Do The Bills Care About The Smart Marks of Bills Mafia?
As you guys know, I’m someone who loves bringing the Bills and football into the WWE world, because weirdly enough, there are a lot of parallels.
One of the biggest WWE tropes you hear all the time is that they don’t book the show for the Internet fans. They don’t care what the hardcore wrestling message boards are saying, what wrestling Twitter is complaining about, or what the so-called “Internet marks” think about every storyline. Their obsession has always been the casual fan, the person flipping through channels, somebody who maybe watches WrestleMania every year but isn’t sitting there breaking down a random Monday Night Raw in October.
I would view smart marks for wrestling, not just as those who spend money on WWE, but as people who know everything about the behind the scenes drama. The underground punk scene before it got commercialized.
And the logic is pretty simple. The hardcore fans are probably going to be there anyway. You can piss them off, ignore them, make fun of them, whatever, and most of them are still watching next week. So WWE spends a lot more energy trying to grab the person who isn’t already completely invested, because that’s how you grow the audience.
And in a weird way, I sometimes think that’s how the Bills operate.
The Bills know the diehards aren’t going anywhere. The people who have spent their entire lives watching this team, buying tickets, buying jerseys, sitting in traffic in Orchard Park, arguing about the backup left guard in June, those people are locked in. You can annoy them, make something inconvenient, charge them more, give them a corporate answer they hate, and chances are they’re still going to be watching Sunday.
So sometimes it feels like the organization is much more interested in the fan they’re still trying to win over than the fan who has already given them 30 or 40 years.
And from a business perspective, I understand it. You don’t grow by only selling to the same people forever. You want the casual fan. You want younger fans. You want somebody who doesn’t know who Steve Tasker is to suddenly care about the Bills.
But WWE has also learned this lesson the hard way over the years: just because your hardcore audience probably isn’t leaving doesn’t mean you should treat them like they don’t matter.
Because eventually there’s a difference between knowing somebody is loyal and taking advantage of that loyalty.
And at times, I probably have to admit that I fall into the hardcore sicko category myself. When I’m writing this site, I have a tendency to write for the extreme hardcore smart mark Bills fan, the person who notices every little thing, reads every story, follows every account and gets pissed off about shit that probably never even registers for most people.
I mention that because I have text threads with Bills fans I’ve grown up with, people who I know love this team, and you know how many of them have brought up the water policy, the arrogance of the Bills stadium Twitter account, obstructed seats, or the fact that the new stadium won’t have a grass field?
Zero.
Not one.
They’re Bills fans, but they aren’t the smart marks of the Bills universe. They’re probably much closer to the casual fan WWE is always talking about. They watch the games, they want the Bills to win, they might buy a jersey or go to a game, but they aren’t spending Tuesday afternoon reading about whether somebody in Section 436 is staring at a fucking concrete pillar.
They also don’t care that the old Aud Club, which was actually super busy, is being replaced by a fucking Michelob Ultra bar that looks like it was built on the set of Back to the Future Part II when Marty goes into the future.
I care about that stuff. A lot of you reading this probably care about that stuff. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the average Bills fan does.
And you can see the same thing with how the Bills approach media.
They seem way more interested in getting Pat McAfee or Bussin’ With The Boys to amplify Bills talking points than they are in having somebody from the organization go on your favorite local podcast and talk directly to the people who obsess over this team every single day.
Again, from a business standpoint, I understand it. McAfee has a gigantic audience. Bussin’ With The Boys has national reach. If your goal is to grow the Bills brand beyond Western New York and beyond the same group of sickos who already know who the sixth defensive tackle is, those are obviously attractive places to go.
But it’s the exact same WWE philosophy.
Why spend all your energy catering to the smart marks when the smart marks are already watching?
WWE has operated the same way forever. They don’t give a shit what Dave Meltzer thinks. They’re not sitting around worried about whether the hardcore wrestling press gave the show three stars or four and a quarter.
But if you’re some terrible comedian with a national podcast and a huge audience? Get ready for comps.
