What's Up with the Cloak and Dagger Activities with Buffalo Bills?

The Buffalo Bills will be playing a "home game" in Toronto soon, coming up on Thursday night, Dec. 3, against AFC East rival New York Jets. I am beginning to wonder if the Buffalo and Toronto connection is affecting the Buffalo Bills in a new and strange way?

The Toronto Blue Jays have long been known as an organization that puts out a certain amount of mis-information regarding injuries, trade proposals, contract negotiations, etc. to keep people guessing as to what is truly going on with players, agents and front office personnel developments.

Not exactly a straight forward team, with respect to press releases and press conferences. Instead of returning to the keyboard or laptop, you might be better off sitting through reruns of "The X-Files" to remind you that the truth is out there somewhere.

The same type of shenanigans is now starting to become commonplace with the Buffalo Bills. According to a story that was originally released by WIVB-TV, the Bills recently went hard after Jon Gruden and even met with Gruden in a face-to-face meeting.

What is strange about the story is the following :

On Monday this week, ESPN signed Jon Gruden to an extension contract that gave them exclusive rights for his services. Maybe ESPN got word that the Bills were about to sign him and that forced their hand to extend a sweeter deal to Gruden?

On Tuesday, Ralph Wilson fired coach Dick Jauron and offered the job to Perry Fewell. The next thought is, did Wilson offer the job to Fewell then because Gruden had already turned him down?

If that is the case, when exactly did Wilson meet Gruden? Was it before the ESPN deal was announced, and if so, that means that he was trying to find a new coach before he fired the one that he already had.

Or was the meeting with Wilson done sometime after Gruden signed the ESPN extension? If so, then you can pretty much figure that the exclusivity rights that ESPN maintains on Gruden is basically meaningless.

On the surface, companies are always on the lookout for talent and having a successor potentially lined up should they be forced to go in a different direction. But this is the NFL, and there are rules and by-laws that need to be adhered to, such as the Rooney Rule, which could have been violated in this instance.

Researching the franchise further, when you look at the Forbes article on valuations of NFL team franchises, the Bills are valued at roughly $885 million, generating annual revenues of $206 million.

Still think that Ralph can't afford a top flight football guy to run this company?

So, if Gruden was choice No. 1, that means that the rumored meeting of Wilson with Mike Shanahan would reduce Mike to the second best choice, and then further drop Bill Cowher to the third choice. We are talking about guys that have considerable egos, so this is important to note.

Injuries, and Misinformation - More Cloak and Dagger

During the span of the past couple weeks, there have two Bills injuries that have resulted in players going to the IR list, as they were severe enough that it forced the Bills to say that they would be gone for the rest of the year. Those injuries were to tight end Derek Fine and to linebacker Keith Ellison.

In both cases, there was no mention as to the severity of the injury, just that they were out. With Ellison it was assumed that he had tweaked or strained a quad muscle and the stories coming out said he would be out a week or two.

Fast forward to this week, and all of a sudden there is a wire-report that Ellison has been placed on the IR list. What? Having listened to over a hundred of Jauron's press conferences during his tenure (yeah, I know, I really need to get a life), it always seemed that he was above board and straight with everyone on the injured players.

The first hint that something had changed was with the Derek Fine injury, and now it extends to Fewell with the Ellison situation.

Who Is Really Running The Show Now?

When tackles Demetrius Bell and Jamon Meredith went down with knee injuries recently Dick Jauron had promised that reinforcements were coming. Now on the eve of the Jacksonville game, no new offensive lineman have been signed. More disinformation.

When the Bills announced that Ellison went to the I.R. list, that meant 12 Bills had gone the I.R. route this season that is staggering. Consider that the Bills already had lost Kawika Mitchell to the I.R., Posluszny was trying to play and recover from a broken arm.

Untested Marcus Buggs was inserted in and quickly followed by joining them on the I.R. list. It made sense to sign Chris Draft as a veteran to plug in to the group. But now that Ellison has joined the long list, no new linebackers have been signed to the team.

Instead, the Bills solved their abundance of safeties playing well, by shifting Bryan Scott to linebacker. But there is very thin depth now at linebacker, should one of the starters go down.

Nic Harris has missed practices this week due to illness, so you wonder how effective he would be if called upon. So, the Bills brought up Cary Harris from the practice squad, because they need another secondary guy they can convert to linebacker?

If all of the above is not bad enough, Marcus Stroud has been ruled out for this week, and Kyle Williams is struggling to come back from his own knee problems. The Bills are forced to start John McCargo and Spencer Johnson, and if one of them goes down, there is nobody behind them at all.

The longest tenured Buffalo Bills is defensive end Aaron Schobel was perplexed with all of the stuff going on with the team. He had been complaining in the locker room after the Titans game wondering aloud what the direction of the team was.

Aaron, we hear you loud and clear and are wondering the same thing ourselves.