Since the Music City Miracle in January of 2000, the Bills and Titans have faced each other eight times with the Bills winning only three of those games, including yesterday's last second 13-12 win in Orchard Park. With the most recent meeting before yesterday being a 14-13 win in Nashville in 2015, the Bills have now won the last two meetings with the Titans by a single point. Had Home Run Throwback not succeeded as it did so tragically for Bills fans, the Bills would have won that one 16-15. Tennessee entered the game yesterday as a five-and-a-half point favourite after beating the Super Bowl champion Eagles last week.
One long-time reader of this blog encouraged me to continue the "halftime retirement" theme throughout the season if possible. So, I will not only oblige but I have decided to name one player from each Bills game for the rest of the 2018 season as the winner of the weekly Vontae Davis Halftime Retirement Award. This week's candidate was more of a challenge to come up with but I have decided to name Titans wide receiver Nick Williams as the winner. Williams played for the University of Connecticut and was initially signed by the Atlanta Falcons as an un-drafted free agent in 2013 where he moved on and off the practice squad and saw limited action before signing with Washington and finally the Titans entering this season. He will quite likely be cut once again today and could find that his chances of getting on with another team are quite slim. Although his retirement-inducing play came in the fourth quarter yesterday when he dropped what looked like an easy touchdown pass from Marcus Mariota on a third down play, had he have been able to foresee it, he surely would have retired at halftime, thereby saving himself from being the game's goat (I know its a stretch).
Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving and, as I have done for several years, I brined, stuffed and roasted the turkey for our family dinner. The turkey went into the oven exactly at noon, immediately after which I did my one-hour bike ride and then settled into the game surrounded by family and friends who generally cared not at all about the Bills or any kind of football on TV. But I fought through the distractions and watched the Bills defence play a solid game which earned them three turnovers. The running game also showed up for the home team with LeSean McCoy gaining a season-high 85 yards on 24 carries and Chris Ivory adding another 43 yards. Josh Allen picked up 19 yards which included the game's only touchdown in the first quarter. Allen did not have a strong game passing the ball but made a few key throws at critical times, especially on the final game winning drive.
So, at 2-3 (and having won two of their past three games) the Bills are showing signs of having earned some measure of respectability in the NFL. I doubt that they will finish with the league's worst record as seemed likely after their first two games. On to Houston next week to face the Texans who eeked out an overtime win against the Cowboys last night. The Bills are early 10 point underdogs.
In a departure from recent posts, I want to weigh in on the recent SCOTUS developments. The point I want to make is by way of comparison of the US system to the convention which governs Canadian Supreme Court appointments. Now that the drama around his nomination and confirmation has mostly ended, I have to say that I was most struck by the way in which Mr. Kavanaugh comported himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee when he gave testimony the week before last. And I'm not really talking about the fact that he decided to repeat what I would classify as Fox News talking points in his testimony (which I disagree with but that's not the point I'm trying to make here). It was his demeanor and attitude which shocked me. In my view, it was the antithesis of how a judge on the nation's top court should behave in a very public setting. When I think of characteristics which befit a judge, I think of words like calm, thoughtful, reserved, rational, neutral, learned. In Canada, we rarely hear judges say anything at all publicly except perhaps after the retire from the bench. And when judges are appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, we hear very little about their personal lives or political leanings and no mention at all of whether they might be conservative or liberal. The appointment process in Canada purports to operate above the unsavoury partisan bickering of the red/blue tug of war. Maybe we are fooling ourselves thinking that our judges aren't partisan and who knows, maybe they would react just as angrily as Mr. Kavanaugh did if we conducted pre-appointment hearings which included salacious details of their past personal lives. I just think that the events which played out over the past two weeks in the United States have damaged the American people's confidence in the SCOTUS and that is a sad development.
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