Positivity – The Little Victories from the Buffalo Bills 2010 Season
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Positivity is not a word…unless you’re a Bills fan. I’ll never forget a few years back watching a Bills-Bears game at a Bills Backers bar in Pittsburgh. There were lots of Bears fans scattered around that day, and the Bears quickly built a 30-0 lead. Naturally the outnumbered Bills fans didn’t have much to cheer about…until the Rex Grossman threw a long TD pass that would have put them up by 37 points in the 3rd quarter, but was called back for a holding penalty. Through the silence, one Bills fan yelled, “Take that Bears!!!”
Laughter erupted, and our foul moods subsided. When you’ve been this bad for this long, the only way to get through it is to make fun of yourself, and to find the positives in the losses.
I want to win every week. If we’re fighting Carolina and Denver for a top draft stop, I still want us to win. Screw the draft next year; I want to feel good on Monday, whether our first win comes in Week 1 or Week 10. I always tell people that I don’t care how we win or lose, whether the loss is in Week 1 or Week 17. A win is a win, and a loss is a loss, period. But when the losses come in bunches of 8, and you’ve had one winning season in the past 11 years, you tend to grasp on to the flashes of hope that your team gives you.
2010 was rough. An 0-8 start would cripple any fan’s optimism about the present. Heck, with a new coach and cutting our starting quarterback and running back, by the time Week 4 rolled around a lot of people shut off the TV and gave up. But the loyal (or stupid, as I’m called in Pittsburgh) fans came back week after week to try to see any glimpse of future success, even if it meant waiting until 2011.
-Would our new coach give us any reason to think our string of terrible offenses year after year would come to an end?
-Would a QB on our roster show anything to make us believe he can start for this team?
-Would Spiller break the streak of terrible high first round draft choices?
-Would we finally find an offensive line combo that we could stick to?
-Would having new strength and conditioning coaches lower the Injured Reserve rate?
-Would any of our players who were after-thoughts when the final roster came out of camp blow us away with their performances?
It’s tough to be a Bills fan, especially with Brad bringing back horrible, painful memories in his Failure Chronicles each week. But I’m here to bring a little positivity back to BuffaLowDown. Each week, I’ll be spotlighting a positive from last season, whether it is an individual player’s performance during a game or the season, our coaching staff showing that they know what they’re doing, or an entire game where our team as a whole showed us what a professional football team should look like.
Check back next week for the first edition of Positivity – The Little Victories from the Buffalo Bills 2010 Season.