From The Wayback Machine: Flutie v. Johnson

Exhibition finales are never very interesting, but if you find your way to sitting through all of Buffalo's visit to Detroit tonight, you might want to seek medical help.

Coaching paranoia precludes anyone of value playing more than a handful of snaps. A little more than a week before the real thing starts, the depth charts are pretty well set. So you will see starters for a series or two, backups for two or three beyond that.

Then it is all guys who are about to get cut auditioning for the chance to get picked up by another team. Which will then cut them again.

The Bills' quarterbacking situation somehow manages to make tonight even less intriguing. New backup Tarvaris Jackson will not be ready for more than a few plays, so that is all he will get. As usual in the final game of August, starter Ryan Fitzpatrick will have the shoulder pads off after 10 snaps or so.

That means Tyler Thigpen aficionados finally get the moment for which they have been waiting.

The idea of analyzing the situation facing Thigpen, who is widely expected to be cut before he reaches the locker room after the game, makes my soul hurt a little. Instead, time for a little We Want Marangi nostalgia.

Long, long ago, in the days before blogs, Twitter and Facebook, there was The Buffalo Post.

Looking for a way to keep ourselves from being driven insane by our day jobs, Mark Wisz and I, along with a cast of both frequent and decidedly irregular contributors, developed one of Buffalo's first consistently updated online outlets.

Real life, along with our failure to monetize our efforts, eventually put The Post into hibernation. While the url for BuffaloPost.com was snapped up by shady internet squatters, the content lives on at web.archive.org -- also known as The Wayback Machine, an excellent resource for extinct online entities.

What passed for The Post's heyday was also the height of Flutie v. Johnson, perhaps the greatest wedge issue in franchise history. As tiresome as the debate could get, especially when you had little choice but to write about the wee miracle worker and the laconic Californian to the exclusion of other, at-least-equally important topics, it was ideal column fodder.

No matter which side you took, you were sure to piss off at least half your readers. And if you tried to play it straight down the middle, nobody was happy.

So as the Bills head toward the 2012 regular season unsure of whether they have a competent backup quarterback on the roster, let us travel back to a time when there was a legitimate debate over who should be No. 1.

All Flutie does is win. All Johnson does is get hurt.

Flutie's a warrior. Johnson's a dude.

Flutie only cares about the team. Johnson only cares about making sure his bandana is on straight.

It all looks so simple.

Too bad so much of it is crap.

See the rest of the piece -- the last I wrote before Tom Donahoe and Gregg Williams told Flutie to hit the bricks -- for yourself -- and explore more coverage of the Bills, Sabres and the rest of turn-of-the-century Buffalo by navigating the links on the left.