There is a reason that many Buffalo Bills’ fans reach for the Alka-Seltzer and Pepto-Bismol around Game 8 during every football season. That seems to be the time that the Bills go on a backslide and fall apart. It happened this year during Week 9 as Buffalo turned into a dysfunctional mess and lost 34-21 to the New York Jets. The New Orleans Saints annihilated the team with a 47-10 crushing the following week. This past weekend's match-up against the Los Angeles Chargers was a disaster, as the Bills dropped the ball hard with a 54-24 defeat. For a franchise that started off 5-2 and a defense that managed 20 turnovers at the start of the season, this type of colossal collapse seems to add up to mindset problem.
The Buffalo Bills must find a way to wipe out the old cobwebs of defeat and get back to taking control of their football games.
Is the underdog mentality keeping Bills in the gutter?
The Buffalo Bills seem to thrive when they are underdogs, something that Coach Sean Mcdermott mentioned a few times in press conferences. When the Bills were slated as the loser of match-ups, a title they have embraced this year, they knocked off the Denver Broncos at home and the Atlanta Falcons on the road. Buffalo also beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders, which pushed them to 5-2. They were in great shape for the playoffs. However, when the Buffalo Bills were the favorite to win against the New York Jets in Week 8 and were on National television, they fell apart on both sides of the ball.
The offense and defense looked like a hot mess.
Buffalo was not the favorite to beat the New Orleans Saints in Week 10, with the Saints marching in on a 6-game winning streak. However, nobody expected the Bills gain a mere 56 passing yards. New Orleans also broke a record with 6 rushing touchdowns against Buffalo. The 47-10 loss seemed to come out of left field.
The loss to the Los Angeles Chargers last week, a 54-24 thrashing, let the fans know they were in that familiar territory of mid-season collapse.
Bills need to punt their self-fulfilling prophecy out the window
A self-fulfilling prophecy is when any positive or negative expectation about something results in that expectation being fulfilled.
Somewhere in the minds of this Buffalo Bills team is a lingering doubt about whether they can match-up with other teams and pull off a win. To go from being so dominant to so bad is a sign of more than just a lack of talent. The team needs to get their heads together.
Many fans also have the same self-fulfilling prophecy. Most Buffalo fans expect a mid-season collapse that will knock the Bills out of the post-season hunt. The heartbreaking expectations are etched in the minds of sportswriters’ and pour from their pens and keyboards. The dark cloud may still be clinging to grandfathers’ empty bottles of Guinness beer, the ones they drank in 1999 when the Bills lost the Wildcard game to the Tennessee Titans.
The Titans managed a series of laterals on the last play of the game that helped them score a touchdown and steal a win. Boxes of Flutie Flakes make fans cringe for what could have been in that crazy game that had Doug Flutie sitting on the bench.
Despite a lackluster history, it is time for the Buffalo Bills players to stop acting like Voodoo dolls getting punctured with a nail gun. The past is gone. They need to be the team that believed in itself and in a new process in its first seven games. A 53-man roster is enough to beat an opponent. It's time for them to punt that self-fulfilling prophecy right out the window, and destroy the tape of Super Bowl XXV, the “Music City Miracle” game.
Their fans need them to be the men they were meant to be and to beat the Kansas Chiefs this Sunday.
