The contrasting fates of Doug Flutie and the Buffalo Bills were on display on Sunday.
While the Bills managed to lose to the New York Jets, likely cementing the demise of GM Tom Donahoe (and possibly costing head coach Mike Mularkey his job also), Flutie, ever the improviser, scored a single point off a drop kick in the Patriots' game at Miami. This is the first time a point has been scored off a drop-kick in the NFL since 1941. The play fell into disuse after the shape of the ball was changed in the 1930's, which made bounces more unpredictable.
Flutie may well retire after this season, and if he does, the drop-kick will be a suitable book-end to a career that started at Boston College in the 80's, included his winning the Heisman Trophy due to the infamous last-second "Hail Mary" pass, and took him on a long journey into and out of the NFL, on to the CFL and back to the NFL with the Bills.
If Tom Donahoe is fired this week by the Bills, it will be hard to not see his dismissal through the lens of his quartback personnel decisions, which involved Doug Flutie.
When Donahoe joined the club in 2001, the team was divided between factions supporting Flutie, the unorthodox little guy who had twice come off the bench to salvage seasons that were slipping away, and Rob Johnson, the quintessential good-looking California athlete, signed on a big trade deal from Jacksonville, a man with a great arm but no survival skills beyond running around and taking sacks whenever a play broke down.
Donahoe and new coach Gregg Williams decided to keep Johnson, and let Flutie go. It is fair to say that ever since that decision, the Bills quarterback position has been a mess. Johnson was never the answer; he lacked pocket awareness, and held onto the ball too long. His answer to the survival skills issue was simply to train harder so that he could run faster; lost in the mist was any consideration of Doing Something Smart With the Ball.
The Bills then traded for Drew Bledsoe and hailed him as their saviour, only to decide after 2 seasons that he was also not the answer either, seemingly because he was not mobile and also took too many sacks (which begs the question of why they traded for him in the first place. After all, it's not as if anybody watching the NFL for the last 10 seasons would have confused Drew Bledsoe with a mobile quarterback).
More recently the Bills dumped Bledsoe and gambled a first-round draft pick on J.P. Losman, who may well be an excellent quarterback eventually, but who is not yet ready for prime-time. The Bills have played more consistenly this season under Kelly Holcomb, who may be the most underrated #2 quarterback in the league.
Using the military maxim of 20:20 hindsight, the Bills would have been better keeping Doug Flutie and selecting a young quarterback in the draft to ultimately replace him. Instead, Donahoe confused youth, athleticism and "potential" with results, with negative consequences for the Bills.
Although he is totally unorthodox compared to Jim Kelly, Flutie could run a no-huddle offense just as well as Kelly, and, as Peyton Manning as shown, running a no-huddle offense can be very effective at keeping opponents off-balance in a game. Flutie was probably not a long-term solution at age 37, but as Bill Parcells always likes to point out, saying a player "has potential" is merely a polite way of saying that he hasn't done anyting yet.
So, the Bills will probably be starting over at the GM position, and they might also be starting over with a new head coach. Some of Mike Mularkey's play-calling decisions have been incomprehensible to the outside world, and his approach to the Eric Moulds incident bore the stamp of a man who was insecure and over-anxious to impose his authority. The long-term result of the incident was that Moulds ended up looking like the class act, and Mularkey looked like a macho posturer.