Quick Slant: The Return of The Ferg, and a Game with Big Fantasy Implications

Bills @ Dolphins, Thursday @ 8:15 PM

Thursday, we are gifted with Episode One of every football season’s semiannual must-watch extravaganza: the Ferguson Bowl—The Ferg, if you’re in the know—named for Reid and Blake, the long-snapping brothers for the AFC East rivals (it is rumored the Zoomers are calling it the “snappiest” appointment in football, but I can't confirm). Since Mike McDaniel was hired as head coach in Miami, The Ferg has pitted two of the most explosive offenses in the NFL against each other with enormous fantasy implications. Yet Tracy, the sainted mother of the Fergusons, won't be gracing any soup commercials or doling out high-fives to international pop stars in a luxury box. Seems like an injustice to me, but what do I know?

This version lets the Bills off the hook, as they won’t have to spend their trip to Miami standing in the burn scar formed by the heat of 1,000 blistering suns that becomes the visitors’ sideline at Hard Rock Stadium this time of year. Instead, they’ll trade in a soggy, warm blanket of day-treated humidity, the discomfort of which may be relatively unfamiliar to the folks of Upstate New York, in exchange for a swathe of peaceful Alice Blue floodlight melding with warm pink twilight dissolving into a raisin-hued sky. The over/under is tied for the third-highest total of the week, and the implications for the divisional crown are high. Nothing improves warm summer eventide like fireworks; perhaps The Ferg will bring them.

Bills’ Implied Team Total: 23.5