The Bills win in Orchard Park, lose in Vegas

He trudged up Abbott Road, toward Southwestern Boulevard, about 1,000 yards away from where, 15 minutes earlier, Rian Lindell’s field goal as time expired had spared the Buffalo Bills the shame of losing to the once-feared, now-pitiable Oakland Raiders.

Fit and looking to be in his late 40s, he wore the proper uniform—gray sweatshirt emblazoned with blue block letters reading “BILLS” and a white baseball cap with the vintage standing red buffalo logo.

It was his expression that seemed out of place. Making his way through a sea of high-fives, “Let’s go Buffalo!” chants, and hoarse choruses of that song they play every time the Bills score mingled with honking horns, his face was blank, even a little sad.

He stopped a few feet away and looked around as if he had lost something. I wondered if pre-game tailgating had gotten the better of him, or if he had been waylaid by a bum stadium dog. But his equilibrium seemed fine, his color good. So I guessed it was not something he had consumed that bothered him, but something he had laid out.

“You bet the Bills?” I asked.

He smiled a half-smile, gave a slight nod. “It shows, huh?”

He wasn’t the only Buffalo fan looking glum late Sunday afternoon, despite an exhilarating rally that required their team to score 10 points in the game’s final four minutes and three seconds.

Though the Bills managed to repel the Raiders and begin their season with three straight wins for the first time since 1992, they fell short against a far more imposing foe: the point spread.

Gambling on professional sports—or the college variety, or your kid’s local Little League team, for that matter—is illegal. That law may actually prevent some people somewhere from wagering. It’s just that you would be hard-pressed to find any of the deterred at Ralph Wilson Stadium or anywhere near a television set on most Sunday afternoons between late summer and mid-winter.

The point spread, for the uninitiated, works like this. Professional oddsmakers in Nevada, the only state to allow sports betting to occur without a vague, generally baseless fear of prosecution, look at every game and choose the team most likely to win. They then set a line, which quantifies the perceived difference between the teams based on their recent performances, as well as factors such as injuries, weather, and where the game is played.

The idea is to make either team equally attractive to prospective bettors. Local bookies tweak the line to suit their clientele, partly to take advantage of excessive enthusiasm for the home team and partly to minimize their losses when the home team goes on a winning streak.

For the Bills and Raiders, the line hovered between around 9 1⁄2 points in favor of the hosts. That spread was listed on the game-day preview page in Sunday’s Buffalo News, right next to the kickoff time and broadcast information.

The underdogs, then, opened the game with a theoretical lead of 9 1⁄2 to nothing. So if you bet on Buffalo, you needed a victory by 10 points or more to cover the spread. If you took the Raiders on this day, you won, even though they lost.

Of course, there are at least as many of us who find pinning serious cash to the athletic efforts of others who have no such financial connection to the outcome to be way too much stress for far too little reward.

It’s a paradox that helps fuel football’s somewhat eerie popularity: If you bet on your favorite team, and it’s a bad one, the odds are greater that you will win money even when your team loses, due to those pretend points. But when your heroes are winning real games, you’re more likely to lose cash, since you’re spotting the outgunned enemy points before the national anthem gets mangled.

On Sunday, those who fixated on the imaginary score missed a pretty wild afternoon.

Oakland’s underdog status was well-earned. Uncertainty over who would coach the team lingered as late as Friday, when it finally became clear that second-year coach Lane Kiffin would escape the wrath of re-animated owner Al Davis for at least a few more days.

Rookie running back Darren McFadden had run for 164 yards a week earlier against Kansas City, but hobbled into the stadium Sunday wearing a boot to protect an injured toe. Enormous quarterback JaMarcus Russell was healthy, but his inexperience still offsets his tremendous physical skills, forcing Oakland to stick to very basic game plans.

Oakland’s defense has remained formidable through the worst times, though, and allowed the Bills just one touchdown through more than three quarters.

Three blunders uncharacteristic for this year’s Bills—a coverage breakdown on the opening kickoff, an interception thrown by Trent Edwards near his own goal line, and sloppy positioning in the defensive secondary that permitted an 84-yard touchdown pass from Russell to Johnnie Lee Higgins—helped Oakland take a 23-14 lead with 6:23 left.

Then Edwards led a comeback that topped last week’s finish in Jacksonville. He completed six of his final eight passes, including a 14-yard score to Roscoe Parrish to pull the Bills within two points. Then he connected on a pair of short flips before the two-minute warning that allowed the luxury of letting Marshawn Lynch grind out the final yards to set up Lindell’s kick, which won the game, if not an untold number of bets.

Most non-gamblers are aware of the spread, in part because of its acceptance by media outlets. The Vegas line, as the official spread is known, was even cited in a question posed to Edwards during his mid-week press availability.

Curiously, no one asked the Buffalo quarterback’s views on prostitution, the narcotics trade, or insurance fraud.

As for the spread, Edwards said he didn’t think there should have been one for the game against Oakland. Not due to any moral opposition to gambling, though he said he does not, but because he expected a close game.

Turned out he was right. But at least a handful of those in attendance were very grateful for those 9 1⁄2 imaginary points.

None more than John, who wore the only Raiders jersey visible at one tailgate party we attended. John stood out from the crowd around him, not only because he was a silver-and-black icon in a sea of blue, red, and white.

John, whose shirt bore the name and number of Rich Gannon, the last quarterback to lead Oakland to a Super Bowl, also served as the bookmaker for a network of casual football bettors, including at least a dozen fans partying around him. Buffalo’s strong start, which included one victory each over Seattle and Jacksonville, as well as two against the spread, had not been good for business, he said.

“I haven’t taken a bet against the Bills yet this season,” he said in a gravelly voice, shaking his head and gesturing with a can of Labatt Blue toward his fellow tailgaters/clients. “I’m paying for this party.”

He did not seem overly worried, though. The point spread, like the odds at casino machines and tables, tilts the competitive balance toward the house over time. The outcome would determine his bottom line for the day, but he said he still considered himself more fan than bookie.

“I’ve always loved the Raiders, but I cheer for the Bills, too,” he said. “So whatever happens, I’ll be happy.”

He harkened back to another Bills-Raiders game a quarter-century earlier, when his loyalties did not serve him so well.

Seems he was sitting in an end zone seat for that 1983 contest when someone behind him threw a football that hit his friend’s son in the head. John turned around and, after locating the perpetrator, decided to take action.

“I said, ‘Come on down here,’” said John, who remains a rather imposing man 25 years later.

The other guy took him up on the offer, with predictable results.

“The cops dragged me off to the hoosegow,” he said, referring to the in-stadium jail where the criminally rowdy are housed until someone bails them out. “My brother was the first one there with the $50, but I was the last one out, because I was wearing a Raiders jersey.”

He missed an even bigger comeback, one led by a mostly forgotten Buffalo quarterback. Matt Kofler, replacing an aging Joe Ferguson, brought the Bills all the way back from a 24-3 deficit, only to see the Raiders win on a late field goal.

But on that day, there were still plenty of happy fans wearing Buffalo’s colors, particularly if they weren’t cellmates with John, because the home team lost the game, but beat the spread.