Where Have You Gone, C.J. Spiller?

In three short weeks, C.J. Spiller has gone from one of the NFL's most electrifying runners of 2012 to the biggest disappointment of Buffalo's 1-2 start.

A year after averaging 6.0 yards per rushing attempt and 106.4 total yards per game, and following an offseason in which Buffalo's new offensive coordinator, Nathaniel Hackett, vowed to "give him the ball until he throws up," the former first-round draft choice has managed 3.6 yards per carry, 60.7 total yards a game and zero incidents of vomitus.

Remove Spiller's 46-yard breakaway against Carolina in Week 2, and he's gaining barely two-and-a-half yards on each run.

The lack of a breakaway running threat hasn't helped the development of E.J. Manuel, either. After two solid-or-better outings, the rookie quarterback looked very much like a rookie quarterback against the Jets last week.

Turns out there is a pretty good explanation for the drop-off, and it can be found in a most unexpected place.

Until recently, Bleacher Report was easily the hackiest outlet in online sports media, a seemingly unregulated, unedited pastiche of poorly researched listicles and cliche-ridden slideshows. Since Turner Broadcasting System proved quality has little to do with value, at least on the Internet, by paying $200 million for the site in August 2012, though, the addition of quality writers (like my former colleague, Lyle Fitzsimmons) has made B/R significantly less irritating. Even downright useful, sometimes.

For instance, this guy did an thorough job of breaking down the problems with the Bills running game, particularly as they pertain to Spiller.

The lack of innovative play-calling for Spiller by an offensive staff widely praised for its creativity is one factor cited in a piece full of photographic evidence and advanced statistics. Mostly, though, lousy blocking -- especially by Colin Brown, who replaced departed free agent Andy Levitre at left guard -- gets the blame:

Alas, the big Buffalo lineman has simply been an albatross to that offensive line and the running game. The Bills might get better blocking out of a tackling dummy than they have out of Brown.

With Baltimore bringing the NFL's fourth-stingiest run defense to Ralph Wilson Stadium this afternoon, the Bills need better production from Spiller (whose three fumbles in as many games matches his total from all of 2012) and Manuel, as well as Fred Jackson and everyone else who touches the ball on a regular basis. While the offensive line shouldn't get all the blame, it certainly hasn't helped.

If you're looking for a thorough breakdown of all facets of today's game, the Baltimore Sun has a pretty good one here.

 

Prey Pounces Hunter

Alexander beat Attica last night in a high-school football game.

This is no big deal to most of humanity. Unless you attended one of the two schools.

Especially Alexander.

Alexander and Attica are rivals, in the sense that the zebra and the lion are rivals. And last night, the zebra devoured the lion.

To the best of my knowledge, as well as everyone surveyed at last night's Homecoming game, the last time this freakish reversal occurred was 1992. The last time before that was 1984, preceded by 1977 and 1964.

And that's it.

The dominance is certainly not due to any sort of physical, moral or mental superiority, but a matter of numbers. According to greatschools.org, Attica has 513 students in grades 9-12. Alexander has 514 -- in grades 6-12.

So the rivalry is purely geographical. In more populous areas, schools do not play football against another school roughly half its size every single year, then act like pounding the little guy is some sort of great accomplishment.

But that's Attica for you.

I was on the sideline for the 1977 win by the Trojans (yes, this nickname led to many, many jokes by our opponents and their fans, including Attica students showing up for our meeting on their field in 1985, my senior year, wearing garbage bags and derisively chanting "Rubber Tech" at us), standing with my father. He played for Alexander in the 1950s, including two years of six-man football. The Blue Devils (leave it to Attica to have an even more ridiculous nickname than "Trojans") walloped Alexander 20-0 in 1957, when he was a senior.

I was a junior at Alexander for the '84 upset. This may or may not be a coincidence, but it was the only season I did not play football in high school, since I thought serving as student council president would take much more time and commitment than it actually did. Or at least than I actually put into it.

