Bills- related stuff on Peter King's MMQB

[olivier in france]

Lot of Buffalo related stuff on P king's this morning...

 

From his top15:

13. Miami (7-5). Odd game coming up -- versus sinking-like-a-stone Buffalo on the road, but in Toronto rather than Buffalo. So the Dolphins won't have the road problem playing in the snow. It might be a road game of relative indifference, but I have more faith in Bills' fans than those who think they won't show up in Canada, two hours from home.

 

 

Goat of the Week

Rian Lindell, K, Buffalo. Regardless of the weather, Lindell wears the horns this morning. From 40 yards-and-in entering the game, Lindell had made 56 straight field goals. In this game, he missed in the first half from 20 (HOW DO YOU MISS A 20-YARD FIELD GOAL?) and in the second half he missed from 40. In a 10-3 loss to a team Buffalo should have never lost to, those are ridiculously bad misses.

 

 

The Way We Were

Modern Kickers, all of them, vs. Pete Gogolak.

Forty-five years ago, pro football had only straight-on kickers. Then, in the 1964 draft, Buffalo chose a revolutionary figure in pro football history, and not just because of what he did on the field -- Pete Gogolak. The soccer-style kicker from Cornell was picked in the 11th round, and promptly rocked pro football in an August exhibition game in Tampa, Fla. The American pro football record field goal at the time was 54 yards. Gogolak, in his first outing with the Bills, booted one from 57. An irreversible trend was born.

As the NFL inches toward an all-time field-goal efficiency record -- the league's kickers have made 81 percent of their field goals entering Sunday's games -- I thought I'd do this category a little differently this week, thanks to longtime Buffalo football authority, peer and columnist Larry Felser, whose book, The Birth of the New NFL: How the 1966 NFL/AFL Merger Transformed Pro Football, is chock-full of great, great stories like Gogolak's, and will be one of the books I feature on my holiday shopping list in next week's full-service MMQB.

Gogolak's 1966 defection actually led to the merger of the two leagues. At the time, the leagues had an unofficial truce -- neither league would raid the other league's veteran rosters. Rookies were fair game for competition, but not vets. Then, when Gogolak's contract expired after the 1965 season, Giants owner Wellington Mara signed Gogolak, enraging the AFL owners and starting a bidding war for players. Within weeks, the AFL signed Mike Ditka, John Brodie and Roman Gabriel; none ever played in the AFL, but their signings made the NFL take the AFL serious and forced the 1966 merger. The two leagues combined in time for the 1970 season.

"Gogolak was the poison apple,'' Felser said Sunday. "Mara was Eve.''