The Buffalo Bills drafted a quarterback last night. It was kind of a big deal. They traded out of the eighth pick and down to 16, picking up second- and seventh-round picks in the process. I was pleased by this development. I was also pleased that no other team took a quarterback. Every draft-eligible quarterback in the nation was available to the Buffalo Bills.

They picked Florida State quarterback E.J. Manuel. I was disappointed.

I’m not a draft expert, so the rest of my night was spent trying to figure out why I felt that way. The football people at my football team did exactly what they wanted on Thursday night. They were excited, and I was not. I can’t say why Geno Smith or Matt Barkley or Ryan Nassib are better than E.J. Manuel. They are probably not. What was my problem?

Then I figured it out. Somehow I had forgotten that I don’t trust anyone involved with this pick. I don’t trust anyone in the Buffalo Bills organization at all. I don’t understand why Buddy Nix still has a job. I don’t understand why Russ Brandon was given a promotion. I don’t have any reason to believe that Doug Whaley will be better at this than anyone he eventually replaces.

I have absolutely zero faith in the Buffalo Bills to make the right pick, or to do anything of any importance correctly. This is because they’ve done almost nothing right for the last 13 years. That’s what it comes down to. Skepticism is at an all-time high, and I think that’s more than justified.

Buddy Nix is the guy who drafted E.J. Manuel last night. That’s the same human being who gave Ryan Fitzpatrick a gigantic contract extension, though later it would sound like some vagrant had snuck into his office and drafted up the paperwork while he was out to lunch. The Bills will pay Ryan Fitzpatrick to stay away from Buffalo this season. In the few weeks since that happened, I had forgotten my interest in paying Buddy and Co. to do the same.

All of that came back when the Bills actually did something last night. I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, and it’s difficult for a human being to throw an entire football franchise. I’m incredibly skeptical of our new head coach. To say I’m skeptical of Manuel is an understatement. He’s just the shiny new thing put on top of the pile of things that can’t convert flight path to faith.

Let’s talk about this man.

It’s 2002, and the Buffalo Bills have the fourth pick in the NFL Draft. After a 3-13 season, the Bills are in need of some serious change. A top 5 pick can make an immediate impact, and Bills fans are excited. This “Fanatic” shaves a mohawk into his head, or maybe he always has a mohawk. In his hotel room, he paints a Bills helmet on his head and takes his personalized Bills jersey out of his suitcase.

He takes the train to Madison Square Garden because, despite the awful season, he’s still proud of his team. He’s proud that he and his Buffalo-headed friend made the trip to New York to see the future of the Bills happen right before their eyes. They want to show off their colors, and especially their sweet headgear.

Sure, the Bills haven’t made the playoffs in two seasons. It’s a blip on the radar of a decade-plus of success. Before this drought—if you can even call it that—they qualified for the postseason 10 out of 12 years. The 2001 season was awful. They beat Jacksonville, Carolina and the Jets. That’s it. It was a nightmare. Hell, even Chris Mohr left. But that Moorman kid looks pretty good, and something has to happen at quarterback. It’s going to be good.

The draft starts, and the Texans take David Carr. He knew that was going to happen anyway. One quarterback off the board. Probably the only good one, really. The Panthers take Julius Peppers, who looks like he’s going to be a monster. It’s okay. Lots of good players out there. The Bills are going to get someone good.

Detroit has the third pick. They’ve been hapless forever. Even with Barry Sanders, who is long gone. They take Joey Harrington, a quarterback out of Oregon. Not exactly quarterback factories for these guys, but okay. The Bills are on the clock now. Let’s make some noise.

The Bills take Mike Williams.

Let’s jump back into the present now. Feel free to bring 11 more years of failure and awful memories with you. Mike Williams. Let’s find the Wikipedia page for Mike Williams. Start with the disambiguation page. Well, he’s the first athlete on that list. That’s nice.

