So I gave my two cents regarding the unreliability of preseason predictions back in my Pats Preview, although my revised conclusion the God is Dead seems be holding in that TAWM TERRIFIC has not yet succumbed to Stage 3 Spontaneous Combustion.

But with regard to the Bills, we all thought we had a pretty goddamned reasonable expectation about How Shit Would Go Down: their dominant defense was largely unchanged from 2014, they had a potentially good run game, and Fuck All at quarterback. In other words, the standard Rex Ryan team, but with a classier and more attractive fanbase. We didn’t know how that would play out in terms of their record, but we knew how they would play: loud, proud and low scoring.

Well that’s not how it’s played out. In their three wins, they’ve held the opposition to 14 points or less. The other games have gotten out of hand (eighth-worst in points-per-game), but the offense (led by Tyrod “Tie-Rod” Taylor and EJ “I want desperately to like him but he’s a fucking twit” Manuel) keeps them in the game with near-heroic comeback attempts. The Bills lead the league in penalties and penalty yardage (FLAGS FOR THE FLAG GOD) but are inexplicably fifth in the league in points scored. They are turnover-neutral. They are near .500, even with diamond-in-the-rough Taylor having been injured for the last two games and LeSean “The Sean” McCoy nursing a bum hamstring all season. Beating Indy and hanging with both New England and Cincinnati make you feel good. Shitting the bed against the Giants and rolling around in it against the Jaguars makes you feel…well, it reminds you you’re a Bills fan.

So where, gentle reader, does that leave us? Well, to put it in Rex Terms:

We really have no idea what’s in those boots. They could be the finest set of piggy-wiggies ever to set fire to a man’s loins and imagination. They could be buniony abominations, whose toe-jam is like unto the putrescent ooze of Satan’s taint-sores. Bills fans have Schrödinger’s Foot Fetish, simultaneously aroused and repelled until the boot comes off, likely against the Jets in two weeks.

All we have now is a faint sense of disappointment that the boots are still on, and not lodged deeply in Tom Brady’s colon.