Raiderdamus' Friday Foretelling: Raiders vs. Bills

Greetings, Raider fans! It is I, the man who is easily bothered by persistence, one step from lashing out at you, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful. We've reached Week 13 and the Raiders miraculously have a record of 9-2 and seem well on their way to reaching the postseason since the first time Raiderdamus was a very young hermit indeed. I say "miraculously" because no matter how you slice it, Derek Carr coming back from a finger with multiple dislocations in approximately 15 minutes is nothing short of a miracle. Surely, Christ turned the Gatorade into holy water on Sunday.

But now we are on to the next game, in search of our tenth win. The Buffalo Bills, our ancient enemy going back to the days of Ye Olde AFL, stand in our way. So in order to get some clarity on the outcome of Sunday's game, I consulted the Great Beyond in his wisdom to tell me what shall befall our beloved and intrepid Oakland Raiders. Prostrate yourselves to receive his message.

"You doubted for a moment, didn't you? One little injury to Derek Carr and it was all over. You gave up hope. But I told you they would win, and they did. And Derek Carr is perfectly fine. So who you got coming up this week? The Bills? Alright, get your popcorn ready.

Much like the city of Buffalo itself, the Bills are rife with the fetid stench of failure. Buffalo has the dubious distinction of not being either New York City nor Toronto, and will forever be known almost exclusively for delicious hot wings. They won't tell you this, but the secret ingredient in every batch of Anchor Bar wings is the tears of Jim Kelly's children.

Buffalo is also home to one of America's great natural wonders, Niagara Falls. If the city of Buffalo needed any more proof that life was constantly pissing on them, look no further than the Bills. They have been abject failures and sorrow magnets since their inception in 1960. Their best player of all time, O.J. Simpson, turned out to be a crazed murderer, which he was not convicted of, and then a thief of his own property, which he was convicted of.

To give some insight into how this would affect a team, imagine for a moment that in twenty years it turned out that Tom Brady was responsible for 9/11, or that Jerry Rice had somehow masterminded the Armenian Genocide. The best player in the history of your team was not who you thought he was.

For instance, I don't remember OJ being quite this black.

In another example of somebody not being who we thought they were, the world was told repeatedly during the early 1990s that the Buffalo Bills were the best team in football and would win the Super Bowl. We were also told that the Nintendo Virtual Boy was the future of gaming and that we'd all have flying cars by the year 2000. The most important thing for anyone to learn in life is that everybody is an idiot and nobody knows what they're doing. This lesson is doubly impactful when the person who teaches you this lesson is Marv Levy.

You'll be pleased to know that Coach Levy is in fact still alive. Please, nobody tell him he's alive, or he'll be so surprised that he'll have a heart attack and die. Marv is on a strict schedule these days. Every morning at 7 AM he goes pee. Every morning at 8 AM he goes poop. And every morning at 9 AM he wakes up. When he finally passes away, his Loser's Championship Belt will be passed onto John Fox, who has lost three Super Bowls as a coach, just as it was passed down to Levy from the legendary Bud Grant. Grant has done more damage to Minnesota than the entire native mosquito population.

I'm not even going to go into the players involved in the Bills' four Super Bowl losses that happened consecutively between the years of 1990 and 1993. I'm not going to talk about how this gave us one of the most annoying hyped teams of all time, the 1992 Cowboys and their reign of terror. I won't discuss how the only reason Buffalo even had the opportunity to go to the final one of those Super Bowls was a historic and ultimately hilarious collapse by the Houston Oilers. I will refrain from mentioning that this is the reason Warren Moon never went to the Super Bowl. Because Oilers vs. Cowboys in 1993 would have made everyone who didn't live in Texas vomit.

Since that time, the Bills have been awful in ways that violate the Geneva convention. They have hired about as many coaches as the Raiders and used nearly as many quarterbacks. One of those quarterbacks was JP Losman. Another was Rob Johnson.  There was Kyle Orton, Ryan Fitzpatrick and the ghost of Drew Bledsoe. They literally drafted EJ Manuel in the first round. Jim Kelly nearly died for this and looks like he actually died for this, and this is how you repay his love for your city? This is who you try to replace him with?

That's to say nothing of the who's who of coaching nobodies that the Bills have hired. Names like Wade Phillips before he was any good. Dick Jauron, Chan Gailey, Gregg Williams, Mike Mularkey and Doug Marrone. I can't even make a joke here. These names are the punchline. If you need a reason why the people of Buffalo have descended into the virulent throes of alcoholism, look no further.

But this brings us to current head coach, Rex Ryan. Ryan is famous for being the defensive guru of the 2000 Ravens, as well as leading the Jets to short-term success and long-term failure, as is their custom. Ryan is most famous, however, for his love of women's feet. I propose that each time the Bills' offense is on the field, the Raiders put this up on the scoreboard:

Rex will be so enthralled thsat he won't be able to coach his team. Which, given his level of success in the last five years, is probably about par for the course.

Rex convinced the Bills to hire his village-idiot brother, Rob, to be the defensive coordinator. This is sort of like a police department hiring a pyromaniac to head their arson division. Rob Ryan has presided over some awful defenses, including the awfulest one of them all- the 2015 Saints. For putting this abomination on the field, Ryan was fired. Of course, his brother felt this was such a miscarriage of justice that he hired Rob soon after so that he could personally ruin a young and promising defense. It's clear at this point that Rob and Rex together do not equal their father, Buddy.

Sometimes I wonder if Rex is in fact a deep-cover agent of the Patriots, hired by Bill Belichick to ensure the Pats' never-ending reign over the AFC East. He ran the Jets into the ground so deep that they still haven't climbed out of that hole. The Jets were forced to hire a man with no personality, just to counteract the fact that Rex Ryan is all personality and no substance. if Rex gets fired from the Bills, which he will, and then gets hired by the Dolphins, my theory will be proven true.

And this brings us to the Bills of today. The same Bills who have finally found a good quarterback after all these years, but had to bench a former first-rounder to do it. The same Bills who had the opportunity to draft University of Buffalo standout Khalil Mack, but instead took Sammy "The Human Foot Injury" Watkins. Today, the Bills have the worst passing attack in the NFL, because Watkins has more foot issues than Yao Ming. Here's Yao's response to the Bills drafting Watkins:

What the Bills do have is the best rushing attack in the NFL. This seems strange for a team which traded Marshawn Lynch. They didn't let him walk in free agency. They actively traded him to Seattle for a fourth-round pick in order to give more playing time to CJ Spiller and Fred Jackson. That sound you hear is another Bills fan jumping into Niagara Falls.

But they did fleece Chip Kelly and the Eagles in a trade hat brought Lesean McCoy to Buffalo in exchange for Kiko Alonso, now with the Miami Dolphins. This, combined with the rushing prowess of Try-hard Taylor, make the Bills a formidable opponent for any team.

The Bills have also drafted very well on defense of late, picking up a number of studs in the secondary including Ronald Darby and Stephon Gilmore. Gilmore was in the news this week for remarking that he would tell the refs if Michael Crabtree were to push off on him. Here's a quick look at Gilmore making this statement:

While the Bills are mostly harmless these days and actually have done a very good job building their team, they won't be able to stop the Oakland attack. They may have a big play here and there on offense, but won't be able to keep up. We wish them the best of luck against the Patriots in years to come, but for now...

Raiders win, 36-24."