As a football fan, the problem with the NFL Draft is that getting excited about draft picks seems illogical. So little is known about each player’s probable outcome that it’s tough to even determine who did the right thing, let alone gauge how excited I should be about it. Even in hindsight it’s tough to say that anyone else drafted after Williams would have done better on the Bills. Each pick is the fork between an alternate universe you will never know and the reality you are stuck with.

When I think about draft failures I don’t think about the players. Those guys get big contracts and celebrity and the chance to do something few people can. Sure, there are victims of the sports system and sob stories to be told, but on draft day I don’t worry about athletes stuck in the green room waiting for their signing bonuses. I think about the fans wearing ridiculous outfits who must decide in an instant whether they love or hate what their team just did.

I think about Jets fans screaming about instant busts. I think about instant reactions on Twitter that I may or may not regret in a few years’ time. I wonder what the guy with a Bills helmet painted on his head thought about Mike Williams when the Bills drafted him. I’m sure he cheered. He was big and the Bills needed to fix the offensive line. It made sense at the time.

In the second round the Bills drafted Josh Reed. In the third, they got Ryan Denney. They also got Coy Wire in the third round, who would be a mainstay at your local Walmart on the front of a Coca Cola vending machine. You probably have a bobblehead of him in your basement somewhere. It felt like a good day for Bills football.

A good two days. The next day, the Bills traded for Drew Bledsoe. If you don’t remember the excitement, here’s the last two graphs of that SI article about the trade.

Even before the deal was announced, the Bills opened their box office to accommodate fans who heard the trade was imminent. Buffalo, which failed to sell out four of its eight home games last season, drew 504,709 fans last year, the lowest since 1987.

“Just the hint of Drew Bledsoe would get anybody down here,” said Patrick Cimicato, after purchasing a pair of season tickets at the stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. “As expensive as it is for a game here, Drew Bledsoe is the main reason I came down here. … I was jumping around in the car.”

As you know, that all worked out really well. Two years into the playoff drought, Bills fans were hoping the draft was the place to start the turnaround. Eleven years later, we’re all still just hoping.

Ryan Fitzpatrick was released back into the wild yesterday, 502 days after signing a $56 million contract extension with the Buffalo Bills.

A lot can happen in 500 or so days. Some dude from Grantland can call you the potential savior of a city. Ribs break and beards are shaved. Hip twentysomethings fall in and out of love. Seasons come and go. Life moves on.

It was a bad idea for the Bills to give him that extension on October 28, 2011. People outside of Buffalo thought the deal was crazy, and even those captivated by the unlikely success Fitzpatrick had early in that season knew it wouldn’t last. Definitely not six more years.

And so a wave of rookie quarterbacks came and went without the Bills taking a chance. The franchise was tied to Fitzpatrick through good and bad, but now all that’s gone. Buddy Nix, who hours before accidentally told the world how much his quarterback sucks, took care of the problem he himself created. They will probably draft a rookie and see what happens. Open competition and all that.

For all the talk about things staying the same with sports in Buffalo, the body count sure is piling up this year. Fitzpatrick joins his former head coach and a Buffalo sports legend on the discard pile during one of the most frustrating stretches of sporting ineptitude in recent memory. Somehow, the general managers have survived the carnage despite creating much of the mess they are attempting to clean up.

I’m not sure if they really deserve the chance to fix it, but it looks like Buddy Nix sure will give it another go. After all, there’s still some room on the shirt for a few more quarterbacks.

Have you missed the sweet, southern twang of Bills GM Buddy Nix’s voice during the football off season? Well, Deadspin has a phone call for you!

I’m no lawyer-guy, so I’m not going to pretend to know whether this is legal or not. My guess is no, and someone will probably have a court date no matter how benign the actual conversation was here. We learned that Ryan Fitzpatrick has a big contract that even embarrasses the guy who gave it to him. Also, the Bills like their tackles.

The actual football information here is sparse, really. The real problem is that the entire incident reinforces every bad stereotype Bills fans have about the organization. An unorganized, second-rate franchise had its general manager calling a prankster back again and again. An old man fumbling through his smartphone searching for a wrong number. It sounds foolish and out-of-touch and, well, like everything the Bills have been known for since the late 90s.

