Anything to take my mind off of the presidential race. Then again, when I watch a Bills game this season and see Rex Ryan on the sidelines I will think of this:

Sorry, I can’t help it, the connection is burned into my memory.

Anyway, except for the two teams that played last evening, the whole league today is still tied at 0 wins and 0 loses. Besides, Rex Ryan said that the Bills won the off-season, whatever that means. I guess it is like winning primaries before you get to the general contest.

I have to admit that I was wrong about last season. I drank the Kool-aid. I believed that a coach with a mediocre record and a big mouth could turn the Bills into winners again, like they were in the past millennium.

So here we are at the start of the new season. Hope springs eternal. I am prepared to be surprised.

I like Tyrod Taylor. I think he will be even better than last year. I’m happy that Kyle Williams and Aaron Williams are back, and that Mario Williams is not.

I hope that LeSean McCoy and Charles Clay can live up to what they can do. I wish for an injury-free season for Sammy Watkins.

Defense guru Rex sure did a bang-up job with the defense in 2015, turning the unit that ranked fourth in the league in 2014 when Jim Schwartz was the defensive coordinator, into the 19^th placed defense last year.

To make the defense even stronger, Rex searched high and low for better defensive coaching and he turned up his twin brother Rob. Rob Ryan has mostly been a failure wherever he has coached. His hiring, to use a political expression, was an act of nepotism.

As was the player selected by the Bills in the first round of the NFL draft, defensive end Shaq Lawson. Shaq was a teammate of Rex’s son, who plays at Clemson University. The fact that the Bills tried to hide the issue of Lawson being unable to play until who knows when while drafting him is pretty bad.

Maybe I’ve been too busy watching politics to pay attention, but there seems to be a lot less excitement about the Bills this September than there was last year at this time. “Fool me once …”

The federal courts gave the Bills and three other teams a break by ruling against Tom Brady in deflate-gate. Who says that you cannot get a fair hearing from the courts?

The thing is, though, that even with 39-year-old Tom Brady spotting us four games, the Bills are no more likely than last year to make the playoffs, even though they play in a weak division. As noted in a previous blog, the Buffalo News and Sports Illustrated both project the Bills as an 8 win 8 lost team again this year.

That sounds about right, and if it is accurate we will probably see the end of the Rex Ryan and Doug Whaley eras in Buffalo. Too bad Lou Saban is not still around.

At least for the next 17 weeks we will have Sunday, Monday and Thursday night football on TV. That will be an excuse to stop channel flipping between the news channels and their endless stream of talking heads discussing Trump pivots and Clinton emails. The Romans had their “bread and circuses” to divert them from Caesar’s politics. We have the NFL. Go Bills!