Buffalo Rumblings
The Bills advanced to the AFC Championship Game, which also means some analysts have taken to maintaining tired narratives
I don’t expect intellectual honesty from national American professional football pundits. Driven primarily by their network’s incessant need to generate traffic at the expense of quality conversation, NFL “analysts” are made up in large part by take artists who offer no substantive benefit to the conversation.
Platforms such as ESPN, Fox Sports, and others have a supply and demand issue: they want to occupy 24 hours a day of takes, but don’t have the roster of thoughtful commentators necessary to fill those 24 hours with differentiating opinions and perspectives while maintaining a semblance of intellectual honesty.
This reality has come to the forefront of the public consciousness after the Buffalo Bills’ 27-25 playoff victory over the Baltimore Ravens. Ryan Clark of ESPN posted at Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson on X last night, tell him that the loss “wasn’t on you” and praising Jackson for showing up in the “most important moments.”
A year ago, after the AFC Divisional Playoffs, Clark and his colleague Dan Orlovsky discussed the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory over the Buffalo Bills to advance to the AFC Championship Game. At that time, he remarked that Josh Allen was “still not the winner that we always try to make him be” and was exasperated that people “keep making excuses for him.”
Clark said that the NFL world was one week away from Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes going to multiple Super Bowls, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow going to a Super Bowl, and Lamar Jackson going to a Super Bowl (oops).
“When he does it, he does it” applied to Josh Allen then, but not to Lamar Jackson now. “What we never do,” Clark exclaimed during last season’s playoffs, “is come in here ‘oh my gosh Lamar wasn’t helped by anybody! Poor Lamar! Poor Lamar! No, it’s ‘Lamar gotta win’, ‘Lamar gotta figure out a way.’”
Clark went on to say that Allen “played great but didn’t do enough.” When Orlovsky said that he disagreed, Clark interjected with “What’s the score! He didn’t do enough!” Wins are a quarterback stat until Lamar Jackson loses in the playoffs, at which point we apparently need context.
Amongst the reactions from visible names in sport commentary, however, there were some pleasant surprises. Trey Wingo, formerly of ESPN and currently the host of the “Alternate Routes” podcast, took issue with Josh Allen’s comments to Tracy Wolfson of CBS after the game where he said that the team heard all year that they had “no talent” and were “not good enough to complete.”
“Literally NO ONE said Buffalo had no talent,” Wingo exclaimed on X.
Bills Mafia kept the receipts.
Emmanuel Acho of Fox Sports had proclaimed that exact thing just a few months ago. As such, Wingo was inundated with the video below as proof that while NFL teams are notorious for concocting all sorts of nonsense in their quest to perpetually...
