Another football season is fading away. Another hockey season is nearly half over. We have seen this all before. The Bills went down the tubes again. The Sabres are once again hovering around last place in their division.

I don’t know the reason

I stayed here all season

Nothin’ to show but this brand new tattoo

It has been a long 17 weeks. First there was no hope. Then there was hope. Then there was a  little hope. Then there was none. Bills fans are a hardy lot and they tend to absorb many things. We have had lots of practice doing that.

While 12 NFL cities bask in playoff fun this weekend, we can only day dream about what it used to be like. The Bills’ glory days from 1988 to 1996 seemed like they would never end. Now they just seem so long ago.

The Ryan boys are leaving town, so now we sit and wait to see who comes next. The team has had nine head coaches in 17 years. The only two who had winning seasons left on their own. That seems to say something.

Interim and perhaps new permanent head coach Anthony Lynn is reportedly thinking that there may be better opportunities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. If true, that also says a lot about the situation in Buffalo.

There is about one half a season left for the Sabres. The team that seemed to deliberately tank a couple years ago to get a shot at a number one draft choice (they couldn’t even win that!) seems to be going through the same losing ways this year without even the motive of acquiring a superstar rookie. Are they are playing badly because they don’t know anything different?

Management of both franchises is in the hands of Kim and Terry Pegula, aided by CEO Russ Brandon. Yet when it came time for the annual end-of-season press conference to explain what happened to the Bills, only General Manager Doug Whaley appeared. He did his best Sergeant Shultz imitation: “I know nothing.”

You will see the same thing in April when Sabres General Manager Tim Murray shows up to explain the team’s dismal season and the coming re-building process.

We know the Pegulas have tons of money, and to their credit they opened up their wallets to acquire some high-priced football talent. But the thing is, they don’t seem to have much of a clue about how to run a sports franchise and they don’t seem to want to bring in help to figure that out.

So we the fans will go on, wandering in the wilderness of sportsdom, looking for a winning team. People keep buying tickets and team paraphernalia and showing up to games. Wasting time and money. Sad!

Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville

Searching for my lost shaker of salt

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame

But I know it’s my own damn fault

 

This just in – the Bills won the title

The years 2016 and 2017 may go down in history as the years that facts became irrelevant in politics; the years when lies that are repeated over and over either become accepted as truth, or became accepted simply because people don’t have an interest in the truth. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once noted “you are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Not anymore it seems.

“Fake” news used to be mostly the domain of the National Enquirer, but not now. It seems a bit ironic to note that the bizarre-stories Enquirer, owned by a Trump buddy and one of the few newspapers to endorse him, has become almost quaint as a fake news outlet. There are just so many other fake news outlets now, such as Fox News and Breitbart.

So why do we or should we believe mainstream media reporting about sports? What if there was a sports news blog called NFL.Assange.com and they announced that the Bills had actually won the AFC Eastern Division race this season. Just think for a moment: everyone, it appears, trusts the reporting of sports scores, player records, player salaries, team standings and the scheduling of playoffs. Why is all that more credible than the date on which a security briefing is scheduled, or a report about how big a budget deficit the Republicans in Congress are about to approve? Just wondering.