In any event, three other quasi-jocks and I joined the cheerleading squad for several home games, including the Attica contest. Not dressed as traditional male cheerleaders, mind you, doing relatively butch stuff like lifting the girls in the air and whatnot, but in skirts and sweaters, waving pom-poms and doing leg-kicks.

Anyway, I returned to the active varsity roster a year later, and we got our teeth kicked in by Attica in the aforementioned garbage-bag game -- 32-8, as I recall.

Last night, I watched much of the game with one of a couple of guys who wore football uniforms, rather than cheerleading garb, during that '84 victory -- first Steve Sojda, a star running back who is now a member of the school board, and then Dave Wozniak, a towering two-way tackle. Meanwhile, my son, Jackson, spent the evening with a bunch of other 10-year-olds, chasing each other around the hills leading down to the temporarily lit field.

The first half was rather familiar to anyone who attended Alexander, or who regularly watches the Buffalo Bills play the professional version of the sport. The Trojans bottled up Attica's star running back, Matt Perry -- who had scored 13 touchdowns in the Blue Devils' first three games -- while their offense moved the ball up and down the field.

But Alexander faltered near the goal line, Attica got a late touchdown, and it was 7-0 at intermission.

This is where the Trojans (at least the editions I was involved with) or the Bills would normally be expected to experience a crisis of confidence and proceed to get their teeth kicked in.

Not this time, though. Alexander scored three straight touchdowns -- two of them by its own star running back, Dylan Scharlau (the son of one of my basketball teammates at Alexander, pictured on a first-quarter carry) -- to take a 22-7 lead early in the fourth quarter.

"There's still a lot of time left," Dave said, expressing what I and every other person wearing green and/or gold was thinking.

But when Attica inevitably pulled within seven points on its next possession, the Trojans calmly added another touchdown to put the game away.

Zebra 30, Lion 15.

On behalf of everyone who was ever on the green-and-gold side when things went the other way, I have three simple words.

Eat it, Attica.

'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.

Broadway Joe, The Juice And Some Bros

If you are killing time waiting for a rare late-afternoon Bills game (kickoff in New Jersey is slated for 4:25 p.m.), you can find just about every relevant statistic for today's game between Buffalo and the Jets here, as well as a lot that don't really mean anything.

You can also view the ongoing intelligent repartee between what appear to be very lonely men of a certain age by clicking the 'discuss' tab: 

Shane Verton ·  Top Commenter · Consultant at Sutherland Global ServicesGeno Smiths #1 receiver for week 3- Kiko Alonso
Reply · 28 · Like · Follow Post · September 18 at 1:04pmMax Menaker ·  Top Commenternope youre pretty stupid
Reply · 1 · Like · September 18 at 1:32pm

• Shane Verton ·  Top Commenter · Consultant atSutherland Global ServicesMax Menaker You seem to have a very limited vocabulary based off your previous comments..so i will keep this simple enough for you to understand.
  Suck it. That is all.
  Reply · 38 · Like · September 18 at 1:33pm

Nate Chevrier ·  Top CommenterMax Menaker nope he's pretty much dead on. Gina can't read a defense.
Reply · 19 · Like · September 18 at 1:33pm

Once you tire of that -- and believe me, it happens pretty quickly -- enjoy these clips of past Week 3 contests between the Bills and Jets.

This 1970 game features Dennis Shaw's debut at quarterback for Buffalo and the sort of elusiveness that made O.J. Simpson a superstar (for the right reasons).

Then there's the 1974 clash at a water-logged Rich Stadium. Joe Namath and Joe Ferguson combined for two completions (both by Broadway Joe), the fewest successful passes in a game since 1942, when players wore leather helmets with no facemasks, had to play both offense and defense and were not allowed to touch the ball with their hands.

OK, I made that last part up. Aside from stunning passing futility, this game did feature a rare star turn from Jim Braxton, We Want Marangi's first, and probably still, favorite player.

