BillsFanSD

We owe it to America to deny New England a first round bye. Let's get it done.

Great post. The part about "the narrative" is unfortunately spot-on, but at least now we can laugh about it while we stack up wins.

Dear PFF: Get bent.

This is a weird scenario, but according to 538 we clinch a playoff berth with a loss by Tennessee to Houston in week 17 no matter what happens in any other game. I don't pretend to understand the math behind that one -- it seems like the Colts should still have some kind of chance to catch us, but I guess not.

In our "worst case" scenario, we had three games on our wish list for today -- Houston over Tennessee, Arizona over Cleveland, and Jacksonville over Oakland. We got all three. Go Bills!

Jax takes the lead with :31 to go.

Same sorry-ass Rams.

TD Arizona.

Blatant PI by a Cleveland defender in the endzone goes uncalled but challenged by Arizona. We'll see . . .

1:00 pm. Plenty of time in the morning to go out for a run and go to church, so I stay busy and don't fret too much. Then win or lose I have a great excuse to start drinking at 3:00 CT.

Some gamblers just took a massive bad beat on the Philadelphia game.

Obviously this is all academic because we're going to punch our own ticket tonight anyway.

If Houston holds on to win this game, the Bills clinch a playoff spot if Tennessee, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland each lose one more game, starting now.

Yes. In the unlikely and unhappy event that we lose out, we want Tennessee to have also lost two of their last three games so they can't leap-frog us. They get New Orleans next week.

The Bills are just a better team that the Steelers. I know we all have bad memories about prime time games in the past, but those were the bad old days. New staff, new players, new team. I expect to win tonight. Even if we lose, the consolation prize is that our playoff chances will still be excellent.

Yes. Allen came into the NFL incredibly raw and basically un-coached. He improved by leaps and bounds over the course of his first season, took another big step forward during the off-season, and has continued to improve as this year has gone along. He's currently playing at the level of "average NFL starter" which is nothing to write home about, but there's no reason to think that he's reached his ceiling and lots of reason to think that we can expect more in the future.

This is all a lot easier to understand if you keep in mind that it is mathematically impossible for Houston to finish 10-6 and get a WC spot. A 10-6 Houston team wins its division and guarantees that we finish ahead of Tennessee either outright or based on our head-to-head tiebreaker, assuming that we win any one of our remaining games.

I enjoy telling my son about Bryan Cox getting ejected from a critical late-season game after getting into a dust-up with Carwell Gardner. That was one of my happiest memories as a Bills fan.

New England would never stoop to something like this.

With Hodges, the Steelers have beaten the Bengals, Browns, and Cardinals. All three of those games had a final margin that was within one score. That's hardly "on a roll." Hodges hasn't faced a defense even in the same general universe as ours.

The problem is that any in-game fix will simply be ignored by the officials themselves, like the rule change to allow reviews of PI. The ultimate solution needs to be full-time, professional officials who are accountable to the league.

How many players from that game are still on our roster? How many are still on Pittsburgh's roster? How many coaches are still on their respective staffs?

It's worth noting that when Allen misses on deep passes, he misses them in a very consistent way -- they're all overthrown. There's nothing erratic about these passes. It's not as if some are overthrown, some are overthrown, some are too far off to one side, etc. I'm pretty confident that he's deliberately erring on the side of overthrowing deep balls to eliminate any chance of an interception. I'm also pretty sure I read him saying that somewhere a few weeks ago. If that's the case, then this is definitely fixable.

Cleveland can theoretically still catch us if they win out and we lose out. They play @ARI, BAL, and CIN. They could easily lose to the Cardinals and will probably lose to Baltimore. You're absolutely right that we should all be Houston and New Orleans fans for the next few weeks. If the Saints beat the Colts and Titans and Houston splits with Tennessee, we become strong favorites to back into the playoffs even if we don't win another game. But backing into the playoffs blows so let's just win out.

This was a very poorly officiated game, and the calls went both ways. I personally thought the PI on Beasley was extremely soft -- there are professional soccer players who would be embarrassed to flop so blatantly. Then again, Foster was clearly interfered with and that one went uncalled, so I'll happily take it and not feel the least bit guilty.