Nathan Peterman Brought Us All Together In 2018


Uproxx/Getty

Nathan Peterman playing quarterback for the Buffalo Bills was a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. It was also a gift from the football gods.

There are a lot of bad teams in the National Football League this year, and somehow the Bills are just merely mediocre. But Peterman tried his hardest to ensure the Bills — which rang in 2018 by making the postseason for the first time in nearly two decades — were in the conversation for the league’s worst teams. A disastrous Week 1 performance made him a backup until injuries thrust him back into the starting job, where only more misery awaited the sophomore signal-caller. He was reinserted into the lineup during Week 6 when rookie Josh Allen hurt his elbow and promptly threw a game-losing pick six in Houston.

Then, somehow, he kept going out there to play quarterback.

The Bills completely mismanaged their QB depth chart and had no options. Peterman, despite one of the worst stat lines of any starting signal caller in NFL history, simply could not be taken off the field. It was remarkable and gross mismanagement on an epic scale, and it was absolutely enthralling to watch.

At a certain point, it became almost mundane to make fun of how bad Peterman was. High Noon made it an art form. As someone who grew up rooting for the Bills and covered the team for two seasons, watching the Bills become appointment viewing for being pathetic was surprisingly communal. The entire football world would come together to eagerly watch The Peter Man throw bad interceptions and wildly incomplete footballs.

It’s not picking on Peterman to say he’s a bad quarterback. He is. The game tape doesn’t lie. The improbably bad statistics are not leading you astray. Yet Peterman somehow managed to get another job before Colin Kaepernick, signing with the Oakland Raiders to join their practice squad in late December. Again, Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre got another segment out of The Peter Man, and I got to Log On and tweet through it one last time.

Looking back on the year that was, it’s hard to say anything that happened to Peterman was surprising. We knew what he was when the Bills started over Tyrod Taylor him back in 2017 against the Chargers for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear. He had one of the worst quarterback outings since the merger, and the Bills still wanted him on the roster over Taylor. Bills fans knew Tyrod’s fate well before the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31 and Bills fans deliriously celebrated the team’s first postseason appearance in 18 years. But watching your absolutely worst sporting fears come true — and knowing exactly how it would play out — was surprisingly cathartic.

We are so irony poisoned. All of us. It’s how we cope with a world that constantly feels like it’s falling apart, like the seams are ripping and at any moment the thread may truly break. The public transportation you may take to work in your big city is crumbling and there isn’t any money or public will to fix it, or maybe the highway you drive on needs repaving and the suburban strip mall you pass seems to get emptier and emptier as the months go by. Then, you check your Twitter feed or watch the news and all that entropy only seems to loom larger.

It doesn’t feel like it’s going to get any better. The good moments are so few and far between in a sea of bad news and evil agents. We have never been more connected and yet we’re drifting apart, or maybe we’re driven apart by all those ways we can engage with others. It’s bad, and probably why entire generations of people openly long for the TV shows and movies we loved growing up to come back and distract us from the present.

We are all reaching back to a time when things felt better, but those that know the truth have long ago realized it wasn’t better for anyone in the past. It just felt less decayed. The nostalgia television networks and movie studios are chasing won’t fix anything, and already there’s a fatigue that’s come with the news a show you once appreciated might be roaring back. We’re all so tired all the time. That nostalgia has seeped into the sports world as well. We love throwback jerseys for teams that were based off a sports movie and basically demanded LeBron James make a Space Jam sequel.

In a way, the whole Peterman Saga brought me back as well, and it might be weird to say an irony-filled viewing of Peterman failing all over the field was a good thing. But watching it didn’t remind me of growing up. It didn’t make me feel like the elementary school-aged boy who would cry when he heard random drunks in the stadium criticize Jim Kelly for throwing an interception. Those days, and that allegiance to a football team over all else, isn’t coming back.

It did feel, though, like things came together for at least a little bit during those dumb Bills games. It was an easy situation to read: Peterman, bless his heart, just doesn’t have the stuff. As a sports fan — especially one of a small town team — it’s satisfying to see everyone around a sport conclude that you were right about the bad quarterback. And finding strange joy in a player absolutely overwhelmed on the field justify your skepticism in a faulty process, while cynical, made the pain and frustrations that come with those interceptions bother you a bit less. When everyone was bewildered by what’s happening with your football team, it makes you feel a lot less unhinged.

When it came to The Peter Man, it felt like everyone — OK, about as close to everyone as you can get to everyone in a world where you can find every opinion online — was on the same side for a little while. That’s a feeling that might not come as often as we’d like in the world we’ll endure in 2019, and it’s worth reflecting on for a bit as the year comes to an end.

Not everything has to be ironically fun. It all doesn’t have to be a weird joke. But Nate Peterman absolutely was, and, in a way, that fun made things feel more normal for a bit.

×