'The Worst Stretch Of Football I Can Remember'

As still another yellow FLAG icon flashed at the top of the screen early in the fourth quarter of the New York Jets' 27-20 we-don't-really-want-to-win against Buffalo, Joe winced as if someone had just jammed a fork into the back of his hand.

"I've been watching this team for a very long time," said the lifelong Buffalonian, who traces his dysfunctional relationship with the local football team to the early 1970s, "and this is the worst stretch of football I can remember."

He was not lying.

And poor Maria. A South Florida native making her first visit to Buffalo, the recovering Dolphins fan is undergoing team-orientation conversion therapy.

"I'll still root for Miami, except for when they play Buffalo," she assured Andre, an ex-pat in town for last weekend's Music Is Art Festival who is overseeing the process.

Sunday's spectacle could not have done much to accelerate the transformation.

The final score suggests a reasonably competitive, perhaps even dramatic, football game between two relatively equal teams.

It was none of the above.

Joe, Andre, Maria and I had all invited ourselves to Nate's house for the game, and he graciously accepted. For more than a half, the game lent itself well to conversation. Very little happened that required more than a momentary reaction before returning to the subject at hand.

Around the time the Jets took over at their own 20-yard line a little more than a minute into the third quarter, though, things started to get weird.

The Jets did not so much march as stumble inexorably into Buffalo's end of the field. This, despite committing three of what would become a franchise-record 20 penalties, causing them to go 89 yards to set up a field goal.

Of course, almost half of those yards came on one play. On third-and-12, one snap after a replay review overruled an apparent Santonio Holmes fumble recovered by Buffalo linebacker Manny Lawson, Geno Smith (who some overly optimistic pundits suggested would be the lesser of the two rookie quarterbacks on display) connected with a painfully open Holmes for 40 yards over a mismatched Da'Norris Searcy.

Normally, a safety covering a wide receiver would look like a blatant mistake by someone, or a serious flaw in the coverage scheme. An injury to Leodis McKelvin left the Bills with the highly beatable Justin Rogers and two fellows named Brandon Burton and Johnny Adams (don't feel bad if you have never heard of them -- neither was on the active roster before Sept. 1) at corner and Searcy in a position to fail.

Which he did.

It would not do anyone any good to rehash the play-by-play of the final 25 minutes of game time, which felt like about five hours worth of real clock. If you missed it, consider yourself lucky.

We, on the other hand, got to witness:

---The Bills reach New York's 25-yard line, thanks largely to a 24-yard pass interference call on Jets corner Kyle Wilson, who had yet to completely lose his mind, only to settle for a field goal. At this point, since Buffalo scoring a touchdown was turning into a perverse fantasy, we started counting how many Dan Carpenter kicks would be necessary to overcome New York's lead.

---Kiko Alonso return an interception to the Jets' 13, so that the Bills could settle for another field goal, which cut the margin to three more of them.

---Rex Ryan throw away both his replay challenges (neither of which would have greatly altered the course of the game had they been successful) and two of his team's three timeouts -- within a three-snap sequence. So he did not have one available when a reversal would have mattered, on Manuel's non-fumble early in the fourth quarter.

---The Jets display remarkable generosity as they pushed Buffalo toward a tying touchdown the Bills showed little interest in scoring. The aforementioned Mr. Wilson experienced some sort of breakdown after getting into a shoving match with Stevie Johnson, an altercation resulting in offsetting penalties and wiping out what should have been a third-down misfire by Manuel.

Given another shot, Manuel threw another incompletion, only to get a new set of downs thanks to Wilson's continuing tantrum. After he committed two more personal fouls -- in a row -- Ryan finally pulled his disintegrating defensive back before he could pull a gun on someone.

After performing the seemingly impossible task of crossing New York's goal line (twice, once on Manuel's 33-yard catch-and-run hookup with Scott Chandler and then on a 2-point conversion throw to Johnson), the Bills appeared to set about falling behind again as quickly as possible.

---This they accomplished quite quickly, thanks to an interference penalty on Nickell Roby, who is slightly more skilled and much smaller than Buffalo's other novice corners, followed by the game's decisive play.

Much to his displeasure, Rogers found himself in single coverage on Holmes and did a nice job of staying with Holmes stride-for-stride. At least until Smith's pass traveled directly over his head and into Holmes' hands just inside Buffalo's 40, at which point Rogers appeared to suffer a spasm of some sort and fell face-first to the turf, allowing the receiver to prance into the end zone.

---The Jets tried to induce the Bills into tying things up again by committing three more defensive penalties, all on third down, with two of them pushing Buffalo's offense across the imaginary yellow line. Those conversions accounted for half of the successful third-down plays executed by Doug Marrone's offense (in 18 tries), with the other two achieved via Fred Jackson's running.

This would probably be a good place to point out that penalties accounted for eight of Buffalo's 18 first downs.

---So, a week after coolly guiding the Bills to a comeback win in the final seconds, Manuel was not able to produce a single third-down conversion all day, no matter how many extra chances the Jets gave him. He also had two shots on fourth down. The first ended in one of the eight sacks he would absorb. On the second, with 1:48 remaining, Manuel heaved one so far out of bounds, you would have thought he'd forgotten the down.

On Buffalo's last three drives, Manuel completed just six passes out of 18 attempts (two more incompletions were negated by New York penalties) and was sacked twice.

By the end, Manuel was unable to execute the second-simplest play asked of a professional quarterback, after the kneel-down, when he was unable to get the ball spiked before the clock finally, mercifully ran out.

---Manuel's rather deliberate decision-making and a struggling offensive line made a lousy combination. C.J. Spiller and Fred Jackson did not have much room to work with, either. Other than Jackson's 59-yard run (which led to, you got it, a field goal), the two combined for 22 yards on 17 carries.

---As bad as Manuel, and most of the rest of the offensive players not named Fred Jackson on that one run, looked against the Jets, Buffalo's defense may have been worse.

Jets running back Bilal Powell ran for 149 yards, 109 of them coming on 17 second-half carries, including a couple of runs during which it looked like at least half of the Bills defenders had found something better to do. Smith, whose for two weeks had made Manuel's Buffalo roll-out look brilliant by comparison, threw for 331 yards, including strikes of 69, 51, 45 and 40 yards.

The Jets rolled up 513 yards in all, to Buffalo's 328, enabling the Jets to overcome a 2-0 turnover disadvantage.

Poor Maria.

While watching the Bills get badly outplayed by a team of, at best, a similar talent level, yet still have a shot at winning before blowing it may not have been the ideal way for her to bond with her new team, it may have been the most honest beginning to the relationship.