That’s the audience they want. Not necessarily the person who knows every wrestler on NXT or can tell you why a match finish from six months ago made no sense. They want the person who can put WWE in front of a few hundred thousand people who might not otherwise be watching.
The Bills feel very similar sometimes. Your favorite local Bills podcast could spend 365 days a year talking about the team, know the roster inside and out, and have an audience full of people who actually buy tickets and merchandise. But if a national show with a much bigger platform comes calling, that’s where the attention goes.
It’s not really about who knows the product best. It’s about who can put the product in front of the most new eyeballs.
And that brings me back to something I noticed last week.
I saw some people on Bills X annoyed with how much Brad Riter and Tim Graham were talking about the water story. And Bills X is probably the closest thing we have to a focus group for the hardcore fan base, although I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.
Because I kept thinking about the person who isn’t on Twitter all day.
Imagine some Bills fan getting in their car, turning on the radio, hearing 20 minutes about water bottles at the new stadium and thinking, “What the fuck are these guys talking about?”
They didn’t spend the previous 48 hours watching people argue about it on X. They didn’t see every reply. They didn’t read every quote-tweet. They have no idea that this became the outrage of the day.
And the response from people like me will always be, “Well, people want to know what’s happening. Everyone is pissed off about this. Look at social media.”
But that’s where the rub lies.
Is social media actually an accurate representation of what Bills fans want to talk about?
Or are we just listening to the smart marks?
Because wrestling has dealt with this exact question forever. The loudest people online can make something feel like the biggest issue in the world, but then you walk outside that bubble and realize millions of people consuming the product have absolutely no idea the controversy even exists.
That doesn’t mean the water story isn’t worth covering. It doesn’t mean obstructed seats aren’t worth covering. It doesn’t mean fans shouldn’t be pissed when they feel like they’re being treated like an ATM.
But maybe we should stop pretending that whatever Bills Twitter is furious about at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning automatically represents what Bills fans as a whole care about.
Maybe Bills X isn’t the audience.
Maybe Bills X is the smart marks section of the audience.
And if that’s true, suddenly a lot of the decisions the Bills make — who they talk to, what media they prioritize, what complaints they respond to and which ones they basically shrug at — start making a lot more sense.
The uncomfortable part is that I’m probably one of those smart marks too. And if you’re reading this column, there’s a decent chance you are too.
Buffalo viral moment of the week
The headline definitely got a lot of people on X very excited about the possibility of Jessica Pegula eventually running the Bills. And I get it. Of Terry Pegula’s kids, she’s obviously the most recognizable because she’s spent years as one of the best tennis players in the world.
Laura Pegula, who is Terry’s daughter from a previous marriage, has basically been a Marvel Easter egg in every Bills or Sabres embedded series. By all accounts, she’s replaced Kim or at least is helping Terry more.
Matt Pegula pops up in the draft room every once in a while, and whenever the Bills release some terrible hat that looks like somebody spilled semen or some mysterious liquid all over it, I personally just assume Matt had something to do with it.
Kelly Pegula has also been around the organization publicly at different points, dated the third-string tight end, and used to post party photos that made me wish I was young again and getting shitfaced.
Jessica is the one everybody knows.
What was more interesting to me, though, was how whimsical Jessica sounded about the whole thing. She said it would be exciting if she got to help with the organization one day and that she always thought she’d stay in the sports world when her tennis career was over.
That’s not exactly, “I’m being groomed to take over the Buffalo Bills.” It sounds more like, “Yeah, maybe that would be cool someday.” Maybe she’s just being coy. Maybe there’s a detailed succession plan sitting in Terry Pegula’s desk somewhere. But based on what she actually said, there’s still a giant gap between wanting to be involved and being the person running the franchise.
And then there’s the Taylor Gahagen part of this that I think is really interesting. Jessica’s husband didn’t just marry into the Pegula family. He worked inside Pegula Sports and Entertainment for nearly a decade, starting in 2013 and eventually holding jobs including Director of Brand Strategy and Development and Director of Corporate Development. He was literally listed in Bills media guides as part of the Pegula Sports & Entertainment staff. Then he left in 2023, right around the time PSE itself was being dissolved and reorganized.
