Vontae Davis Was Right To Quit The Bills, Who Are Going Nowhere Fast

Vontae Davis quit on the Buffalo Bills and football itself on Sunday, and quite frankly I’m pretty jealous.

Davis, a 30-year-old free agent signing over the offseason, abruptly left the Bills at halftime of a blowout loss to the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday, shocking teammates and fans when he put on street clothes and left the stadium altogether without telling his teammates what happened. He later released a statement explaining that he questioned whether he had it in himself to keep playing football anymore.

“And truthfully, I do not because the season is long, and it’s more important for me and my family to walk away healthy than to willfully embrace the warrior mentality and limp away too late,” Davis wrote on Sunday night.

A skeptical reading of the situation is that Davis, coming off a major injury, did the bare minimum to make the opening day roster, collect his $2 million guaranteed base salary and called it quits as soon as he could. There’s also the worry about injury from others around football who wonder if something else was up with Davis when he walked away from football in the middle of, well, football.

The narrative around the situation quickly went from a hilarious footnote to what looks to be a long season for the Bills to a legitimate concern for Davis. But he seems to be very clear-headed about why he walked away from football, something more and more people are doing at earlier ages these days. So let’s let him be and hope he enjoys his retirement so we can get back to talking about how Davis retiring in the middle of the game is one of the funniest, most Bills-y things to ever happen to the franchise.

Davis quitting on the Bills in the middle of a game is merely a new wrinkle in a long line of people looking at One Bills Drive in Orchard Park, checking in with the rational part of their brain, and then hitting the proverbial bricks and getting the hell out of there. No, really. Here’s a brief list of people who have quit on the Bills in recent memory.

The fact that Bills fans replied to this not with hate, but more suggestions for the list is telling. But Rossi is right: Davis is the new leader at the clubhouse, golfing 36 holes a day now that his Sundays are free from the Buffalo Bills.

It was likely easier for Davis to quit because the now 0-2 Bills are primed to be one of the NFL’s worst teams. An opening day 47-3 loss to Baltimore and deceptively bad 31-20 has laid things bare for this Bills team. They’re bad, and they’re going nowhere fast. But what’s worse is that this is all part of the process, the term head coach Sean McDermott not-so-loosely borrowed from the Philadelphia 76ers.

Despite stumbling into one of the worst playoff games in recent memory last season, the Bills are still in the middle of a roster teardown instituted by second-year head coach McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane. That teardown has included jettisoning quarterback Tyrod Taylor and most of the wideouts that were on the roster before the regime change. But two offensive linemen retiring in the offseason was not addressed properly, the defense is backsliding considerably and the best quarterback on the team is rookie Josh Allen, who even the most positive of NFL prognosticators can’t envision as a franchise quarterback. The Bills traded up for Allen, taking him over a long list of other quarterbacks available, such as Arizona’s Josh Rosen.

He did this in his first start on Sunday.

It’s still much better than the guy who started Week 1, Nathan Peterman, who currently ranks as one of the worst quarterbacks of the modern NFL era and threw five first-half interceptions in a start as a rookie last season. Last Sunday, he threw this.

https://twitter.com/sung_minkim/status/1038855329247780864

The other clips from that game are a hilarious reminder that Peterman was started over the perfectly serviceable Tyrod Taylor in the middle of the playoff race last season. Buffalo then traded Taylor to Cleveland in the offseason after he somehow dragged the Bills to their first postseason game in 18 years anyway.

No NFL team seems to want Taylor as their starting quarterback despite being a replacement-level signal caller, but the biggest mark against the Bills is currently tearing it up in Kansas City. If you scrolled below the video Rodak posted of Lorenzo Alexander explaining how Davis left on Sunday evening the next story that popped up was Kansas City quarterback Pat Mahomes setting an NFL record for touchdown passes in his first three games. Mahomes is a quarterback that will be forever tied to the Bills because Kansas City drafted him 10th overall in the 2016 NFL Draft, trading into the spot with Buffalo, who used the picks they acquired from Kansas City to trade up to take Josh Allen this spring.

Mahomes has had a year to mature on the bench behind Alex Smith in Kansas City, but what stings most for Bills fans is that Mahomes is everything that Allen isn’t as a quarterback right now. Allen has a rocket arm but is inaccurate and his decision-making is questionable. He’s also throwing to a mediocre receiving corps led by Kelvin Benjamin, who is too slow to get space in traffic and limit risky throws from a young arm.

Mahomes could be a completely different player on a much worse Buffalo Bills team, but his success early this year is in stark contrast to the Bills not only in the record book, but in the kind of choices Beane and McDermott have made to assemble the Bills. It seems clear they intend to rebuild wholesale, even if it means struggling in the immediate present. The problem isn’t that the Bills don’t have a plan. It’s that, right now, the plan seems to be bad, and many think Allen won’t be as good as the Bills insist he’s going to be. Even the Browns, a team whose winless streak can now be measured not in months but in equinoxes, have a plan that looks considerably more structured by comparison.

As far as I’m concerned, Davis saw all of this from the inside, took a hard look at what he wanted the rest of his life to be, and said ‘Nah, I’m good.’ Maybe there’s more to it, and perhaps it had more to do with him personally than anything the Bills have ahead on the schedule. But it’s still an incredibly funny way to bail on what’s looking like one of the more miserable teams in football this fall. It’s maybe the most amazing thing that’s happened in a long string of incompetence from one of the most hapless pro franchises on the planet. In a season that will be filled with bad quarterback play and baffling decisions, Vontae Davis driving away from the stadium in street clothes before they even cut off beer sales at New Era Field is a gift.

Fans always side with management in disputes between a team and a player, because athletes are termed as selfish actors receiving huge windfalls for simple services rendered. That fans are closer financially to players than they’ll ever be to anyone in the owners box is beside the point, of course, but everyone hates when a player isn’t loyal to the team gracious enough to sign him. Fans mad at Davis for calling it a career in the most hilarious way possible are missing the point, though. The Bills, especially this Bills team staring down the barrel of a long, miserable season, are not worth giving emotional currency.

Only those paying the bills — and reaping huge windfalls from television revenues and merchandise sales — are allowed to make business decisions. But Davis saw the score plainly on Sunday and made one of his own. He should be commended for it. This is a Bills team going nowhere fast, and the beating his body was going to take wouldn’t be worth the effort on a football team built to fail. It’s a physical jettisoning many fans are trying to emulate emotionally, as they simply don’t trust the direction the franchise is going. Sometimes, though, you just have to walk away.