Bills 16, Cowboys 6

I've always been fascinated with the US college football bowl games which run throughout the holiday season. With the exception of the featured games on New Year's Day and the national semi-finals games on New Year's Eve, the names, the sponsors, the teams and the places the games are played are constantly changing. This year saw the Cure Bowl, Bahamas Bowl, Heart of Dallas Bowl, Quick Lane Bowl and, the best name for a new bowl game, the Potato Bowl which was played in Boise, Idaho and won by the University of Akron Zips over the Utah State University Aggies, 23-21. The Sun Bowl, played for many years in El Paso, Texas, featured a mix of rain and sleet which changed to wet snow as the Washington State Cougars outlasted the University of Miami Hurricanes 20-14.

After watching football for several decades, a certain play which I had long wondered about finally happened. It was in the Pinstripe Bowl, played at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx between the Indiana Hoosiers and the Duke Blue Devils on Boxing Day, which went to overtime. Duke lost the overtime coin toss and were up first from the Indiana 25 yard line. Their possession sputtered and they kicked a field goal. Indiana could have then won the game with a touchdown but also settled for a field goal try of their own to extend the game to another overtime possession. The kick was long enough but, as viewed from several camera angles, it sailed directly over the top of the right goal post - by about three feet. The two referees, one standing under each goal post, ruled the kick as no good. I'm not sure that it was the wrong call but Indiana kicker Griffin Oakes was convinced that the kick was good and demanded a replay review which confirmed the ruling on the field and ended the game. I have long believed that the goal posts in football are simply not high enough and the evidence from the Pinstripe Bowl clearly supports this view. I'm amazed that this has not happened before. I have seen many kicks which reach higher that the goal posts but obviously fly either between or outside them but this is the first time I've seen one fly directly above one of them without being clearly inside or out. I felt for the kicker and his team who deserved a better fate - in the form of certainty about the result - than they got.

This is the second year of the college football playoff system where 4 teams are given berths in the two semi-final games played to be played on Thursday. Oklahoma will play Clemson at 4pm in the Capital One Orange Bowl and Michigan State will face Alabama in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl at 8pm. The winners will play in the National Championship Game on Monday January 11th. I would like to see the playoff format expanded to 8 teams with play over 3 weeks and with the two semi-final games taking place on New Year's Day. They are now played the day before in order to protect the tradition of Rose Bowl and, to a lesser extent, the Sugar Bowl and the huge TV money these games generate. Why not make the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl the two semi-final games? Tradition changes slowly.

On to the Who Cares Bowl, played yesterday in the steady rain in Orchard Park between the Bills and the Dallas Cowboys. The game should have been played on a warm August evening because the line-ups fielded by the two teams looked very much like what we would see in the 4th and final pre-season game. To their credit, the teams played hard and the Bills played well enough to win. I was keeping an eye on the Falcons/Panthers and the Jets/ Patriots. The Jets close out the regular season next week at Orchard Park in a huge game for them. I'm happy for Ryan Fitzpatrick who has played extremely well this season. The Harvard graduate is a good and decent guy who has fashioned a solid career for himself, transitioning most years from back-up to starter. Happy New Year.

Redskins 35, Bills 25

Rex Ryan was feeling the heat at his post-game press conference yesterday in Landover, Maryland. He said that changes were coming to his team which was officially eliminated from the NFL playoffs after a disheartening loss to the Washington Redskins. Ryan was asked if some of the changes might come in connection with a report last week that Bills GM Doug Whaley had expressed his displeasure with some of the team's assistant coaches. Ryan dismissed the report but his terse response and body language said (to me at least) that all is not well between the Bills front office and the coaching staff. Whaley has been disappointed, according to the report, with offensive coordinator Greg Roman's heavy emphasis on the run game which leaves star wide receiver Sammy Watkins as a spectator on far too many plays. Whaley has a particular interest in seeing Watkins live up to the price the team paid to get him in the 2014 draft by trading its first round pick this year to grab him at number four overall - a move orchestrated by Whaley himself. Watkins has been very good through his first two seasons but not good enough to justify his price.

