Back in August, while walking up to Ralph Wilson Stadium for the exhibition game against Cincinnati, I noticed that the ticket provided by Gary, BillStuff's gracious host for the evening, bore the image of Brian Moorman.
Usually, such high-profile placement is reserved for the quarterback, or running back, or a star defender. Not the guy who only gets to do his job when his teammates have failed at theirs.
"You know, putting your punter on the tickets doesn't exactly instill confidence," I said.
"No," Gary said. "No, it doesn't."
Shows what we know.
During his Hall-of-Fame coaching career, Marv Levy was never one to gloat. And it's way too early for any justified told-you-so's.
At some point Sunday, though, maybe very late in the fourth quarter of Buffalo's 16-6 thumping of the Miami Dolphins, in which Moorman may have been the single most important player on the field, the Bills' new general manager must have chuckled to himself just a little.
Before the January news conference announcing Levy's return to One Bills Drive ended, the harrumphing began.
The sages of the National Football League declared the man who oversaw one of the most innovative teams of the late 20th century out of touch with the modern game. At 80 (he turned 81 on Aug. 3), he was too old. After nearly a decade of doing radio and television work and penning an autobiography, he had been away too long.
Levy's hiring by 87-year-old owner Ralph Wilson was pure delusional octogenarian cronyism, said nationally syndicated radio hosts, unemployed former front-office types and a raft of senior and national football writers.
Those same astute minds, who apparently hadn't been watching many games involving the Bills, pointed to the resignation of Mike Mularkey, allegedly one of the game's bright young coaching minds, as evidence. The Dolphins' quick hiring of Mularkey as offensive coordinator was further proof that Levy was in over his head.
Levy's low-key free-agency shopping -- a defensive tackle here, a center there -- led to further tut-tutting.
The annual NFL draft was a pure disaster, they said, as the Bills reached for Ohio State safety Donte Whitner with the eighth overall pick. The Bills didn't get "value," they cried.
The Dolphins, meanwhile, spent the spring and summer where the cognoscenti have put them just about every year, save a couple in which they were clearly going to be putrid, for the last three decades -- steaming inexorably toward the Super Bowl.
Mularkey, who spent the previous offseason molding J.P. Losman to take over Buffalo's quarterbacking job, then gave up on him almost immediately, would be the perfect coach to reverse Daunte Culpepper's career spiral, they said.
With a rejuvenated Culpepper leading the offense and a defense anchored by multiple Pro Bowlers Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas, the aqua-and-orange express would plow through the AFC, returning in time to host Super Bowl XLI.
While the Bills wallowed in senile oblivion, went the self-assured conventional wisdom, the Dolphins would soar.
Well, not quite.
Any notion that Miami's opening-night loss in Pittsburgh or the first 35 minutes of Buffalo's debut in New England could be dismissed as first-week flukes vanished on the Dolphins' first two offensive series.
The Bills came out blitzing, sacking Culpepper three times -- though, to be fair, he caused one all on his own, losing his grip on the ball while rearing back to pass.
Buffalo didn't do much more when it had the ball early on, with Losman fluttering a couple deep balls, taking a sack and, after Willis McGahee and Anthony Thomas pounded into field-goal range, handing off on third-and-11.
"Boy, they've got a lot of confidence in him," said John, who joined the BillStuff coverage team at Player's at the corner of Niagara and Fourth streets, situated diagonally from the Seneca Niagara Casino. "He's terrible."
The third-down draw play to Thomas -- which accomplished little more than to position the ball for Rian Lindell's 33-yard field goal and the game's first points -- had less to do with Losman than a shift in philosophy from a week earlier, though. Coach Dick Jauron's decision to eschew the points and go for it on fourth-and-1 from New England's 7-yard line spun that game completely.
This time, Jauron played the percentages perfectly. Just like you would have expected Levy to do when he was on the sideline.
The rest of the afternoon went much as Marv might have scripted it, too.
The offense only accumulated 188 total yards, but compressed most of them into three scoring drives and didn't commit a turnover.
The defense, while still far too permissive against the run, harassed and confused the easily harassed and confused Culpepper all day with a variety of blitzes and coverage schemes. The only time Miami mounted a serious threat while it still mattered, Buffalo linebacker Angelo Crowell snuffed it with an interception at his own 7-yard line a minute before halftime.
And the source of much of Marv's football joy, the special teams, ultimately made the biggest difference.