No one likes what they see when they look behind the curtain. It’s embarrassing that a franchise as maligned as the Buffalo Bills gets duped by this. I’m sure Bucs fans feel the same way, but we live in Buffalo and so this is a Buffalo story. You can blame who you want in this exchange because the list is pretty damn long. The people engineering the phone call. Nix. Dominik. Maybe a secretary or the Kinja-ninjas over at Deadspin.

Without context this phone call merely tips the hand of the Bills’ GM. With a decade and counting of failure attached, it’s yet another indication of how terrible this franchise is. A team owned by an out-to-lunch old man who hired a bumbling, hapless slightly-younger man to assemble an aw-shucks team that can’t ever get its shit together. Whether you blame Nix for getting duped or not, the incident definitely doesn’t improve the way you think about the guy.

The Bills want to be a new-look franchise. They want you to believe they’re turning a corner and that things are getting better. Russ Brandon wasn’t part of the problem, it was his lack of control over the franchise that kept it back. And hey, Doug Whaley is ready to take over once Nix can’t hack it anymore.

It’s all supposed to be different now, but one year after the free agency courtship of Mario Williams brought plenty of hope and little satisfaction, the Bills are back on FA day to show you they’re still operating from the inside of a clown car. I have no problem with Nix speaking frankly about Ryan Fitzpatrick. At least he’s not delusional about the situation at quarterback.

It’s not the fact that he’s right. It’s that everything else is so obviously wrong.

More than 179 million people will watch the Super Bowl this year. If you’re reading this, I expect you’ll be in that group along with me.

More than “funny” commercials and halftime music and lead-out shows, the Super Bowl has taught me about ancient counting systems. Football fans learn how to use Roman numerals because of The Big Game. The number grows by one as the years pass. It’s 47 this year, and AP style says to do that rather than type out the XLVII that looks so darn nice when it’s in gigantic letters outside the stadium.

There was something cool about knowing about Roman numerals before the rest of your classmates in elementary school. You talk about the Roman empire in social studies, or watch the closing credits of a television show and figure out the date for fun. It’s nerdy, sure, but it’s about football. It can’t be all that bad.

Over the years, XX had grown to XXX and now we see the shirt size-like XL denote the game’s first digit. As the numbers grew and various champions are crowned, we get further away from the Super Bowl being an event of local importance.

Here’s the thing about the Super Bowl: it’s never really meant anything to me as a Bills fan. My memories of the Bills of the early 90s are fuzzy at best, not much more than one of the Cowboys nightmares where they were leading at the half. I remember a quiet car ride home afterwards, but the context of a sad Bills clearance sale at Hills just wasn’t there for me.

In my more formative years, the Super Bowl has been about watching other teams play in the big game. You get together with family and friends and do squares pools while you eat a lot of food and watch football. It’s not all that different from Thanksgiving, really, other than the fact that the Bills have a better shot of playing on a Thursday than they do playing in February.

Over the years I’ve grown to notice that there are two distinct seasons in football. The first one is the 20 games the Bills actually get to take part in. Then there are the playoffs, where you get to watch good football teams play important games. There is no crossover, and yes, it’s incredibly depressing.

The Bills might have seven or so years left in Buffalo. It’s something I don’t like to think about, but I honestly can’t see the Bills even making the Super Bowl in that time. Every year the team provides at least a glimmer of hope that they could be decent, or even just fun to watch. Despite remarkable fan support, getting to the Super Bowl is never a realistic expectation.

If you want to use Facebook data to extrapolate the point, 73 percent of Facebook users who “like” a football team and live within 50 miles of Ralph Wilson Stadium are Bills fans. That’s the seventh best percentage in the league despite having the third worst total likes among all teams. Bills fans are loyal, even if the team is already working on a second decade of absolute misery.

