By Michael Vallee
Last Sunday the New England Patriots beat the Buffalo Bills 23-3. If we did an analytical deep dive into this one it would go something like this: The Patriots are really, really good and the Bills are terrible. The Patriots have talented players, the Bills have shitty players. The Patriots coaches are smart, the Bills coaches are stupid. The Patriots organization is always three steps ahead, the Bills organization is always three steps behind. We could do half dozen paragraphs of this if you want, but really, what’s the point. New England’s beatdown of the Buffalo Bills was not so much an outcome of a game as it was a symptom of a much larger issue. Rather than extolling the virtues of Tom Brady or the genius of Bill Belichick why don’t we talk about the elephant in the room: The embarrassing, bumbling, laugh-out-loud, unparalleled suckiness of the Buffalo Bills franchise.
For the sake of efficiency we will leave the city of Buffalo alone on this one. We’ve already documented the lifeless, dystopian hellhole that is Buffalo, a city whose score on the depression richter scale ranks somewhere between Pyongyang and outer Mongolia. Instead let’s just focus on the pitiful Buffalo Bills.
Historically speaking the Bills are on a wretched run. Buffalo has the longest NFL playoff drought at 17 seasons. In a league where the Cleveland Browns are the benchmark for bad football, the Bills have actually been worse. Now that’s a low bar. In fact, during that stretch the Browns have made the playoffs and won 10 games in a season, two things the Bills could not accomplish. It’s never a good thing when you’re being upstaged by the clown show in Cleveland. That’s like losing a battle of the bands to Nickelback.
To truly appreciate the Bills ineptitude you actually have to look beyond the NFL. Buffalo isn’t just lowering the football bar, they’re lowering the bar for all sports. The Bills are currently on the longest playoff drought in all of professional sports. That’s 123 professional teams spread out over four major sports and none of them has been sitting at home when the games matter most, as long as the Buffalo Bills. Hillary Clinton knows more about winning presidential elections than Buffalo knows about winning football games.
And do you remember what happened the last time the Bills made the playoffs? Well, let’s just say they Buffalo’d the hell out of it. For starters, they took their starting quarterback, Doug Flutie, and unceremoniously booted him to the bench for their 1999 Wild Card game against the Tennessee Titans. It’s always good for morale to humiliate your inspirational team leader just before the postseason kicks off. Flutie was 17-8 as a starter for the Bills when he was benched. So who did Buffalo hand Flutie’s job to? Rob Johnson. Rob Johnson?!?! The guy best known for wearing effeminate headbands and throwing interceptions. The guy that finished his Buffalo career with a 9-17 record. THAT Rob Johnson.
And this was no football decision. Johnson was awarded the job by Buffalo’s fossilized owner, Ralph Wilson, who was convinced Johnson was the guy because he piled up stats in a meaningless week 17 win. Man, that is so Buffalo. 
But these Bills were just getting warmed up.
Six days later, in the most Buffalo of Buffalo moments, the Bills, after taking the lead on a FG with 16 seconds left on the clock, choked away that playoff game when they allowed the Titans to score a game-winning, kick return, lateral touchdown on the ensuing kickoff. BAHAHAHAHA. Buffalo’d again. In case you’re wondering, Rob Johnson and his headband completed 45% of his passes against Tennessee for a QB rating of 64.8. Good call Ralph.
That Titans play would later be dubbed ‘The Music City Miracle’ and spurred the Titans to their first, and only, Super Bowl appearance……..and sent the Bills franchise reeling. Since then it has been a never-ending shit show for that depressing enclave on Lake Erie. It’s a run of futility that has produced many depressing stats, perhaps none more so than this: During that time Tom Brady has won as many games in Buffalo as any Bills starting QB. That almost doesn’t seem possible. Brady plays for New England right? Yet he has won more games in Buffalo than the guys that actually play in Buffalo, like, all the time.
The Bills have had 14 starting quarterbacks since Brady took over the New England QB job in 2001. Including such illustrious names as Brian Brohm and J.P. Losman. The Bills have also had 10 head coaches during that time New England has had just one. The Bills are like the oppo-Patriots. A perfect inverse mirror image of the Patriots. The moment Buffalo started losing, New England started winning. Buffalo stumbles, New England surges. Buffalo spirals, New England soars. The Bills fumble their way to another losing season, The Patriots rack up another AFC East title. Buffalo is the incompetent Yin to New England’s championship Yang.
Maybe it’s all the curse of Doug Flutie. Since Buffalo benched New England’s beloved native son the Patriots have played in 34 playoff games. The Bills have played in zero. The Patriots have played in seven Super Bowls. The Bills – zero. The Patriots have won 14 AFC East titles. The Bills – zero. You have to wonder if somewhere in the Boston area Doug Flutie is privately kicking back, smoking a cigar and quietly laughing his ass off over the football carnage in Buffalo.
Buffalo also has their own famous native football son, Rob Gronkowski. An unstoppable, all-world, superstar talent that will some day be enshrined in the pro football Hall Of Fame and likely recognized as the greatest tight end that ever played. Gronkowski may have grown up in Buffalo but now resides in New England and spends his time torturing his hometown Bills with touchdown catches and forearm shivers to the back of their head.  
Gronk could have been scoring all his touchdowns for the Bills. He was drafted 42nd overall in the 2010 draft by the Patriots. Who was the team with the 41st pick? That would be the Buffalo Bills, but instead of drafting the local future All-Pro they went in a different direction and drafted some guy named Torell Troup. Troup was a defensive lineman that lasted a whopping three years in the league, registering zero sacks. At the time they passed on Gronkowski the Bills tight ends were Derek Fine, Shawn Nelson, Jonathan Stupar and Joe Klopfenstein. Yeah, you definitely don’t want to draft Gronkowski with that stable of talent at the tight end position. The last thing you want to do is take targets away from the dynamic Joe Klopfenstein. At some point, Bills fans have to wonder if Buffalo Bills management purposely sabotages their own team.
Of course you don’t want to piss off Bills fans, a fan base that dubs themselves the “Bills Mafia”. Though, I’m thinking, the “Bills Mafia” is less Tony Soprano and more Bobby Baccalieri. Is there anything more absurd than the least successful NFL team of the last 18 years having a fan base with the nickname “mafia”. In real life crime terms that would be like a guy saying, “I’m with the Hoboken mafia”. When you hear the title it elicits more laughter than fear. For Bills fans “mafia” is actually code for “drink a lot of alcohol, do a lot of drugs and engage in a bunch of dumb shit” while tailgating before Bills games. I guess anything to numb the pain of what is about to happen on the field.
The pain and self-sabotage has continued into 2017. Not long ago the Bills were 5-2 and looked poised to finally end their humiliating playoff drought. Now they are 6-6 and fading fast, courtesy of a three-game losing streak that culminated with an embarrassing 54-24 loss to the Chargers. That was the game where Bills coach Sean McDermott inexplicably benched starting QB Tyrod Taylor in favor of rookie Nathan Peterman. Predictably, Peterman was awful, finishing with almost as many interceptions (five) as completions (six). He was benched at halftime. Did McDermott have the Chargers in his suicide pool? Baffling. 
Last Sunday the Patriots dominated the Bills for the usual reasons: Brady to Gronk was an unstoppable combination racking up 147 yards, the rapidly improving defense smothered the Bills for four quarters and, once again, Bill Belichick coached the pants off some hapless counterpart. But the real star of the show, the thing perhaps most responsible for that final score, was the one thing in the NFL that might be more consistent than the Bradys, the Gronks and the Belichicks – the unwavering terribleness of the Buffalo Bills.