Maybe I’m reading this incorrectly, but when Tim Graham wrote about the transition in 2024 to where Laura Pegula was getting a percentage of the Bills, the timeline of events from Jessie releasing a piece on what happened to her mom to power/money being transferred to her step-sister, and then her husband getting canned was quite timely in a “here’s your receipt”
Maybe there’s absolutely nothing to that. Companies reorganize, people leave, and he has gone on to work in investment and wealth management. But when we’re suddenly talking about Jessica someday helping run the Bills, I don’t think it’s crazy to wonder about it. It’s another piece of a succession puzzle that, from the outside, still feels pretty murky.
I also wonder about the relationship between Jessica and Terry. During so much of her tennis career, it felt like Terry was constantly popping up in the box or there were photos of them together. You don’t seem to see nearly as much of that anymore and I can’t recall the last time she was at a Bills game. And yes, she’s a tennis star and Terry has said he tries to get to her matches, but she’s been playing tennis since the Pegulas bought the team and she was definitely walking the sidelines before games.
Again, that proves absolutely nothing, and I’m not going to turn fewer public photos into some family conspiracy. But combined with Taylor leaving the organization and Jessica talking about the Bills like something she hopes she might be involved with someday, it makes me wonder what the actual conversations inside that family look like.
And I already know the response from some Pegula flunky is going to be, “OF COURSE TERRY HAS A PLAN. HE’S A BILLIONAIRE. HE’S NOT STUPID.”
Okay.
You know who else was a billionaire? Jerry Buss and Pat Bowlen. Two owners who were pretty damn good at owning professional sports teams, and their franchises still went through complicated succession fights after they were gone. Being rich and successful does not automatically mean your kids are all going to agree on who gets the keys.
That’s really the part of this story I find fascinating. Laura already has an ownership stake and Jessica now says she’d like to help someday and reportedly doesn’t want the family selling the teams. But who is actually the lead dog if the Bills stay in the family? Jessica? Laura? Matt? Some combination of them? Do they hire somebody outside the family to actually run the business while they retain ownership? We have no idea.
And as uncomfortable as people get whenever succession comes up, Terry Pegula is 75 years old. Eventually this becomes a real question.
Maybe everything is mapped out perfectly behind closed doors.
Or maybe someday we’re getting the Western New York version of Succession, except instead of Waystar Royco everybody is fighting over who gets Terry’s seat in the Bills draft room.
Stathead of the day: 18.2%
Since the start of last season and including the playoffs, the Bills are 2 of 11 on two point conversions for a success rate of 18.2%. It is the 3rd worst rate percentage in the league over that time. Strangely enough they were pretty good at it from 2020-2024.
Dad shots
—Pat Moran told me I went too easy on Max Hairston in my recap. He was awful and then seeing this tweet made me more furious
Ugh. Come on! Better effort. Then he decided to storm out of the locker room and beat traffic or go the Parker Brothers tailgate. Normally, I wouldn’t care if an athlete left the locker room without talking to the press. I’ve explained why plenty of times: A lot of the questions aren’t great, the answers rarely tell us anything we don’t already know, and the whole thing can feel rushed as we are trying to get out of there. If Josh Allen or James Cook had a rough game and decided they didn’t want to talk afterward, I could shrug and say, “OK, shit happens.” They’ve built up enough goodwill with me to get that kind of leeway.
But when your résumé is basically that one time you kept up with Worthy against the Chiefs, getting hurt, and changing your number to 1—which I actually think looks cool—you don’t get that same latitude. You haven’t done enough on the field for me to shrug off what you do afterward.
—I knew the Sabres/Blue Jackets had all the makings of a bad Sabres opener. Andy was legitimately excited to watch hockey and lost interest about five minutes in, which honestly might make him the smartest person in the house.
By the time we got to bedtime — me back in my usual spot laying on the floor waiting for him to fall asleep — the Sabres were down 3-1 and Sabres social media was already ready to exile UPL from Western New York.