None of this will matter when the game actually starts. I won’t think about the Bills, and I definitely won’t think about Steve freaking Johnson’s offseason workout schedule. The Super Bowl is about the game itself, and I’m looking forward to it. Watching football is fun, even when you’re team isn’t playing. It’s the time before the game, and the months without football to follow, that make me think about the Bills.

Pray for overtime.

Do you remember when the Dallas Cowboys decided to chirp the Dallas Stars on Twitter last week?

It went something like this:

And then the Stars came back with the knockout punch:

At least our #9 got the job done….. RT:” @dallascowboys Similarly in the category of nobody-cares…the NHL is back!” twitter.com/DallasStars/st…

— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) January 8, 2013

The Cowboys went on to apologize and jokes were made about how there would be an opening in the Cowboys Social Media Department. Only there may actually have been an opening in the Cowboys Internet/New Media Department as a result.

This listing for a “Social Media Writer” was posted on the TeamWorkOnline jobs site this morning.

I have no idea if the timing of that Cowboys tweet and the job posting are related, but it is pretty intriguing. Now being the little go-getter that I am, I sent in an application for that position, just to see what would happen.

A little more than a half-hour later (a really short period of time), this email showed up in my inbox:

The job posting was pulled and apparently no one will be hired at this time.

So much for getting to the bottom of this mystery.

Because we always want what is impossible, we are transfixed by the past. Around the holidays we become fascinated by “tradition.” We use it to sell 7-year-old books and movies set in the 1940s that were made in 1980s. It’s a misty-eyed racket that sells well, and every passing year grows the tradition a bit more. It doesn’t hurt that DVDs are fairly easy to wrap.

Our love of the past is as simple as it is misguided. A look behind us is always easily explained. There is a line of cause and effect in the events, a clear view of what happened and why. When things look that logical it’s easy to long for the past, a world that makes sense and reminds us of what we already know.

What we forget, of course, is how awful the past can be. We forget social progress or emotional growth. We ignore the mistakes of youth and focus on its easy aspects. Out of a history full of ignorance and bigotry and an early death we choose to cherish simplicity and the joys of a sitcom’s nuclear family as evidence of a happier time.

We romanticize history with fuzzy camera filters and melded memories, but we add the unnatural sheen of possibility to the future as well. We can also spend far too much time worrying about the present. Our perspective is totally screwed up, but the lens with which we view things is important. Oftentimes I think we spend too much time worrying about what we see and not enough time wondering why we see it.

My two favorite Christmas specials are both cartoons. This is because I have the maturity of an eight-year-old boy, but also because I think cartoons can make the most of a Christmas plot. There are plenty of cartoons where the main character helps Santa deliver presents or, better yet, incapacitates Santa and has to assume his responsibilities. Those are fine, but all of those classic Christmas stories do nothing to add to the show itself. It’s wacky hijinks in a fake beard or A Christmas Carol with the smallest character playing Tiny Tim.

The episodes I like use the holiday as a foil to show you something new, to add another dimension to a character that maybe you can’t manage with an ordinary episode. I want Christmas in cannon, and some shows really pull it off well.

In Hey Arnold, for example, the main character learns the background of a quiet man who lives in his boarding house. Mr. Hyunh, who most viewers knew as the guy with the funny accent, lost his daughter during the Fall of Saigon. It gets heavy in a hurry, and years later it still resonates with viewers who got their first taste of Vietnam on a cartoon.

Adventure Time is one of the smartest, most self-aware shows currently on television and its Christmas episode is no exception. If anything, the lone contrast with its usual 11-minute vignettes is that it’s one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen on a children’s cartoon network. In fact, midway through the episode they throw up a “Merry Christmas from Adventure Time!” banner on the bottom of the screen just to remind confused viewers that they are watching the right channel.

The episode itself, subject material aside, is a brilliant example of using a holiday setting to expand the cannon. It firmly establishes a time period for the show and gives the main villain a thorough history. It’s heartbreaking, really, and once you see the Christmas episode of Adventure Time you never look at the show the same way again. It’s an awesome use of the 22 minutes a network gives you a half-dozen times in December. A year later, it still stuns me when I watch it.

