No drama

Here's a problem for Buffalo Bills' fans after the team's ninth game of the season.

There's no drama left.

National Football League seasons essentially answer question that come up from the start. The big one, naturally, is, who will win the Super Bowl? But there are sub-plots along the way as well. The idea is for the season to slowly go toward a climatic moment.

Don't look for any climatic moments here, unless you are interested in knowing if the team will run for the bus the rest of the way. In the Bills' case, we wanted to know back in September if the team was capable of making a playoff run. With seven weeks left and a 3-6 record, it looks almost certainly like the answer is no.

There were other questions. Would Terrell Owens fit in and make the Bills better? Um, it's fair to say that Owens isn't going to make the season memorable for Buffalo for the right reasons. He still has a chance to make it memorable for the wrong ones. Right now his signing looks like an interesting but less-than-successful and expensive gamble.

Is Trent Edwards going to be the quarterback of the future? You'd have to guess no. The Bills would have to come up with some major dollars to sign him long-term in the coming offseason, and that doesn't look like a good idea. In other words, it's about time to start from scratch at the position ... again. The Bills apparently haven't made a great long-term decision about a quarterback since Jim Kelly; Doug Flutie and Drew Bledsoe merely had short-term moments.

Was not re-signing Jason Peters to a big contract a good idea? Based on the problems on the offensive line, it's fair to say Peters might have helped somewhere. Unless you like false starts and concussed quarterbacks.

Is Dick Jauron going to make it to next year? My guess is that it would take a winning record at this point to keep the fan base even a little happy, and that would mean 6-1 down the stretch ... with games against Indianapolis and New England, among others. I don't like his odds.

So here we are, in mid-November, and the story of the season seems more or less written. We're going to just have to wait to see what shoes will drop come early January in terms of some sort of top football executive, new coach, new quarterback, etc.

We've seen a lot of anger about the Bills in the first part of the season. It's easy to wonder if those feelings are about to turn into apathy for the rest of the calendar year, which is never a good sign. Put another way, I'm glad I don't have to sell Bills' tickets for a living the rest of the way.