The power play remains an issue, which has basically been an issue since Moses wore short pants. Buffalo went 0-for-5, including somehow getting nothing out of a FULL TWO-MINUTE 5-on-3. That almost feels harder to do than scoring.
And because I need to find something positive before Game 2, Owen Power had two assists, becoming just the third Sabres defenseman since 1990-91 to have multiple assists in a season opener.
Andy checked out after five minutes. Maybe next game I should follow his lead.
—I did not watch the home opener. But they won. Hooray.
—The Bills are spending a lot less time with the football this season. Through four games, Buffalo ranks 22nd in offensive plays per game (59.5) and 29th in time of possession (28:06).
Last year, they ranked fifth in plays per game (64.3) and led the NFL in possession. That’s nearly five fewer offensive snaps per game for Josh Allen and company. Obviously you can point to the Bills are moving the ball on chunk plays or that the Bills defense can’t get off the field for reason for this stat. Four games don’t define a season, but going from controlling the clock to sitting near the bottom of the league is a pretty noticeable change.
—So I found a loophole to watch the MSG broadcast in Buffalo, which means I also get all the local commercials and TV spots. Honestly, that might be half the fun.
I got a kick out of Dwayne Carter carrying what I can only describe as Temu Mahomes into a McDonald’s to get his free Big Mac. Then I stumbled onto some Bills show with Maddy Glab and Chris Brown. I don’t have much to say about the actual content outside of a pretty aggressive ball-washing segment about the art in the new stadium, but I do have one question:
Why the fuck do teams insist on putting their broadcasters in team gear?
It looks stupid.
This isn’t even about objectivity or pretending team-employed broadcasters are independent journalists. My eyes have just been trained by decades of watching sports television to expect the people on the desk to look like they’re working. Suit. Tie. Jacket. Something resembling television.
The Sabres crew still dresses like they’re broadcasting a professional sporting event. Meanwhile, the Bills crew looks like they’re five minutes away from handing out Jägerbombs at a charity golf tournament in smedium Nike polos.
And I know this has become normal across sports. Teams want everything branded. The desk is branded. The microphones are branded. The backdrop is branded. Apparently the human beings now also have to dress like they work the pro shop.
But it makes the entire production look cheaper.
Chris Brown does not need to wear a Bills polo for me to remember I’m watching Bills programming. I figured it out from the giant Bills logos, the Bills highlights, the Bills studio and the fact that everyone has been discussing the Bills for 28 straight minutes.
Dress like broadcasters.
End team gear on television.
—There aren’t many broadcasters I can think of who had a bigger rise and harder fall strictly from a content standpoint than Tony Romo.
And now, on Friday, CBS and Romo officially agreed to part ways after nine years together. Go back to 2017. Romo was fucking great. The guy felt ahead of his time. He wasn’t waiting until after the play to tell you what happened. He was looking at the formation, identifying what the defense was doing and basically saying, “Here’s what’s coming.”
And then it would happen.
There was a stretch where watching Romo felt like getting access to the quarterback meeting room. That version of him was legitimately fascinating television.
Then somewhere along the way, it disappeared.
There have been a million theories about why. Did he stop studying as much? Did CBS tell him to stop predicting plays because it stepped on the broadcast? Did he just get comfortable after getting the gigantic contract? I have no idea, and unless somebody involved actually tells the full story, neither does anyone else.
But the difference was noticeable.
The guy who originally sounded like he had watched 30 hours of film before kickoff eventually became the guy making noises, laughing with Nantz and yelling “Ehhhhhh, Jim!” while Twitter tried to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
The only comparison I can really think of is Joey Styles.
When Joey started in ECW, he was incredible, different, loud, and was emotional. He felt like he belonged to that product because the entire presentation was built around letting Joey Styles be Joey Styles.
Then he gets to WWE and it just wasn’t the same. He was reportedly told to tone down some of the yelling and adapt to a much more controlled television environment, and once you start sanding down the things that made somebody unique, sometimes you’re just left with another announcer.
That’s what Romo eventually felt like.
2017 Romo felt completely different from everybody else doing NFL television.
Then, little by little, the things that made him different seemed to disappear.
