out the night we arrived and the place was dead. Here we were out drinking on a Saturday night, in a well-known American city that is 12 hours away from hosting its biggest NFL game in years, and the place looked like it was on lockdown.
If you ever want to film a post-apocalyptic zombie movie just go to Buffalo, you could shoot for hours without having to close off any streets. You might not even need a permit, in fact, I’m not sure anyone would even notice. Here is bustling Buffalo on a Saturday night:
We literally could have taken this picture on any of a hundred streets in downtown. And of the few people that were there, none of them are from Buffalo. And, when I say none, I mean none. We met dozens of people Saturday night and could not find a single person that said they were from Buffalo. That’s just weird. Not until we asked Gianna, our cute-as-hell bartender from the Bada Bing sports bar, did we find somebody that was actually a local.
Because of its good food and close proximity to our hotel we spent a lot of time at the Bada Bing – a sports bar inexplicably named after a fictional New Jersey strip club made famous on the ‘Sopranos’. Does that make sense? Of course not but that, in a nutshell, is Buffalo. It’s a quirky bizarre city that seems forever stuck in some kind of cultural time warp. Buffalo reminds me of those ancient tribes, like the Incas, that lived centuries behind the rest of the world because nobody had yet arrived to introduce them to modern norms and technology.
And Buffalo seems to do nothing right. Most American cities have thriving waterfronts. Some of the best hotels, condos and public parks that a city has to offer are found by the water. But not in Buffalo. Large chunks of their waterfront is barren. There were no hotels, no shops, no housing, no parks, no bike paths…….nothing. Just a bunch of empty space and the occasional burnt out structure that looked like it was abandoned years ago. It was as if Lake Erie was a toxic radiation dump everybody was trying to avoid. Here’s the perfect image to sum up Buffalo’s waterfront:
This grotesque cement eyesore is located on the aptly-named “Ghetto Beach” and represents one of many ugly industrial structures whose only apparent purpose is to make Buffalo’s waterfront look like the ideal backdrop for an episode of ‘The Walking Dead’. What is that structure anyway? What’s it’s purpose? We’re four guys with college degrees that couldn’t come up with a single good guess.
And then there’s this:
This is a star from what appears to be some sort of sad pathetic attempt at a Walk-of-Fame, to honor the greats of Buffalo. These are tiny barely noticeable squares with almost illegible writing that are strategically wedged into the sidewalk in front of a handful of bars where they serve as a canvas for people to smoke, fight, vomit and urinate. If you are a famous or successful person from Buffalo and they offer you one of these, I recommend you politely pass.
These stars were located across from a place called ‘Nightclub’. Not ‘Cure Nightclub” or ‘Neon Nightclub’……just ‘Nightclub’. I would love to know how many people were behind the burst of creativity that named that place.
Even Buffalo’s billboards are weird. Check out the phone number in this ad for Buffalo ambulance chasers:
No area code and seven 8s?!? Is this a real business? Imagine trying to give that number out to a prospective client? They would think you are mocking them. It sounds like a phone number some hot chick at a bar gives you when she is trying to blow you off.
Game Day: If you thought Saturday night in Buffalo was slow, try Sunday morning. Here is a shot of the thriving downtown streets of Buffalo hours before kickoff:
It looks like a cross between a small town and the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. After a quick breakfast it was time to leave the abandoned streets of Buffalo and head out to Ralph Wilson Stadium New Era Field to drink among the notorious Bills mafia and watch New England try to avenge the 16-0 Bradyless blanking they suffered at the hands of the Bills four weeks ago. While tailgating at a Bills game one thing is clear – they absolutely, unequivocally and without anything that resembles nuance, hate the New England Patriots. It is a hatred that is both palpable and pervasive, born out of a cocktail of envy, frustration and inferiority. And the one player that bares the overwhelming brunt of their hatred is Tom Brady. They are almost obsessed with him. It’s as if Brady is the varsity quarterback that stole all their girlfriends in high school. And who can blame them? If you lived in a small boring industrial city with a crappy football team that hadn’t made the playoffs in 16 years wouldn’t you hate the tall, good-looking, supermodel marrying, wildly successful quarterback of your arch-nemesis? His 26-3 career record against the Bills also doesn’t help.
Walking into the Bills stadium was an underwhelming experience. It is an odd asymmetrical stadium that looks like it was built piecemeal over several decades, with no real architectural plan. It is both strange and dated – a perfect metaphor for the city itself. Arriving at our seats, located just seven rows from the field, one of the first things we notice is the three smallish replay screens scattered around the stadium. If the Dallas Cowboys massive, record-setting replay screen is the 60-inch flat screen in your living room, the Bills screens are more like that small TV you keep in the kitchen. And during the game somebody in the BIlls brain trust thought one way to fire up the home crowd was to use these screens to sporadically show images of buffalo herds rumbling across the countryside. Kinda lame, but, having spent two days in Buffalo, not exactly surprising. And I’m no expert in buffalo herd footage but I think they could have done better than the slightly faded, repetitive clip they kept showing which looked like it was culled from some obscure 1970s PBS documentary on the migrating habits of buffalos.
