Bad news for the Bills: Jon Feliciano will be out months
The Bills haven’t even hit the practice field yet, but already they have suffered a major injury. Right guard Jon Feliciano tore a pectoral muscle while weightlifting in his home gym, underwent surgery Friday, and will be sidelined until at least midseason, maybe more.
It’s a tough break, for sure, but the Bills have built some depth on the line and they will have several options to replace Feliciano.
Bills-Cowboys 2007: A Monday night meltdown like no other
I know, this one is painful to think about. The Bills were hosting their first Monday Night Football game since 1994, and the opponent was none other than America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys.
For more than 59 minutes, the Bills outplayed Tony Romo and the Cowboys, but it was those dastardly final 20 seconds of the game that thrust this into the never-to-be-forgotten category. If you can stomach it, click and read on.
Sept. 1, 1991
Bills 35, Dolphins 31
The Bills opened the 1991 season, and defense of their 1990 AFC championship, with a wildly entertaining 35-31 shootout victory over Miami at Rich Stadium, their ninth win over the Dolphins in the last 10 meetings.
Jim Kelly set a regular-season career-high with 381 passing yards and the Bills set a team record for total offense with 582 yards. The previous record had been 565 in a 1964 AFL game against Houston. They also had 33 first downs and averaged 7.9 yards per play.
The Dolphins’ offensive line arrived at the stadium in a limo, which ticked Thurman Thomas off. “It goes to show you that maybe they were a little too cocky,” he said. “At first I thought it was someone important like Bruce Smith because he wasn’t playing in the game.
Clearly, Thomas was motivated as he became the first Bill to top 100 yards rushing and receiving in the same game, totaling 268 yards in all. This after he had moped a bit in the halftime locker room because he had only 79 total yards.
“At halftime I was just sitting at my locker by myself, the rest of the offensive players and coaches were on the other side,” Thomas said. “I think they knew I was kinda mad. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I knew they knew that whenever I touched the ball a lot against the Dolphins, we usually won. So I figured I’d get it more in the 2nd half. At least I hoped so.”
June 26, 1998: Paul O’Neill lights up the Subway Series
Dynasty: Yankees 1996-2000 continues with the first Subway Series game of 1998, and Paul O'Neill hit a huge go-ahead HR to beat the Mets in the opener at Shea Stadium, which sounded a lot like Yankee Stadium when the ball cleared the fence.
Aaron Judge is going bonkers. What a start for the big guy and Sunday night he was a one-man wrecking crew for the Yankees in their sweep-completing 9-7 victory over the Red Sox. He hit a three-run bomb in the second inning after James Paxton gave up two runs in the top of the first, and then he came through in dramatic fashion in the bottom of the eighth.
After D.J. LeMahieu tied the game with an RBI single, Judge unloaded a mammoth shot to left field for the game-winning home run, already his sixth this season. Here are the highlights.
On today’s podcast, I welcome as my guest Mike Catalana, the sports director at WHAM-13 in Rochester. The Bills are the topic, and Mike and I share some thoughts on what it will be liking covering the team without actually speaking personally with any of the players or coaches.
I’m very excited to announce that The Junction, a Medium.com site that specializes in fiction, has agreed to publish my historical novel 1968: Amid the Crucible of War, Revolt and Tragedy, Sports Helped Soothe America’s Psyche in serial episode form, one chapter every week in episodic fashion, most likely on Sundays.
I self-published the novel in 2018, the 50th anniversary of what I consider one of the most unforgettable and transformative years in United States history. I love history, especially the 1960s, and I’d always wanted to write about 1968 in particular.
I’ve done some historical fiction in the past and I thought the format would be a fun and creative way to tell the story of 1968, so I created a fictional family to carry the reader through the year with the emphasis on sports.
Not surprisingly, my lead character is a sports writer (hey, write what you know, right?) named Jack McDonald who travels the country covering all the major events including the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Masters, the Stanley Cup Finals, the Summer and Winter Olympics, and more. His wife Olivia is a political activist, his son Patrick is fighting in Vietnam, and his daughter Kathleen is a student at Columbia University who later takes a summer trip to San Francisco to experience the cultural scene in Haight-Ashbury.
I hope you will read each chapter as they come out because of all the books I’ve written, I think I’m most proud of this one because I stepped outside the bounds of sports, a rarity for me.
The Junction is a top-notch site on the wide-ranging Medium platform that publishes creative writing in all varieties – short story, flash fiction, serial fiction and poetry. Thanks to editor Stephen M. Tomic for seeing the vision in the project and allowing me to post.
If you’d prefer to just buy the book now and not wait for each chapter, by all means, have at it.
If you’re a Buffalo sports fan – especially someone who grew up in the 1970s – I think you, or perhaps someone you know, will really enjoy my latest book.
For most of that decade, the city had three major-league teams – the Bills, the Sabres, and the Braves. There were certainly some lean years, but not during the period between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1976 which is what the book focuses on.
That was a time of great excitement, winning teams, and true superstars – O.J. Simpson, Gilbert Perreault and Bob McAdoo – who called Buffalo home.
The book takes a deep dive into the three seasons for each team and you will get reintroduced to many of the players from that era who you may have forgotten, and you will relive the great games and performances that we bore witness to in what I refer to as the golden age of Buffalo sports.