Every December I re-read this post. As much as I want to go back and fix the clunky sentences and style errors of my younger self, I never do. It took me three years to write about my worst Christmas, and I think it’s important to leave that moment as it stands. Over the years it’s become a part of the holiday, an idle minute or two brings it all back to sober a happy moment and steels the resolve to have the best Christmas yet.

I hate that post. It’s a bit too personal and irrational for the worldview of my current self. A few weeks ago I wrote that I could live without rooting for the Bills, and I still believe that. Having on record that the team once saved Christmas is a tough fit for that narrative, though.

Staying in cannon is something I used to worry about quite a bit. I have years worth of opinions cataloged on this site, and at first I thought I could keep it all in line. You like or dislike a certain player or team or concept. Pick a side of the fence and stay there no matter what happens because, eventually, someone is going to call you on it if you change your mind.

That’s stupid. We change our minds all the time because we get new information added to the pile as we are helplessly hurled into the future. The cannon is always changing because future is constantly becoming past and the variables of our lives are always in flux.

That’s why I think holidays are important: they put a timestamp on our lives that’s easy to remember. It gives us a chance to reflect on how things have changed and realize what we’d like to change about the next one. New Year’s Day is full of resolutions and reflection as well, it just doesn’t have nearly as many Very Special Episodes attached.

So sometimes Christmas is bad news and funerals. Sometimes it’s board games and just what everyone wanted. Sometimes it even has that perfect snowfall that makes everything look brand new, and most times it’s so busy we sleep through gatherings and don’t have time to write about it all until January 4.

The one thing every holiday has is something new, and that’s a very good thing indeed. Each year you get a new memories that create your expectations for the next one. Maybe, if we have enough tries at it, we can finally get it just right.

The holidays change just like you do. The best we can hope for is a tradition to hold dear.

Note: Furrer4heisman, a Virginia Tech fan and former SB Nation blogger, has talked college football with us on a few podcasts. This season he attended over 25 football games–both high school and college–in search of something. This is what he found.

It’s nearly two hours before kickoff and The Chief has already found his spot for the game.

He stands alone on the track that circles the field of Homer Bryce Stadium at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, just beyond the north end zone between the steeplechase pit and the area used for jumping events. The Chief will stand here for the next five hours until one of the two teams playing tonight, the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks or Northwestern State Demons, claims him. And claiming him is no easy task.

At seven-foot-six, 320 pounds, Chief Caddo is the largest traveling trophy in college football. For a little over three hours, the Lumberjacks and Demons will play for the right to send its biggest and burliest linemen to the track behind the north end zone to retrieve the wood carved statue of an Indian chief and bring him to the winning sideline.

That scene won’t play out until well after dark. For now, with the sun overhead, The Chief stands in a nearly empty stadium with his gaze pointed toward the field. There’s no way of knowing how long he’s been there and there’s no evidence to suggest how he got there. Unlike other traveling trophies in college football, getting The Chief to this location doesn’t seem like it would be as simple as ordering a graduate assistant to retrieve him from a display case. But here he is. No one standing guard and no one is bothering him. It’s as if the sight of The Chief on the track is just as natural the sight of a high hurdle.

There isn’t a good reason to be in this part of Texas the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Nacodoches is a college town nestled in the piney woods that cover the eastern part of the state and is well off the interstate. Today it’s hosting what most would consider a less-than-compelling college football game, outside of it being a rivalry. Both the Jacks and Demons have known for some time this was going to be the last game of their respective seasons.

If SFA were in contention for a playoff spot in the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision, Homer Bryce Stadium would be a lot closer to capacity. Instead, a campaign with some preseason hype was derailed by turnovers and an inability to get defensive stops at opportune times. This evening a crowd of 8,341 will occupy a stadium that seats just over 14,500.

