It’s been a crazy week – with a Thursday game I’m completely off schedule. It’s amazing how a regular Sunday afternoon game anchors the week. There’s so much to think about with the game against the Jets, a Sunday afternoon without Bills football and the start of New England week round 2.

If you’re a comedian or a story teller a big challenge is linking all your thoughts together to form some sort of cohesive flow so that you have an overall theme or story. As a discombobulated writer of a weekly fan column, I’m going to forgo the formalities of article cohesion and just jot down some of my various thoughts and observations (hey, Peter King earns a great living at this).

On the Jets Game:

• Great win for the Bills – beating a second divisional opponent in a span of 5 days – that is not easy to do. For as much as Bills fans don’t want to give credit to the Jets, New York has a solid team this year – heck, they are the Bills of two years ago with a top defense and a few offensive weapons being led by Ryan Fitzpatrick.
• Very impressed that the Bills seemed to keep emotions in check. As we’ve seen this season, when the Bills have a big game they’ve gotten hyped up – too hyped up – and let their emotions get the better of them with stupid penalties, but not so on Thursday night. Rex Ryan was emotional at the end, but he had a right to be – it was a roller coaster of a game sealed with an interception – F yeah!
• Not a fan of the “color rush” uniforms. Jets looked good in all green but the Bills in bright red from head to toe was wrong – red is not the big color I associate with the Bills. Red is fine for an alternate jersey, but all over was too much. With the blowback from colorblind fans (7-10% of men are red-green colorblind), I don’t think we are going to see this again – the NFL find will another gimmick to get folks to buy another jersey – stripes vs. solids? Bills in plaid to appeal to the Scotts in the unending quest to find fans across the pond?
• How many fans thought the Bills were destined to lose on a missed extra point? How many saw defeat snatched from the jaws of victory with a botched punt? How many relived years past watching the lead dwindle to a single score with the Bills going 3-and-out four consecutive times and a heroic defensive effort? Damn if this didn’t cause my blood pressure to rise and ask me to wonder what we as Bills fans had done to deserve this sort of treatment from the universe.The Karlos Williams touchdown pass should be awarded to the offensive line – the blocking on that play was fantastic as they gave Tyrod Taylor time to stand there all day and find his target – it was beautiful.
• What’s up with the creepy smile Todd Bowles has on his face all the time? He looks like one of those psychopaths that looks through people because in his mind he’s enjoying doing something terrible to them and watching them writhe in pain. I wonder if he ends all his signal calls with “it puts the lotion in the basket or it gets the hose again”…

Football Observations from a Sunday Afternoon:

• After watching football for nearly 40 years I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the game and its rules. Even though I keep up with the rules and think I understand them, it’s apparent that I have no idea how pass interference is called. So many times I see it called where I can’t see it (even on replay), and also a bunch of times when I see it clearly and there is no flag. The inconsistency with which it is called is beyond maddening – can’t imagine what it’s like to play defensive back in the NFL – cross your fingers and hope the calls or non-calls go your way? Additionally, it appears that absolutely nobody knows what constitutes a catch in the NFL. As far as I can tell, catches are much like the old definition of pornography – it can’t be defined but we know it when we see it – impossible to run a league like this.
• Despite all the rules in place and modifications made to keep players safe, I see some moves that could really hurt if not kill some players. I still see horse collar tackles, especially on quarterbacks, and often times these are not being flagged – I saw a few on Sunday afternoon – hard to keep players safe if you only flag this some of the time. I also saw some of the worst facemasks I’ve seen – both Johnny Manziel and Blake Bortles almost had their heads turned around 180 degrees by vicious facemask twists. Whether you like these guys or not, they’re not owls – their heads cannot and should not rotate all the way around.
• The Jacksonville win on a long field goal thanks to the aforementioned facemask penalty was the type of loss for Baltimore that I thought only the Bills would see. The Bills have had horrific losses of almost every variety in their latest reign of mediocrity, but I’m not sure I remember losing because of a penalty on the final play (then again, maybe I just blocked it out) .

New England:

• I hate the Patriots – I’m sure you do as well. It’s almost cartoonish how the team wiggles out of every loss. There’s no way the Giants should have lost, and yet they did – how does that pass not get intercepted? If you made a movie showing all the times New England escaped with a win they had no business getting you’d think it was cliché and predictable.
• Ok, so on top of some amazing good fortune, New England is a very good team. Tom Brady just makes you shake your head – some of the downfield throws he makes he could drop into a mayonnaise jar, not a garbage can. When Brady is that accurate there’s no way to defend against him – even with tight coverage it’s still going to be a completion.
• New England is banged up without Julian Edelman and Dion Lewis and they have issues at offensive tackle. The Bills are relatively healthy, save for Kyle Williams. The Bills get another shot at putting together a different game plan for New England. And none of this matters – I still think it’s going to be nearly impossible for the Bills to win a primetime national game in Foxboro against a New England team that actually cares about winning – hope I’m wrong on this.
• I hate living in New England twice a year – on Mondays after the Bills lose to the Patriots.