Equally strange was these four metal box-like storage thingamajiggies that are located on top of the stadium and whose only purpose seems to be to confuse out-of-towners into wondering just what in the hell they are doing there. Are they storage? Are the inexplicably large vents? Is that where they lock up unruly drunk patrons? Is it a container for all the regrets and tears of four consecutive lost Super Bowls? One has a clock on the side of it, does that mean anything? Like most things in Buffalo this left us shaking our heads.
Just before kickoff the PA announcer informed everyone that former Buffalo kicker Rian Lindell was going to be ‘Leader of the Charge’ for week 8, an announcement that was actually met with applause. ‘Leader of the Charge’ is some Buffalo Bill thing where Bills alum or other honored guests stand on top of the tunnel when the team takes the field. That’s literally it. There is nothing more to this lame tradition than that. And you know your team has had a rough run when the best you can do for the biggest game of the year is Rian Lindell. Lindell played in zero playoff games for the Bills, made zero Pro Bowls and didn’t even play his entire career in Buffalo. That would be like going to a Patriots game and they announce that Hugh Millen is leading the team on the field. Such is life as the dregs of the NFL.
The Game: Revenge came swiftly for the Patriots who coasted to a 41-25 win using the same formula they have been using for years to dominate this matchup: Our quarterback is better + Our coach is smarter = Another long day for the Buffalo Bills. And on this day the Patriots quarterback was a lot better and their coach was a lot smarter. Or was it that the Bills coach was a lot dumber? It’s hard to tell when you’re talking about Rex Ryan, whose teams might play hard and physical but inevitably always seem to collapse under an avalanche of mistakes, penalties and bonehead decisions. How do you let Rob Gronkowski run down the seam for a 53-yard touchdown one week after he scored on an almost identical play against the Pittsburgh Steelers? Do Ryan and his staff not have access to game film?
Then there’s Brady – forever poised, prepared and accurate – reminding the Bills that all the discipline in the world might not have helped on Sunday. Brady looks like a man on a mission, and whether he is motivated by a fifth Super Bowl ring, his desire to whup father time or a deep-seeded hatred of Roger Goodell, he might be playing the best football of his storied career. Nothing encapsulates his dominant play better than a sequence late in the first quarter against the Bills. On 3rd and 8 and under heavy pressure, Brady eluded the rush, rolled left, somehow managed to see Edelman downfield and threw a perfect pass across the field for a 47-yard gain. But the play was wiped out by an ineligible man downfield penalty on Marcus “Yes I still suck” Cannon. On the very next play, and now facing a 3rd and 13, Brady calmly dropped back and fired a perfect 53-yard touchdown to Chris Hogan. The heavy New England contingent in attendance erupted. It was Brady at his badass best. You could almost hear him saying, “Hey Buffalo, you want to move back five more yards and see if I can do it a 3rd time?”
After that, they might as well have turned on the showers and fired up the jet because the game was effectively over. This was one of those games where Brady was not going to be denied. The Bills would later pound the New England quarterback with sacks on back-to-back series, but to little effect. Brady responded to this punishment with five consecutive scoring drives that sealed the win and all but wrapped up the AFC East title before Halloween.
Now the only uncertainty left in the Patriots 2016 regular season is whether they will be a one or two seed and which team will be traveling to Foxboro for the divisional round. As for Buffalo they have two months and an offseason to try and figure out how they can begin to close the massive gap between them and New England and to decide if Rex Ryan is the coach to get them there. On Sunday he wasn’t – but then again the ghost of Vince Lombardi probably couldn’t have stopped Tom Brady.
Saying goodbye to Buffalo: After the game, on the ride back to the hotel we decided to listen to a little Buffalo Bills sports radio. After years of Boston sports dominance I had forgotten what it is like to listen to radio hosts that sound defeated. Think Boston circa 1998. The hosts sounded confused and depressed. And it was clear they had been doing this same exasperated Debbie Downer post game show for years, sort of their own hellish Groundhog Day. It was less like sports radio and more like eavesdropping on a therapy session.
With the trip winding down we decided to head out for one last night in the most depressing NFL city in the northeast, and I can’t say we were surprised to find virtually everything in Buffalo was closed. Bars, restaurants, pizza places, etc. – they all tap out on Sunday night. So with few options available, we headed back to the oddly named Bada Bing Bar and Grill to drink a few beers, flirt with the cute bartender and watch wonderfully awful Ring of Honor wrestling. A more than fitting way to say goodbye to this strange little city.
All in all it was a good road trip but I can’t say it had much to do with the destination. The fact of the matter is, my friends and I could have fun ice fishing in Nova Scotia. The consensus opinion was, “What a blast, and I am never setting foot in this city again.” So goodbye Buffalo and good riddance to your empty streets, weak nightlife and odorous tap water.
And good luck with the Bills…….you’re gonna need it.
Blog Note: My schedule was thrown off by the road trip so I will be posting some additional notes tomorrow, including thoughts and information on the baffling Jamie Collins.