The problem is that Whaley was already the GM when Doug Marrone mysteriously resigned at the end of last season and Ryan was hired as head coach by team owners Terry and Kim Pegula. Ryan then brought in Roman, known for his emphasis on the running game, as offensive coordinator. Whaley then traded for running back LeSean McCoy but now apparently wishes that the team had thrown the ball to Watkins more than it has. If I were Whaley, my questions would be directed much more to the coaches on defensive side of the ball. Ryan and his hand-picked defensive coaches have steered the Bills defence to a league ranking of 20th going into yesterday's game. Last year, with an almost identical defensive line-up but different coaches, the Bills defence finished the season ranked number four in the league. I would much rather hear Ryan's explanation about that than about play selection on offense.

Before the NFL schedule was released in April, and knowing that the Dallas Cowboys were scheduled to make their once-every-eight-years trip to Orchard Park in 2015, I was quite certain that the league would schedule the game on a Monday night in the first half of the season in a effort to replicate the thrilling 2007 game, still seen as one of the best games played in Buffalo in the last 20 years. But, no, the game was scheduled for two days after Christmas. So, here it is: Up next, the 4-10 Cowboys, minus Tony Romo who is on injured reserve and out for the season, will take on the 6-8 Bills with the teams relative 2016 draft positions the only matters still to be decided.

OPP Sergeant and communications "officer" Kerry Schmidt was on the radio this morning providing some statistics on this year's RIDE program. Almost 500 drivers have been charged with impaired driving in Ontario so far this holiday season (and we're still 5 days away from Christmas), including 95 this past weekend. It seems like drunk driving is making a comeback but there is another very disturbing trend this year: drivers attempting to flee RIDE check points. In December alone, there have been at least three reported incidents of this in Ontario (Whitby, Guelph and London). A 24 year old female pedestrian was killed by one of these fleeing drivers and the others have ended up crashing their vehicles while being chased. I guess alcohol clouds judgment but I am still fascinated that someone would decide to try to flee from police in any circumstances at all. The ironic and tragic thing about these stories is that, unless the driver is killed in a crash, they always end up getting caught, they are often injured, their vehicles are usually written-off, they are charged with flight from police and charged with other Highway Traffic Act offenses like wreckless driving. To cap it all off, and in the ultimate of ironies, they are also charged (I assume) with impaired driving. Happy Holidays.

Eagles 23, Bills 20

When the Philadelphia Eagles worked out a deal to trade running back LeSean McCoy to the Bills for linebacker Kiko Alonso on March 9th of this year, the two teams apparently decided not to inform either of the players involved until the trade was approved by the league, which it was the following day. According to Eagles coach Chip Kelly, who tried to set the record straight on this last week, the problem with the plan was that word of the trade was leaked before league approval was obtained and McCoy learned of it through his agent (who had heard through his own sources) and not through anyone in the Eagles organization. This upset him and understandably so. Kelly expressed regret that he did not handle the situation differently by informing McCoy himself as he says is his usual practice in these situations. After all, McCoy had established himself as one of the premier running backs in the NFL over the course of six seasons with the Eagles who drafted him 53rd overall in the second round of the 2009 draft from the Pittsburgh Panthers. The explanation of a leak between the time that the deal was made and league approval was given - as the reason why McCoy wasn't informed of the trade by the team - does seem plausible but perhaps should have been provided more publicly at the time and not nine months later. Kelly also explained last week that the trade was made for financial and salary cap reasons as McCoy was to have represented more than an $11 million cap hit for the Eagles in 2015 while Alonzo's cap hit was only $700,000. Kelly is also very familiar with Kiko Alonso, having coached him for four seasons at Oregon. After describing his perspective on the trade last week, Kelly also said that he would like to try to repair the relationship and offered to shake McCoy's hand before the game.

McCoy's explanation of the reason why he was traded by the Eagles, which he offered immediately after the trade was made, was considerably different that Kelly's. McCoy explained that Kelly didn't respect the league's star players and that he had at least some racial motivation in trading him for a white linebacker. This I find to be a much less plausible story than Kelly's. As the "revenge" game approached, McCoy was asked about Kelly's comments but declined to change his story and stated that would not shake Kelly's hand on Sunday and wanted nothing to do with him. This story became the main backdrop for yesterday's game. While I can certainly understand McCoy's bitterness not only at being traded but also (and likely more so) by the way he learned of it, his suggestion that any NFL coach in 2015 makes player personnel decisions based on whether players are white or black simply isn't credible. But, he was clearly motivated to play well yesterday for a variety of reasons.

