Browns Diary: Trying on the Bills

Who is Kevin Stefanski? Why didn’t anyone hit this year? What will the baseball playoffs look like?

You might remember that last week, to kick off my effort to find a temporary new team to root for instead of these intolerable Cleveland Browns, I tried to meld with the Chicago Bears … and it did not go well. The Bears lost to the Vikings 9-3, and their star quarterback Caleb Williams went crashing to the ground on a gruesome non-contact hamstring injury (which, it turns out, was not as bad as I had feared, though he will still probably miss a month), and I just felt like I had brought all my bad Browns juju to an organization that didn’t need it.

So that didn’t work.

I was much more optimistic about trying on the Buffalo Bills this week.

Here’s why: The Bills are obviously very good. They have won 10-plus games every year since 2019, and they have won five division titles along the way, and they have one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game in Josh Allen. Dozens of Buffalo fans have invited me to be part of the Bills Mafia, which I consider the best fanbase in all of American sports.

Also, I love Buffalo … I have all my life. When I was a kid, our go-to vacation spot—and the place we went whenever any family member visited—was Niagara Falls, a little less than four hours away. We always stopped in Buffalo. I have a memory of one Buffalo trip: I had just gotten a Mickey Mouse watch, which I loved. I somehow dropped it in a huge Buffalo snowdrift and never found it. I know this sounds unlikely, but for the rest of my childhood, whenever Buffalo came up, someone in the family would say: “Remember when you lost your Mickey Mouse watch in a Buffalo snowdrift?”

I developed a lifelong admiration for Buffalo snowdrifts … I was fascinated by this place that seemed to get even more snow than Cleveland did.

And all the while I’ve wanted Buffalo fans to finish a season happy.

It hasn’t happened yet in my lifetime — not in football, not in hockey — and so I figured that this very well might be my team. I thought: Maybe my bad Browns juju, mixed with the Bills’ painful history, would create a winning chemical reaction.

I sat down for the Bills-Chargers game, and I was fired up. It didn’t hurt that the Bills were playing a team I loathe for leaving San Diego. It also didn’t hurt that the Bills were playing a Jim Harbaugh team. Ohio law requires me to despise Jim Harbaugh because of the whole University of Michigan thing. As I wrote in BIG FAN, Section 632.30.1 (B) of the Ohio Revised Code reads like so:

All citizens of Ohio shall exhibit a deep and hereditary disdain for the State of Michigan and in particular the footballing enterprise of the University of Michigan Wolverines, to be reaffirmed and perpetuated ad infinitum every autumn.

The Chargers kicked off, and the Bills’ Greg Dortch — great name — broke off a sweet 39-yard return, and here we go! Let’s go Bills!

And the Bills fumbled the ball on the first play.

NO! I mean, come on, Universe. It was the Bills’ first turnover of the season … on the very first play of my life as a Bills fan. The Chargers went down the field and scored, and I thought: “I can’t do this to Buffalo fans. They don’t deserve this.”

But then I thought: Come on, it’s just one play. The Bills are awesome! Everybody knows it! Their coach, Joe Brady, talks about how he wants — and expects — to score on every single drive; he absolutely hates sending the punter, Tommy Doman, to the field.*

*This isn’t exactly related, but the Chargers’ punter is called JK Scott, and I think JK is the perfect name for a punter. My feeling is that the Chargers should send him out to punt and then everyone in the crowd should shout out, all at once, “JK! Just kidding!” And then Scott should run back to the sidelines and the Chargers should go for it.

So the fumble thing was a fluke. It happens. I had nothing to do with it.

Only, on the next series, Josh Allen was sacked, and the Bills had to punt.

On the next series, Josh Allen threw an interception — his first of the season.

Uh oh.

And on the next series, Josh Allen threw ANOTHER interception.

You have got to be kidding me.

And I found myself thinking: No, I can’t do this to Bills fans. I turned the channel to go watch the Kansas City Chiefs game for a while.

But I came back in time to see the Bills go on an emphatic 80-yard touchdown drive that was capped off by a classic Josh Allen one-yard run. That tied the game at 10-10. The second half was pretty boring … the Chargers kicked a field goal to take the lead, and it wasn’t until midway through the fourth quarter that Allen and that fantastic running back James Cook blasted their way down the field for the go-ahead touchdown. With about three minutes left, Cook scored on a three-yard run to pretty much put the game away.

And how did it feel rooting for the Bills? Well, I definitely felt many of the same pangs I have felt as a Browns fan. And it feels good rooting for Josh Allen, who seems to be a pretty great guy. But I’m not sure it fully took hold … to be fair to the Bills, watching that game yesterday meant being exposed to three hours of Tom Brady’s football announcing, which can’t be good for the body or soul. I’ll have to give them another chance in a couple of weeks.

This coming week, I’m going to try on the Cincinnati Bengals.

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The Atlanta Falcons pounded the cheese out of the Green Bay Packers on Thursday, which couldn’t have felt all that great in Wisconsin.