Mascots Assist In Brainwashing Process

Yesterday, Oscar and I discovered the "Mascot Mash-Up" mode on EA Sports' NCAA Football '11, in which each university is represented by a full roster of their respective anthropomorphic, overstuffed and/or slightly racist symbols.

Pictured above, one of Oscar's Notre Dame leprechauns gets smoked by a Knight from the University of Central Florida, as played by his older brother, Jackson, on the Xbox 360.

Unfortunately, the mascots are interchangeable in their abilities. Might spice things up a little if the Knight could ward off tacklers with a broadsword, or the leprechaun could break open a whisky bottle while making an open-field tackle. Of course, this would probably place the teams with bear or big-cat avatars at an unfair advantage.

Judging from their interest level (they played through an entire game, with no encouragement from me, and despite the Knights, whose giant helmets give them a big aesthetic edge over the unarmored leprechauns, taking control in the second half of a 36-11 romp), this might be the hook that finally softens them up for their full indoctrination into the cult of football.

Hopefully, three-plus hours of the Bills and the Jets later this afternoon will not be enough to negate this bit of brilliance, and poison an 10-year-old and his almost-7-year-old brother to the sport forever.

So if you're reading this, Rex Ryan and Doug Marrone (and I know you are), a bit of your sport's future is on your shoulders.

Meanwhile, In New Jersey ...

You know we are living in strange and heady times when the Buffalo Bills are held up as an example of how to do, well, anything.

Like the Bills, the New York Jets enter Sunday's game in New Jersey with a rookie quarterback and no real alternative, since the veteran who was supposed to compete with the draft pick became debilitated in an exhibition game.

That's about it for similarities, though.

E.J. Manuel drew good reviews from the national football press despite a Week 1 loss to New England, then calmly guided the Bills to a final-second win against Carolina, earning NFL Rookie of the Week honors.

Manuel's green-clad counterpart, Geno Smith, has not enjoyed the last two weeks quite as much.

Like the Bills, the Jets are 1-1.

First, New York's second-round pick got the job despite playing like an undrafted free agent during the exhibition season. But thanks to Rex Ryan's misplaced preseason priorities, even the unpleasant option of replacing Smith with Mark Sanchez is unavailable to the soon-to-be-former Jets coach.

But for a remarkably dumb late-hit penalty on Tampa Bay's Lavonte David in the opener, the Jets would be 0-2. Smith posted decent numbers against the Bucs (24-of-38 for 256 yards, with one touchdown and one interception), but was horrific against New England, particularly during a three-interception fourth quarter.

New York being New York, there are already rumblings about replacing Smith with Matt Simms, whose main qualification is looking a lot like his Dad.

That is where the resemblance ends, however. An undrafted free agent who had a few moments of competence during the exhibition slate, Phil's son is basically Jeff Tuel, except Tuel's father did not win a Super Bowl more than a quarter-century ago in the same metropolitan area.

Impatience by fans and media aside, Manuel enjoys several other advantages over Smith.

His development is overseen by an all-new coaching staff, with a head coach and offensive coordinator whose up-tempo, diverse approach looks well-suited to his skills, as well as those of C.J. Spiller, Fred Jackson, Stevie Johnson and fellow rookie Robert Woods.

Under Ryan, the Jets lack an offensive philosophy beyond turning the ball over as often as possible. The "Ground and Pound" approach that masked Sanchez's flaws enough to get the Jets to the AFC title game in Rex's first two seasons has given way to new offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg's version of the West Coast Offense, which produced a 5-27 record in the two seasons he was the head coach in Detroit and helped get Andy Reid fired in Philadelphia last year.

Of course, when your primary offensive options are people named Bilal Powell and Stephen Hill, having an interception-prone rookie with accuracy issues fling it around doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

You know things are going poorly for the Jets when they make noted ESPN blowhard Stephen A. Smith sound reasonable:

Yet, it's the Buffalo Bills who are scheduled to saunter into town with a rookie quarterback, EJ Manuel, armed with the necessary structure, coaching and counsel Geno Smith should be enjoying with his team.