McCoy was clearly hoping to have a big game against his former team and what he had was a decent game with 74 yards rushing on 20 carries and another 35 receiving yards on 4 catches, but the main story from yesterday's game was the 15 penalties called against the Bills, most of them on offensive and defensive linemen. The Eagles defensive line had a strong game - too strong for the Bills offensive line who took several holding penalties to protect their quarterback. On the other side of the ball, the defensive line jumped offside repeatedly on Eagles quarterback Sam Bradford's hard counts. Now at 6-7, while not mathematically eliminated, the Bills find themselves out of the playoff picture this morning. This will be the 16th consecutive season with no playoffs, the longest current stretch in the league.

Donald Trump continued to make news last week as he called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the US. Finally, the leadership of the GOP responded with a rebuke of this idea and Trump then hinted that he could still consider a presidential run as an independent candidate next year if he is not successful in securing the nomination. This would surely bode well for the Clinton campaign and be disastrous for the Republican Party. It would also serve to clearly quantify just how popular Trump's ideology is, mostly among uneducated white males. However it plays out, political culture in the US will become even more divided than it already is.      

Bills 30, Texans 21

Bills quarterback Tyrod Taylor, the fifth year man out of Virginia Tech, has not thrown an interception in five consecutive games now - a new team record. And, looking at his body of work through the ten games he's started this season, his natural instinct to maintain attention to ball security has enabled him to consistently manage to avoid disastrous plays. Many a young and mobile quarterback in the NFL has suffered from a tendency to self-destruct in their first season or two before learning to protect the ball as it should be protected. I honestly think that spending four entire seasons as Joe Flacco's back-up (and never registering a regular season or playoff start) seasoned him to the point that when he did get his chance to be a franchise quarterback this season in Buffalo, he was truly ready. He's really played very well all season, including in yesterday's match-up with the Texans, winners of four straight coming into the game. In fact, both teams protected the ball yesterday as there were no turnovers by either team, until the game's very last play when Marcus Easley intercepted Brian Hoyer's pass in the end zone.

LeSean McCoy rushed for over 100 yards, Sammy Watkins caught three balls for over 100 yards and a touchdown and Taylor finished 11 for 21 with three touchdowns - just the kind of stats Greg Roman would have been hoping for as he drew up the game plan. When Rex Ryan hired Roman to be the team's offensive coordinator, he said that their offensive approach would emphasize the run over the pass. The Bills ran the ball 36 times yesterday and passed 21 times in their 57 plays from scrimmage.

So, at the three-quarter mark of the season, the Bills have posted a perfectly symmetrical record, now being 3-3 at home and 3-3 on the road with four games to go. The next three games come against NFC East teams: At Philadelphia next week, at Washington the following week and then home to the Cowboys two days after Christmas. The Jets visit on January 3rd to close out the regular season. With yesterday's win, the Bills remain squarely in the wildcard hunt, now with the same record as the Texans but holding the all-important tie breaker against them. A 10-6 record will very likely be enough to earn a post-season spot.

The New York Times published an editorial on its front page this past weekend, the first time it has done so since the 1920s. It wasn't exactly a revelation that the Times supports some measure of stricter gun control and the paper's publishers surely knew that the editorial would probably serve to strengthen the resolve of the NRA types so dedicated to closing down any debate at all on what they see as the spirit of the sacred Second Amendment. But, as long as the gun lobby helps to fund most Republican Congressional campaigns and as long as the Republicans control Congress (which they will at least for another year), then no action will be taken. The argument against any move toward tighter gun safety is the "slippery slope" theory which says that, while it is possible that any individual restriction, such as not allowing those on the terrorist "no fly" list to purchase firearms, may sound reasonable in isolation, it would represent the first step in a march toward the federal government taking away the guns of citizens. The other argument I've heard is that bad people will always be able to get guns if they want them. This was also the basis of the main objection to the now scrapped Canadian long gun registry. If we look at jurisdictions like the U.K. and Japan which have very restrictive gun ownership laws, these countries see gun deaths which are orders of magnitude lower than in the US. The San Bernardino couple who killed 14 people last week had an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and ammunition in their home - all of which were legally purchased. As David Frum said last week, the NRA has established conditions where not only nothing can be done about this, but nothing can be said either.