On Saturday night, the Bills took another baby step forward in their steady march back to relevance.  Josh Allen played admirably enough for us to hold on confirmation that he sucks.  As a matter of fact, he almost doubled Deshaun Watson’s rushing yards 92-55.  However, he still made too many mistakes for us to be able to start saying he’s good:

• Two dropped interceptions (one pick six)
• Lost a fumble
• Lost another fumble that was overturned by replay
• Heaved a 50 yard throw to a double covered fullback
• Took a 3rd down intentional grounding to fall out of FG range with 1:41 left to play down by 3

The dumbest mistake of the game was McDermott’s decision to go for it on 4th and 27 with three timeouts, but nobody cares because they still made overtime and he’s an awesome coach.  Instead, everyone is harping on the Josh Allen lateral and I thoroughly disagree!

First of all, there were no Texans players near #88 Knox and therefore no Texans players came anywhere close to recovering the football.  Second of all, because there are no Texans players near #88 Knox, he had a lot of green ahead to turn the game on its head with an all time historic play.  The execution was poor, but I love the decision.

Let’s put it another way.  Best case scenario and the play works, Bills are in FG range with the clock stopped and plenty of time to drive for a win.  Worst case scenario (keeping in mind there’s ZERO texans around) Allen fucks up the lateral so badly that it goes over #88’s head and out of bounds for 1st and 10 with the clock stopped.  Oh wait a minute that’s what actually happened, which is way better than the ‘smart play’ of getting tackled and running off 15 seconds to spike the ball for 2nd and 10.

And one last point to all those hoity-toity fake nerds out there who are lambasting Josh Allen for a net positive play…

The numbers say laterals are good.  So suck it

 

When Wu Lei became the first Chinese international to score a goal against Barcelona, a trend on Weibo hit 370 million views.  That is more than the entire total of the US population, so I assume it was more popular than anything NFL-related on the internet.  Apologies if I am wrong.  

After watching the goal, I am now fully onboard with Chinese fans in saying that Wu Lei is my new favorite Chinese player.  It was a true beauty…

The time and score of the game.  The through ball.  The strike.  The Chinese dude in a Barca jersey going ape shit even though it meant Madrid caught up to them for first place.

This dude in the stands who just started screaming ‘Wu Lei Wu Lei Wu Lei’ over and over again before he even got the ball.

Everything about it was pretty wild.  My favorite by though, was this tribute video afterwards:

https://twitter.com/manizuela/status/1213579947333365761?s=21

Espanyol is still in last place, but there’s still half the season left to play and they got a new coach who is smart enough to give our boy Wu Lei more minutes.  They’re also qualified for the Europa knockouts, so Champion’s League for next year is still on the table.

In the meantime, they have quite the marketing asset.  Wu Lei’s debut last year, despite being only 12 minutes, garnered 40M total views in China.  For reference, that is twice the number of viewers for the GoT finale.  For La Liga as a whole, its digital following in China almost doubled (82%) last year because of Wu Lei alone.