Such support would be particularly helpful in a nationally televised game against a division rival. But these are the Jets, after all.

Manuel Triggers Flutie Flashback

E.J. Manuel's two-yard toss to Stevie Johnson goes down as the winning score in the rookie quarterback's first triumphant moment in a Buffalo uniform.

His emotional embrace with his father at the stadium wall is the iconic moment of the Bills' 24-23 win over Carolina (assuming the younger Manuel in fact goes on to become an icon).

The play before the decisive touchdown, though, provided the most encouraging sign that, after a half-dozen misfires, the Bills may have finally found the quarterback they have been seeking since Jim Kelly got tired of rehabilitating after knee surgery.

On the snap after a pass interference call properly negated what would have been a fatal interception, Manuel rolled right, saw a lack of open receivers, and took off. After buying himself a couple of feet of space with a pump fake, he glided toward the point where the goal line meets the right sideline.

This is where you would have expected a rookie, or even a veteran, to make a heroic lunge for the winning touchdown. Or, if he misjudged the spatial relationship between himself, the end zone and the defenders trying to keep him out of it, a spot at the bottom of a pile as the clock ran out.

But, as throughout what would soon go in the books as an 80-yard, 98-second, zero-timeout drive, and most of his brief Buffalo career, Manuel knew exactly where he was, how much time was left and what was at stake. He angled for the corner, so that if he was stopped short, he would also be knocked out of bounds.

That left him with six seconds -- time for two plays, provided the first was a fairly quick incompletion -- to cover two yards. He and Johnson only needed one of those snaps, as it turned out.

Not once during the final drive did Manuel look panicky, or even especially concerned, whether he was dropping off short throws under Carolina's soft coverage or bouncing out of what would have been a near-fatal sack.

There was something faintly familiar about Manuel's conduct during the closing moments. Nothing from Buffalo's recent history, of course, which is clogged with opponents celebrating victories nearly as a dramatic (like, say, the Patriots seven days earlier).

No, the flashback triggered Sunday was nearly 15 years old.

Not exactly the same -- that 1998 drive against Jacksonville was 70 yards in 1:50 with one timeout. But it was Doug Flutie's second game after replacing an injured Rob Johnson. Flutie and Manuel each showed impressive patience, as well as mobility along the way. The winning touchdowns even wound up in the same place -- the left side of the end zone at the tunnel end of what was then known as Rich Stadium.

And both drives elicited the same emotional progression from an understandably skeptical crowd, from "Well, at least they've got a chance," to "He might just pull this off," to "Holy shit!"

The excitement level was such that whoever runs the team's Twitter account momentarily lost the ability to count.

Kelly himself was there to hug Manuel after the game, attending the game as part of a ceremony honoring the members of the franchise's Wall of Fame (except one guy, who had another commitment).

Yes, the Bills -- Manuel included -- spent much of the first 59:04 minutes of game time Sunday making sure the Panthers had every opportunity to slip out of Orchard Park with a win.

There were the two drive-sustaining penalties, one of which led to Carolina's second touchdown. And Manuel's first two professional turnovers, which came within a span of four snaps and set up a pair of fourth-quarter field goals by Panthers kicker Graham Gano.

Until that final drive got underway, it looked like what seems like a hundred games over the past decade-and-a-half. A lot of positives (not even counting the throwback standing-buffalo helmets, which Bills management should give serious consideration to sticking with), and just enough negatives to make the good parts totally irrelevant.

But we'll get to all that, including a pretty big day by Mario Williams, as the week goes on and Manuel's first road game, against the Jets and the second quarterback selected in last spring's draft, Geno Smith, approaches.

For now, enjoy what happened Sunday. These people at a Bills bar in Santa Monica certainly did.