It marked the first Atlanta victory for our old pal Kevin Stefanski. Then, after the game, Atlanta’s star running back Bijan Robinson, who ran for 194 yards and two touchdowns, put together perhaps the most extraordinary paragraph in the history of the English language:

“I think last week was a big testament to who he is as a person, as a coach,” Robinson said of Stefanski.

OK, I’m with you so far, Bijan.

“I don’t know if he drank some coffee or something but he said this speech …”

A KevStef speech? I think I know where this is going.

“… it was like Martin Luther King was in there.”

…

…

Um …

…

I clearly did not know where that was going.

Those of you who have followed this space know that for five years, I made fun of just how boring Kevin Stefanski is in press conferences. You might recall that those pressers were SO boring, I would find myself nodding off in the middle of them, and then waking up in the middle of a song or a movie or something. But here’s the thing: I always believed in my heart of hearts that KevStef was doing all that on purpose. I think he looked around at the chaos of the Cleveland Browns and realized that his best plan was to shroud himself in tedium, monotony, banality, blandness.

But now, look, I don’t know what he said in that speech in Atlanta. All I do know is that one of the best players in the NFL was inspired to the point where he compared the guy to MLK, and a Falcons team many were calling the NFL’s worst destroyed Green Bay on national television, and I’m wondering if Kevin Stefanski has been putting us on the whole time to throw us off the track and deep down he’s actually …

Oh my god — I just realized that Kevin Stefanski has the same initials as Keyser Söze.

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The Phillies and Astros saved themselves on the final day of the baseball season. Bryce Harper homered in Philadelphia’s win, six Houston pitchers combined on a shutout of the woeful A’s, and now they’re both playoff-bound. Neither team seems built for a long playoff run, but this has been such a weird year for offense that I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen in October.

How weird has this year been for offense? Well, let’s look at a few of our leaders:

Yordan Álvarez led all of baseball with a .316 average. That’s the lowest average to lead the league since, well, ever. Even in 1968, the year Yaz famously led the American League with a .301 batting average, Pete Rose hit .335 in the National League. Only six players in baseball hit .300 — seven, if you count Colorado rookie TJ Rumfield, whose average ROUNDED UP to .300, but he didn’t actually hit .300.

Over the weekend in Kansas City, as part of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s Hall of Game, I talked with Ralph Garr, who had a lifetime .306 batting average and in 1974, on his way to the batting title, had a staggering 149 hits going into the All-Star Game. I asked him what he thought about the death of the .300 hitter. He smiled.

“You remember how Henry Aaron said he didn’t want people to forget Babe Ruth, but he also wanted them to remember Henry Aaron?” he said. “Well, I wouldn’t mind people remembering me. If they remember me for hitting .300, that’s great. I’m blessed.”

We talk about all the home runs. Well, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Kyle Schwarber led baseball with 45 home runs. That’s the lowest home run total to lead in a full season since 2014.

How about RBI? I can give you twenty guesses at who led baseball in RBI, and unless you’re a hardcore fan or someone living in St. Louis, you probably would not name Alec Burleson. But he did indeed lead baseball with 116. That, too, is the lowest baseball-leading total since 2014, when Adrian Gonzalez also led with 116. Before that you have to go back to 1968.

Runs scored? PCA led baseball with 119. That’s the lowest baseball leader since 2014.

Yordan led with a .601 slugging percentage — the lowest leader since, um, 2014.

And so on. We have been in this offensive rut for a good while now — too many strikeouts, too few balls in play, batters going for home runs because long rallies feel impossible — but I can’t remember a year when individual hitters seemed to matter less. Here are the Rbat — Baseball Reference’s offensive statistics — leaders for each team in the playoffs and those core numbers of batting average, home runs, and RBI:

American League

• Rays: Junior Caminero — .276, 42, 101

• Yankees: Ben Rice — .264, 41, 97

• Red Sox: Willson Contreras — .275, 27, 81

• Guardians: Chase DeLauter — .287, 16, 67

• White Sox: Miguel Vargas — .250, 33, 93

• Astros: Yordan — .316, 42, 106

National League

• Braves: Matt Olson — .251, 41, 93

• Phillies: Bryce Harper — .269, 29, 87

• Brewers: Jake Bauers — .266, 26, 86

• Cubs: PCA — .280, 45, 107

• Dodgers: Shohei Ohtani — .275, 30, 81

• Padres: Fernando Tatis — .289, 25, 83

The playoffs are always a crapshoot, but they feel particularly crapshooty this year. Those core numbers, with only a couple of exceptions, just don’t get the heart pounding. The players who get the heart pounding coming into this October are the pitchers — The Miz, Schlittler, Sanchez, Sale, Mason Miller, Cade Smith, etc.

Of course, you never know. Some hitter might pull off a Randy Arozarena or Carlos Beltran and just tear things up. Some team might get hot together and put together a bunch of rallies at exactly the right moment. Some bullpen might go thermonuclear, throw 25 consecutive scoreless innings, and carry the club all the way.

I suppose this is why we Americans love playoffs so much. We love the possibilities.