Coy Wire's blocked punt set up Lindell's third field goal, which put Buffalo up 16-0 late in the third quarter. Lindell's second followed a 27-yard punt return by Roscoe Parrish, who averaged more than 14 yards on his five runbacks.
It was Moorman, though, who was most responsible for tilting the field to his team's advantage.
If Moorman's numbers -- six punts averaging 41.3 yards -- weren't spectacular, the impact of his kicks certainly was. Five of them pinned Miami inside its own 20-yard line, with four leaving the Dolphins within 10 yards of their own goal line.
Traversing a long field all afternoon magnified Miami's offensive flaws, particularly Culpepper's indecisiveness and Mularkey's refusal to stick with a running game that gobbled up first-half yards (sound familiar, anyone?).
And while, as John said, Losman was ineffective in the first half, going 1-for-6 for 14 yards, he kept calm, stayed within himself and recovered to complete 10 of 12 during the final two quarters, including a 4-yard flip to Josh Reed for Buffalo's only touchdown.
This, truly, was Levyball. Due to the spectacular four-year run of AFC titles his team enjoyed in the early 1990s, some associate his coaching tenure strictly with the no-huddle K-Gun featuring the exploits of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed.
But that approach was a function of the overwhelming talent of those offenses, abetted by Levy's willingness to adapt.
The first full-time special-teams coach in the NFL, under George Allen with the Over-the-Hill-Gang Washington teams of the early 1970s, Levy's ageless football philosophy has always been centered on running the ball, making plays in the kicking game and forcing the other guy to make more mistakes.
And for one Sunday, at least, the team he built did that perfectly.
BILLS MVP: Usually, giving this to a punter would drip with sarcasm. But no individual made a bigger difference than Moorman.
Ryan Denney also deserves mention for recording three sacks, as does McGahee for grinding out 91 yards on 25 carries. Factor in a 6-yard reception, and he accounted for more than half of Buffalo's offense.
THE OTHER GUYS' MVP: Miami running back Ronnie Brown ran for 68 yards on 13 carries in the first half. So, naturally, Mularkey let him carry the ball just twice after halftime.
STAT OF THE WEEK: Culpepper's numbers (23-of-32, 250 yards, one touchdown, one pick) don't look that bad, unless you include the seven sacks he took, the fact that the interception came when the Dolphins had a chance to take the lead and the touchdown occurred with 1:54 remaining. Or you consider that 132 of those yards were gained after Buffalo built a 16-0 lead.
FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL EVERYWHERE: With the lack of steady action in the Buffalo-Miami game, Player's newly installed wall of televisions, which displayed every one of Sunday's games in all their flat-screened glory, came in particularly handy.
Through the afternoon, after discovering that the Seneca Gaming Corp. has no interest in investing in the NFL Sunday Ticket, which might distract patrons from the slots, football diehards steadily shuffled in from across the street.
The Bills and Dolphins also had the decency to finish their game in less than three hours, allowing our end of the room to catch the dramatic closing minutes and overtime sessions of the New York Giants' comeback against Philadelphia and Minnesota's rally over Carolina, as well as Green Bay's near-miss against New Orleans.
The other wing wasn't so lucky, stuck with blowout wins by Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
MANNING, MANNING EVERYWHERE: Some smart corporation should hire Peyton Manning as a spokesman. Because you just don't see enough of that guy.
WING REPORT: BS pulled double duty, sharing a batch of hots with John during the first quarter and a smorgasbord of Cajuns, butter-garlics and, again, hots late in the fourth quarter after the arrival of Tim, our senior wing analyst.
All came from down the street at Dell's Arterial Lounge and all were superb -- meaty, flavorful (the Cajuns were actually spicier than the hots) and well-cooked.
"A very solid A," Tim declared, pointing with a de-meated drumette for emphasis. "And don't even think of putting a 'minus' on it."
BS FAN(S) OF THE WEEK: The Dolphins announced a crowd of 72,797. They might have sold that many tickets, but judging from the huge swaths of empty seats visible in every wide camera shot, at least 20,000 of those folks had something better to do. Predictably, those who did manage to make it spent much of the second half booing, proving once again that the only bigger front-runners than the Dolphins themselves are their fans.
On the flip side, John gets a special mention here, as he repeatedly got up and walked over to keep track of his Raiders, who are truly, indisputably wretched.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | September 19 2006 |