As the gates open and the game draws closer, some of that crowd makes its way to the track to get their picture taken with The Chief. Again, no one is standing guard or appears to be in charge of him. He just stands there, arms crossed, as fans, cheerleaders and band members create a line from the track to the goalpost for their turn to snap photos. Today, The Chief is college football’s Mall Santa.

This is the only real reason I’m here. I’ve driven six hours one way to get my photo taken with a seven-foot Indian carving, which sounds insane as I type it. About midway through the first quarter I’m rewarded for the hours spent on the road and stand next to The Chief, who dwarfs me. The photographer zooms way out to get both myself and The Chief into the frame and a couple of clicks later, I have what I came for.

Nacogdoches is my final destination as a college football tourist this season. The Battle for Chief Caddo is my 13th college game of the season and while I still have three more games to attend, all of them will be in a capacity other than as a fan. The trip to East Texas and the chance for an audience with The Chief is my last chance to really take in all that college football has to offer this year.

A season spent reconnecting with a sport that was beginning to feel more like a job than an escape has culminated with a chance to pose with a piece of what I think makes the sport great. To me, traveling trophies like The Chief and places like Nacogdoches, far away from the NFL’s big cities, are the biggest dividing line between pro and college football.

From the couch, the biggest difference in the two games appears to be skill level or the variety of offenses found in college. At the stadium, the sights and sounds separate the two. Whether it’s jumping during the pregame entrance in Blacksburg, wandering between tailgates in tiny Pittsburg, Kan., or hanging out with a seven-foot wooden trophy, there is no such thing as a bad day of college football.

This sometimes gets lost during the nearly eight-month gap between seasons. When teams get slapped with NCAA sanctions or shun tradition for a new conference affiliation and a larger paycheck, fans can forget why the game mattered to them in the first place.

Thankfully, for me at least, what happens inside the seating bowl can bring it all back. The atmosphere of a night game between two Top 10 teams. Watching a scholarship-less senior try to exhort the small crowd at a D3 game into an uproar or a seeing a first-year starter will his team to a come-from-behind win are still worth putting up with some of college football’s pettiness.

They are things fans miss out on in the sterile, mostly look-a-like stadiums of professional football.

In the end, the SFA fans leave Homer Bryce Stadium happy. Their team scored the last 24 points of the game to claim a 34-17 victory, their fourth in a row over their rivals. After the clock winds down, the Lumberjack players go to the end zone to retrieve Chief Caddo and plant him in front of the SFA band and student section.

The players engulf The Chief to where only his face and headdress are visible and pose for photos. They, too, have what they came for and their season culminates with a few camera clicks while huddled around one of college football’s venerable relics. They have earned the right to keep The Chief another year and when they travel to Northwestern State next season, they will again be the ones responsible for placing him so he can watch the Jacks and Demons play for him once again.

The Bills are an international embarrassment.

I was prepared to write about the Bills in Toronto series and Marshawn Lynch. There’s a good argument to be made that the apathy felt by many with Lynch’s return to “Buffalo” runs in step with the fans’ apathy towards the Bills in Toronto series. There’s little outrage for these games. No one seems to really care anymore.

Then the Seahawks ran all over the Bills and here I am, irrationally angry once again.

There’s little use hiding my frustration with this team. We try our best to write funny tweets about foxglove poisoning and hide our rage with GIFs and statements of indifference. But we’re still watching. We still care.

I’m as frustrated as I’ve ever been with this team. We are wasting our time. Every Sunday oscillates between completely pointless and incredibly cruel. Something has to change and if the the team won’t change, we have to. I have to.

My childhood is over. No one is sitting me down and teaching me how to be a Bills fan on Sundays. I can do whatever I want with my time. Read a book. Watch basketball. Find a hobby that doesn’t involve whatever is on Chan Gailey’s playsheet.

So here’s the deal: the next head coach of the Buffalo Bills will determine what I do with my Sundays next fall. That’s where this organization will make a real statement about the future of the team. I can tell you right now, if it’s Norv Turner or Andy Reid patrolling the sidelines for the Bills, I’m done.