And whether that was Romo, CBS or some combination of both, I’ll always find it fascinating because for a little while Tony Romo looked like he was going to change football broadcasting.
Then somehow Tony Romo stopped broadcasting like Tony Romo.
—Please give my niece Sofia a follow at @fianixtattoos!
If you’re looking to get some tattoo work done, she’s an incredibly talented artist and definitely worth checking out. She’ll also be doing some original artwork for the Joe from Queens site, which I’m really excited about.
Go show her some love and give her a follow!
—AEW completely fumbled the Acclaim. I don’t know what happened in terms of separating them, but they were hilarious and had “it”.
—I guess I’m supposed to have a take about whichever goon or tough guy decided to pick a fight with Metsa and the Sabres didn’t do dick about it. I swear, we have this discussion once a year, where the hockey boomer dads of America demand retaliation because of “the code” — which, at this point, really should be an actual book — while the rest of us uncivilized hockey fans apparently just don’t understand.
And I guess you know where I’m leaning.
1999 Joe would’ve wanted blood. Somebody hits your guy, you send somebody out there to beat the shit out of him. Message sent. Honor restored. The code has been satisfied.
2026 Joe is a reformed father of two who mostly wants the power play to fucking work. If somebody takes a cheap shot, make them pay for it. Score on the power play. Win the game. I’m not sure I need somebody getting five minutes for fighting just so we can all agree afterward that the Sabres “stood up for each other.”
Maybe this is maturity. Maybe I’ve gone soft.
Or maybe the best retaliation in hockey is finally having a power play that scares somebody.
—Memo to young broadcasters, media people, politicians or basically anyone who thinks there’s even a 1% chance they might become publicly known someday:
Delete your damn Twitter account before you get famous.
The Trail Blazers just hired Braiden Bell as their new TV play-by-play voice and then fired him hours later after old tweets resurfaced from 2012 and 2013, when he was around 15 years old. You work your entire career to land an NBA play-by-play job, get announced, probably have every relative you’ve ever met texting congratulations and before dinner, you’re fired because somebody scrolled back 14 years.
And that’s why I don’t understand why anyone keeps the same social media account they had as a teenager.
I am pretty positive that if you had Twitter, Instagram or Facebook at 15, you posted some terrible shit. Maybe not career-ending shit. Maybe just embarrassing, stupid, trying-too-hard-to-be-funny teenage shit. But probably something you don’t need sitting there forever waiting for somebody to discover it the second you get a big job.
There is zero historical value in preserving 40,000 tweets from sophomore year.
Delete it. Start a new account.
Leave your teenage opinions, awful jokes, subtweets, drunk pictures and whatever else you thought was hilarious buried in the same place as your old AIM screen name.
You do not need the engagement history that badly.
And apparently your future employer might eventually go looking anyway.
—-“We are fucked as a television industry” might still be an understatement.
Paramount swallowing Warner Bros. means another massive chunk of television, film and news is being consolidated under one roof. CBS News and CNN are about to have the same owner. HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount, CBS — all of it gets pulled closer together.
And if you work in television, you already know what comes next.
“Synergy.”
“Efficiency.”
“Streamlining.”
All corporate words that usually translate to: a lot of people are about to lose their jobs. Paramount is talking about billions of dollars in cost savings from this merger. You don’t find billions by changing the brand of coffee in the break room. You find it by eliminating departments, combining staffs, closing offices and telling five people that the job they used to do is now being handled by two.
And then there’s the news side of this.
Having fewer and fewer incredibly wealthy people controlling more and more of the places Americans get their news should make everyone uncomfortable regardless of your politics. That doesn’t automatically mean somebody is going to sit in a control room and dictate every story, but ownership matters. Who hires the executives matters. Who controls the budgets matters. Who decides which shows survive matters.
And of course all of this is happening weeks before an election, because apparently our media industry needed one more completely normal development.
I feel for everyone working at these companies because television has already spent years cutting jobs, shrinking staffs and asking everyone left behind to do three jobs.
