schoharie

This summer I was on Martha's Vineyard , in the heart of Patriots country. There is a beech there where you can get a permit to drive your 4 wheel drive vehicle over sand trails, but first you have to deflate your tires to 15 lbs of pressure so you don't spin your wheels in the sand. There is a designated area where you do the deflation. I made a sign designating the deflation station as sponsored by Tom Brady and the patriots, and put it up very early in the morning. Folks were mostly amused but later in the day someone took the sign down and tossed it in the bushes.

Marrone's disease sounds like it may be related to Peyronie disease.

The Tuna may not be out of the question. He as a home in Saratoga Springs, loves the track, and Upstate N.Y. Sign the Tuna as president of football and GM, get some of his guys to coach,scout and play for the Bills, get the Giants and Jets to go to New Jersey for training camp where they belong, move the Bills camp to U. Albany (so Tuna can be close to the track in July and August) market all of upstate as Bills country and all will be fine. With this "Upstate" stratagy we could even give up the Toronto stratagy and move one home game to the dome in Syracuse to reward our eastern fans.

I would like to see Fisher here, and would forget about touch down throwback as soon as he got the Bills to the playoffs. I don't know where all this hate of Ralph and talk about him being tight with the $ comes from. I remember all his coaching hires since Lew Sabin. Each had a reason that looked sound-- former Coach of the Year from the Rams, Former Coach of the Year from the Raiders,former Coach of the Year with the Bears, successful defensive coordinator promoted in house (two times as I recall), assistant coach from another team that looks like the real deal, a coach with the rep for being tough, a coach who is very well organized, a coach who was a "players coach". The worst choice, on paper, was for a coach who was fired in KC, exiled to Canada and was now in the TV booth. Yet that was Relph's best hire. As far as going after one of the former Super Bowl coaches who is now out of coaching; has any coach ever won a Super Bowl with a second team? Or even with coming back to coach his former team? These guys won their Super Bowl with good players and a front office who could find them. I don't think Ralph is cheap as much as he sucks in picking a good coach. I think he has been just as bad in picking front office leadership. He also has lost coaches/GM's due to being autocratic rather than over $. One thing is certain, the worst coaching choices were the midseason firings and promotions from within. The best was the midseason firing and the hiring from the TV booth.

Ralph has been more unlucky than cheap when it comes to coaches. When he went out and hired the very successful, AFL coach of the year, John Rauch from the Raiders we fans believed Ralph had found our salvation. Instead he got a coach who wanted to use OJ as a blocker and a decoy. When Ralph hires the Rams successful, former Coach of the Year, Chuck Knox, we got back to the playoffs but could not get past the first round. When Ralph tried to find a rising star by hiring a brash, confident assistant coach, we got Greg and Mike, two guys not ready for prime time . When he promoted from with-in we got Joel Collier and Wade Philips who again showed the validity of the Peter Principle-- good coordinators do not often make good head coaches. Ralph had some success with recycling Coach Sabin, but we still could not reach the promised land, even with an all time great like OJ and an O line that was unequaled. Ralph did his best hire when he selected a coach( who the internet boards of today would tear to shreds) a guy we had no reason to expect anything close to success from-- Marv Levy. I see the DJ hire as an attempt to recapture the magic of Marv by finding a coach who is well educated, a nice guy, and who has been around the league with mixed results. Poor Ralph came up short again. So the real question is what has Ralpg done to earn such bad karma when picking coaches?

I don't post often, but did address this in a past Poz post(say that fast three times). I come at this from both professional and personal experience. I have had two separate sports accidents (skating and skiing) that required internal fixation with steel plates. The plate in my upper arm failed due to rejection of some grafted bone while I was leading a scout troop on a canoe trip in the wilderness. Not fun at all. The plates make your long bones less flexible and refracture of bone just adjacent to the metal is a risk. Poz will heal faster and straighter with his plate, but will have this risk as long as the plate is in place. Longer plate still has this risk.

Ouch!! Poz had an unfortunate but not unexpected complication of internal fixation of bone fractures. Talk of malpractice strikes a very raw nerve with the medical profession. I had a fracture of my upper arm from skiing accident, repaired with plate and screws, then refractured the next summer on a canoe trip. Was very difficult to paddle home with a broken arm. The length of the plate had nothing to do with the refracture. It is the rigid nature of plates that makes fractures adjacent to a plate very common. When you receive a strong force to a bone, it can bend some, deform some and the force is spread out. As a result, you don't usually get a fracture. When you repair a bone with rigid metal plates, the bone looses the ability to bend or deform, energy is now concentrated at the bone just at the edge of the plate, and fractures occur. The longer plate was needed to cover the fracture site, but Poz is still at risk for fracture adjacent to this plate. The idea of calcium and vitamin D was good. Some energy disipating padding would be good. I am not sure a haircut will do too much. Hopefully, at some point he can have enough bone healing to get the hardware removed.

The PAts loss in 99 where the interferance call was made on the jump ball as time ran out was a killer. I do not recall another NFL game ever with pass interferance called on that play. The Bledsoe to Coats TD to win the game was an "untimed down " with the clock at 0:00. That hurt!

I live about 30 miles west of Albany but grew up in Buffalo. This is Yankee and Giants country and folks often jump on the bandwagon for the AFC east team that is doing the best. There are some loyal Bills fans here, but the T shirts, bumper stickers and hats have become less common in the last 10 years. In the 90's the Albany station would let fans call in and vote to see which AFC east game they would broadcast. They stopped the voting since they claimed that bills fans were voting repeatedly and keeping the jets off the local airwaves. The pats were a distant third in those days.