I’m looking for an inspired hire. A reason to care about what happens at Ralph Wilson Stadium on Sundays. There’s no way in hell I’m buying season tickets for this nightmare. I’m not buying jerseys or hats or scarfs. There is no money at stake with this. Right now, the only thing they can muster is my attention. I can’t believe I give them that much at this point.

So there it is. That’s where I am with football these days. Go Bills or something.

I watched the Bills game at home on Sunday.

At 12:58 p.m. I replaced one of those creepy penguins with another high-definition television. Switch around a few HDMI cables throw in a laptop and at 1:01 p.m. I had the Bears/Packers game on the small TV and the Bills game on the big one. The video quality was far from pristine, but it was much better than anything I saw in my high-definition-less childhood.

I’m not going to do the tongue-in-cheek thing everyone does when they talk about circumventing blackout restrictions for sporting events. “Oops, I broke the law,” and all that. Stop it. No one actually thinks they are breaking the law when they find an illegal feed of a football game.

Blackouts are stupid, a relic of an era technology has rendered obsolete. Legally speaking, it’s the sporting equivalent to jaywalking. It’s sneaking a piece of bulk candy at the supermarket when no one’s looking.

It was incredibly easy to “steal” the Bills game on Sunday. There was nothing to download and no real problems with video quality. Successfully close a few ads and you’re all set. The only real sacrifice was having to check Twitter and my fantasy team on my phone. I’m essentially a tablet purchase away from doing this in some form every Sunday.

Maybe this isn’t “easy” for everyone, but it definitely is for young, tech-savvy people who like sports. Young football fans are growing older, getting jobs and beginning to figure out what to spend their disposable income on. For some it’s an easy call to get season tickets and tailgate seven Sundays a year.

On Sunday it was incredibly easy to sit inside, avoid the rain and make a Wegmans frozen pizza while drinking whatever was left in the fridge. Blackouts don’t hurt technological savvy sports fans anymore. Hell, I wrote most of this while streaming a soccer game played in Athens, Greece. You can watch anything anywhere, even the big bad billion-dollar NFL. And if that football product sucks or the weather sucks or the stadium sucks, why bother making the effort?

You simply can’t overstate how much the Bills being mediocre impacts all this. Watching sports is supposed to be fun. If the product on the field is awful, why drive 40+ minutes to make it to the field? As long as you have the right cables, the game comes to us in 2012.

Let’s pull back a bit here: there’s an entire generation of Bills fans growing up that has never watched the Bills playoff game. Kids in high school really starting to catch the sports bug and make their own spendable money only know a Bills team that wins seven games a year at best. Try convincing them to fill out season ticket invoices. They’d be fools.

None of this is new information. We all know what the deal is with blackouts and the league struggling to sell tickets. High-definition television has made watching sports at home an experience, and Twitter has brought the crowd to our hip pocket.

What we ignore in this discussion—at least in Buffalo—is the lost generation of Bills fans. The group of fans that could determine with their wallets whether the Bills have a future here is getting an awful team and little reason to spend money to see them.

Yearly season ticket drives and attracting families to Ralph Wilson Stadium maintains quotas and makes fiscal sense. The Bills marketing department has done a good job to maximize the good will that has come from free agent signings and a Drew Bledsoe or Terrell Owens. It’s a big reason why the team is still considered viable in Western New York.

Still, the memory of the playoff football in Buffalo is going the way of Sabres fans recognizing Ted Darling’s voice. Football games meaning less as piles of snow grows higher has become an annual tradition in Western New York. Try telling kids who can watch five games every Sunday what a trip to Orchard Park in December is worth.

On Monday morning I got an email from Time Warner Cable offering me $20 tickets to the game on Sunday. Damned if I didn’t check the weather forecast as soon as it hit my inbox. Russ Salvatore took care of things on Wednesday, but I don’t think the threat of a blackout was making me reach for my credit card.

I don’t need Time Warner or the kindness of a restaurateur to watch the Bills anymore. They just save me a few mouse clicks on Sunday afternoons.