Now a gigantic merger arrives promising billions more in savings.
So congratulations to everyone who survives.
You’ll probably get a terrible new supervisor, twice as much work and a mandatory town hall explaining how exciting this all is.
—As we get closer to election season, here’s something I would actually like to hear a politician in New York run on: fix Paid Family Leave for freelancers. For anyone who doesn’t know how New York Paid Family Leave works, the benefit itself is pretty damn good. You can get up to 12 weeks at 67% of your average weekly wage, with the maximum benefit in 2026 at a little over $1,200 a week. The problem is getting eligible for it in the first place.
If you work 20 hours or more a week, you generally have to work 26 consecutive weeks for the same employer.
That sounds perfectly reasonable if you work a normal full-time job where you stay with one company for years. It makes absolutely no fucking sense for television production.
Almost the entire production world is freelance. You get hired on a show for three months, four months, maybe six months if you get lucky. The show ends, your employment ends, and then you go find another show with another production company.
So I could work 13 straight weeks for one company, finish that show on Friday, start another 13-week job somewhere else on Monday and work 26 consecutive weeks without missing a paycheck.
And according to the system, that basically doesn’t count.
Why?
Because I changed employers.
That’s ridiculous.
I got Paid Family Leave when Andy was born by the skin of my teeth. I happened to work for the same company for about 27 weeks across three different projects. I barely made the cutoff.
Luke comes along and now I don’t qualify.
Not because I wasn’t working. Not because I wasn’t paying taxes. Not because I took six months off. Because my industry moves people from production company to production company every few months.
And television isn’t the only business where people work like this anymore.
If the entire point of Paid Family Leave is that parents should be able to spend time with a newborn without deciding between bonding with their kid and paying the electric bill, then eligibility should reflect how people actually work in 2026.
Make it 26 weeks of covered employment in New York during the previous 39 weeks. Let workers carry their eligibility from one covered employer to another. Figure out some version that doesn’t punish people simply because their industry operates on contracts.
Kathy Hochul, state legislators, whoever wants to put this on the agenda… there you go.
I don’t care what party fixes it.
Freelancers have kids too.
And telling somebody they can work six straight months, contribute to the system and still not qualify because their paycheck came from two different production companies is fucking malarkey.
Fix it.
—Moving Andy into the big-boy bed was actually a success. He loves his new bunk bed, where eventually Luke will sleep on the top bunk, or, more realistically, the two of them will have their own Royal Rumble to determine who gets it.
Of course, I’m still sleeping on the stupid floor until further notice, or at least until Andy falls asleep. So really, he got upgraded to a bunk bed and my sleeping situation somehow stayed exactly the same.
Then came Night 2 of the Big Boy Bed Era, when Andy fell out of bed.
So now I’ve surrounded the thing with pillows, jackets and then some more pillows, basically turning his bedroom into one giant toddler crash pad. This is where we officially enter the “be careful what you wish for” portion of parenting.
There has been one positive development: Andy has finally moved on from making me read his dorky science books every night. Unfortunately, they’ve been replaced by a Daniel Tiger audiobook that reads eight different books.
At first, this seemed great. Less work for Dad.
Except Andy refuses to follow along with the correct book. The narrator will be halfway through Daniel Goes to the Dentist while Andy is sitting there intensely studying the potty book like everything is perfectly normal.
Technically, bedtime is easier now. Somehow it also makes me feel like a worse parent because I’m basically outsourcing story time to Daniel Tiger while lying on the floor surrounded by jackets.
I’m not asking for much here.
I just want this kid to eventually pick up a Bills book or a Star Wars book so I can feel like I’ve accomplished something as a father.
—Thanks for reading and supporting Joe from Queens. If you enjoy the work, consider pledging or contributing through Venmo. Every bit helps me turn this into more of a business than a hobby. Have a good rest of the week and please don’t beep your horn at any cars.
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Leonhard's press conference was vastly superior to Brady's weird equivocation. Leonhard gave no BS answers and didn't try to hide what the media and the fans can see with their own eyes. Makes me think he may be able to turn around the Bills' defense after all.