After watching the Buffalo Bills lose to the Miami Dolphins Sunday on CBS, I looked back at last week's crazy game versus the San Diego Chargers.
What a difference.
A difference in the atmosphere, that is.
Sitting in the stands without a scoreboard or music or anything based on electricity change the entire game. People had to actually look at the field to understand what was going on.
Fans, instead of relying on the voice of God booming through the stadium notifying us of what down it was, had to actually look at the orange markers and pay attention for once.
Referee calls? Hopefully you understood the signals or you probably had no idea what was going on.
After sitting at Ralph Wilson Stadium and watching almost an entire half of a professional football game without power, it really made me notice how much technology actually ruins the football experience.
Being able to watch play after play without a "TV timeout" or any other interruptions really made the game more interesting. While the possibility of a red flag being thrown was impossible without electricity, it made every single call that much more important.
It had me on the edge of my seat. It was high school football at its finest.
"I felt like I was back in high school," said Bills quarterback Trent Edwards. "We didn't use [the blackout] as an excuse. We just stayed with it and played."
While the lack of power might have made things somewhat easier for both teams, not having a play clock or gamecock working definitely made things confusing, but it was manageable nonetheless.
Like an injury, if someone unexpectedly gets hurt, you adapt to the situation and play. You get to play the game like it was meant to be played.
This week against Miami, commercial after commercial took away that old school football atmosphere. Commercials for Buffalo Bills ice cream, Bison Dip and Without a Trace really took away from what was happening on the gridiron. Anthony LaPaglia's face haunted my brain as I tried to remember what the last play on the field was.
Then again, that's what football has become - a business.
On Sunday, the San Diego Chargers and the New Orleans Saints took their play overseas to London in a moneymaking opportunity for the league. In December, the Bills will play their second game against the Dolphins oot and aboot in Canada.
Thirty-second ads for Super Bowl XLIII will cost $3 million. That's $100,000 a second being thrown into the hands of Roger Goodell.
If only football could be about the pigskin and not the pigs.
At the end of the day, the power outage was great theatrics for the 71,602 fans in attendance. They were lucky enough to finally see a professional football game played out like it was an old-school clash between two foes in the game's golden years.
Let's hope that Ralph Wilson won't pay the bill again.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
