Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [4]
As the weeks, months, and eventually years of being anchored to the sideline mounted—as did awareness that their ephemeral athletic gifts were being wasted—Hostetler and Anderson naturally connected.
“There was a pretty tight bond there as far as we both knew what we were going through and we were pulling for each other. There was a constant patting guys on the back and ‘keep going, keep going’ and ‘it’ll happen,’” Hostetler remembered. “I think having him there was a real positive for me because there was a guy there that had been playing and knew what it was like and then ‘boom’ the opportunities dried up and you weren’t a contributor and you felt like you were on the outside looking in. . . . And that’s frustrating, ’cause you didn’t make it that far by being satisfied with just having a uniform on.”
Week Ten of the 1986 National Football League season was not a typical one for the Buffalo Bills; and for reasons beyond simply posting a victory.
In their previous forty-three games, Buffalo had only six wins, by far the poorest record of any team during that stretch. They were the worst team in professional football.
“I went through the jokes,” recalled Darryl Talley, a linebacker drafted by the team in 1983. “Like: Knock-knock.
“Who’s there?
“Owen.
“Owen who?
“Oh-and-10.”
The Bills did not start the 1986 season quite that horribly, as they had two years earlier. In fact, given the recent history, their 2-7 record practically constituted a hot streak. Still, those narrow wins over St. Louis and Indianapolis were not enough to save head coach Hank Bullough’s job. One day after the Bills’ early November loss to the comparably futile Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Bullough was replaced.
“We felt that new direction was needed,” first-year General Manager Bill Polian told the press, “and we reached out to a man who had had an established head coaching career, who has helped build winners every place he has been in football.”
That man was Marv Levy.
“I’m very excited and thrilled to be coming to Buffalo,” said Levy. “I probably know the Bills better than any team in the NFL, by virtue of doing the preseason games. I’ve got a pretty good line on their personnel, their strengths and weaknesses.”
Turning the Bills around would be a tall task for him, no matter how well he knew his new team. But Levy—a Phi Beta Kappa from Coe College, who earned a masters degree in English history at Harvard—approached the task with a scholar’s lens.
“I think defensively, and statistics will bear this out, that there needs to be improvement, some of it from current players, some of it from development of current players,” he told reporters. “Offensively, I see some good things, but it’s very hard to divorce offense and defense from kicking.”
But improvements to the defense and (especially) the kicking game would not stir up the excitement the franchise needed to please its loyal, yet starving, fans. And Levy knew that.
“It’s a young team and I’m pleased to be coming to a team with an outstanding quarterback prospect.”
That man was Jim Kelly, the team’s gutsy, flashy, $8 million acquisition, who joined the Bills that season and immediately made a name for himself. In his NFL debut against the New York Jets, the twenty-six-year-old threw for 292 yards and three touchdowns. More so than his passing statistics, Kelly’s scrambling ability and disregard for self-preservation—hanging in the pocket, he endured several hard hits from Jets defenders—endeared him to his teammates, his opponents, Bills fans, and the media.
“It’s easy to lose perspective here. It’s easy to get