Buffalo Bills fans were not kind in their response to controversial San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick when the two teams met on Sunday in Buffalo.
Kaepernick – the league's current lightning rod – made his first start of the season and was met with boos, protests and generally unsavoury behaviour from the Buffalo faithful. It wasn't pretty.
But what the actual Buffalo team did to the 49ers on the field might have been even uglier. For the sake of sanity, we’ll keep this to the on-the-field topics. On the field, Kaepernick was bad against a Bills team that of late have been very good.
The 45-16 win was the fourth straight victory for the Bills (4-2), who after a dispiriting 0-2 start find themselves in the thick of the AFC play-off race. They are the only team to knock off the New England Patriots (granted it was against a third-string quarterback) and have likely saved head coach Rex Ryan from being fired.
Football Outsiders's intricate DVOA ratings say the surprising Bills aren't a fluke, last week ranking them as the eighth best team in the league. That will likely go up after the Week 6 win, which was highlighted by LeSean McCoy's 140-yard, 3-touchdown performance.
McCoy has been fantastic in his eighth season, averaging 5.6 yards a carry. He disappointed in his first year with the Bills last season following a big-splash trade from Philadelphia – he managed only 895 yards and three touchdowns in 12 games. He already has six touchdowns this year, proving the trade that sent Kiko Alonso to the Eagles wasn’t foolhardy after all. Alonso is now with the Miami Dolphins, and the Eagles have lost two straight while missing an every-down threat of McCoy’s calibre.
The four straight wins have been fairly dominant, too: 15 points over the Arizona Cardinals, 16-0 over the Patriots, 11 points over the Los Angeles Rams and Sunday’s blowout of the Niners. But the road gets tougher after next week’s trip to Miami: a rematch with New England (this time with Tom Brady), a trip to Seattle and a trip to Cincinnati. They also have the Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers left on their schedule, but it’s possible to find six more wins on their schedule, and 10-6 is usually enough for the post-season.
There’s not really one area where Buffalo are particularly great, but they are not really poor in any area, either (receiver is a question mark, but better teams have done more with less). There’s no reality in which the Bills can compete with the Patriots for the AFC East title, but a Wild Card berth would be an unmitigated success for a franchise that hasn’t played in the post-season since 1999. They would probably build Ryan a statue if he got there and won a game, which hasn’t happened since 1995.
Whether or not you think Buffalo’s fans proved themselves deserving of a winning team with their ugly treatment of an athlete peacefully utilising his Constitutional right to protest, you can’t say those fans aren’t starving for a winner. For the past month, they have had one.
NFC Beast
The NFC East hasn’t sent a Wild Card team (thus more than one team) to the play-offs since 2009. It’s been a revolving door of contenders, a playground for overrated big-market teams and a trophy shelf for barely-deserving 9-7 teams going to the play-offs.
This season is different. There is a long way to go, but right now it’s the only division in football with no losing teams.
The Dallas Cowboys (5-1), Washington (4-2), Philadelphia Eagles (3-2) and New York Giants (3-3) are all contenders, and the difference between the first- and last-place teams could be minimal (and indeed the Giants have been the only team to beat the Cowboys).
This is going to be a fun race. You could call every team in the division surprising in one way or another. You could make a case for or against each of the four teams. All of them have uncertainty at key positions, big personalities that will grab headlines and hungry fanbases that demand titles (only the Eagles have yet to win a Super Bowl). Every time two of the teams meet, it’s a rivalry game.
The latest of those rivalries – Washington beating Philly 27-20 on Sunday to ensure a Hillary Clinton presidency – gave us a result that could be deemed surprising until you remember the Eagles are trotting out a rookie quarterback who had to regress at some point and that Washington are actually the defending division champions. Kirk Cousins still has a lot to prove in Washington, the Giants are their always-unpredictable-yet-potentially-dangerous selves and the Cowboys's success could be upended by an impending quarterback decision. The subplots are almost too many to keep up with.
Get ready for this four-team race to dominate NFL headlines for weeks.
Lights out in Carolina
The Panthers are toast. Their last-second loss to the Saints on Sunday dropped them to 1-5, and afterwards Cam Newton gave one his now-patented sore-loser podium jobs.
Newton has to learn how to lose as well as he wins. The defending MVP is in danger of losing every last bit of goodwill he built up while putting the Panthers on his back to go to the Super Bowl.
His offensive line is porous, he has little by way of skill players who scare other teams, and the defence has sorely missed the departed Josh Norman. But with his moping, what incentive is there for the rest of the team to overcome their lacklustre play to, as he once infamously said, on his "level"?
Newton can be a gregarious and charismatic presence in a league that desperately needs personality, but right now he’s not smiling, and he’s doing nothing to make us sad about that.
Play of the day
Kenny Britt and the Rams lost to the Detroit Lions, but this one-handed catch that was ensured by keeping the ball off the ground with his legs was nifty:
Stat of the day
The Atlanta Falcons were victim to a truly egregious no-call at the end of their hard-fought loss in Seattle, but they're just the latest team to fall short to this generation of Seahawks defences:
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