BILLS - 21
In the first quarter, Slash Stewart prances around the backfield avoiding being sacked by Bruce Smith, then Gabe Northern and finally dances around John Holecek to get into daylight. He zigs and zags through the secondary before being blasted in the chest area by Kurt Schulz. The impact of the hit downs Stewart and he lays motionless for two minutes. The hit by Schulz is reminiscent to the one Mike Stratton put on Keith Lincoln in the 1964 AFL Championship game. Finally, Stewart is helped from the field and sits out the rest of the game. As a result, the Bills dominate the Steelers and the scoreboard, winning their fourth straight game.
Wade comes out for the post game conference beaming with joy.
"After beating the Steelers today, the Bills are now 4-1 and are driving for first place overall in the East, if not the Conference. I am proud of my boys and as a special treat, I have invited someone you all know and love to relish this moment."
With that, Wade steps off the podium and motions to the back of the room. A monster prances up to the podium and grabs the microphone. The hideous face is grossly distorted as he utters his first words....
"Winston Churchill use to confide in me before he made any important decisions during World War II," Marv Levy says as he rips off his Halloween mask. "Any time he had to make an offensive game plan, I would tell him exactly what to do when his troops would get into the Red Zone. My strategy was put to use during the invasion of Normandy, and history bears me out as a great strategist. As you know, I used these same formulas when I was coaching this great team and the Bills entered the opposition's Red Zone. But for some reason, what worked in 1945 didn't work in 1996. I just don't understand why my well laid plans would not work anymore!
"General Eisenhower used my offensive designs to defeat the Nazis. I used these same plans and could not score against the opposition! Now, Wade's troops are having the very same problems and I am here as a consultant to rectify the red zone blues. When I was here, this hot air windbag on a radio sports talk show would say that my offensive planning was outdated! I refused to accept that! If any player in my starting lineup, whether it is Jim Kelly or Glenn Parker, had a bad game, I would not replace them or trade them like Jimmy Johnson does. I would stand by Jim until he couldn't play any more! Through thick or thin, Jim had produced for us and I thought he would never have to retire. But, alas, that sad day came to pass. Jimbo was no longer able to survive the trauma of ground warfare. Both he and I have gone from the playing field to the network NFL game day shows. Winston Churchill once said, during the darkest hours of British history, 'We have come this far, only to be humiliated time and again. We have to employ our famous stiff upper lip and carry on.' General George S. Patton once said to his troops, 'Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.' Mark Twain said, 'Courage is resistance to fear - mastery of fear, not absence of fear.' Then there was Helen Keller, who said, 'Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.' And lastly, some obscure author wrote, 'Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.' All I've got to add is that all this wisdom is meaningless if my players, or in this case, Wade's men don't perform they way we teach them to.
My goal is to use the well-laid plans of the Allies in their invasion of Normandy and get Doug Flutie to put them into action. Flutie is a genius and should be able to finally start scoring from inside the 20 yard line if he sticks to Eisenhower's Red Zone theory.
But sometimes, even the best laid plans must be scrapped because the players can't grasp the overall concept. One week, I told my troops this ditty to get them motivated: 'The dedicated Magician became enlightened when he put his head under a 200 pound rock, while the melancholy paleontologist transmogrified horribly inside the huge cereal bow filled with snakes." That turned out to be as effective as any Churchill maxim for the bunch of morons I coached!"
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