The 2009 Buffalo Bills: What Did You Really Expect?

Fired a week before the start of the season as the Bills' offensive coordinator, an angry and confused Turk Schonert said the problem in Buffalo was that coach Dick Jauron wanted "a Pop Warner offense" -- an offensive playbook as simple and uncreative as possible, and that Schonert's schemes were too complicated to fit in with Jauron's plan.

Now five weeks in to the season, having committed nine (NINE!) false start penalties Sunday in losing one of the worst offensive games in sports history to the previously winless Browns, the Bills are playing as if to prove Schonert right.

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To this point in 2009, Buffalo's has been the kind of offense that makes you contemplate man's inhumanity to man. They are 25th in the league in yards per game, 26th in points per game, 28th in third-down conversions, 29th in first downs and 31st in time of possession. All of this in spite of an array of skill-position talent that includes Terrell Owens, Lee Evans, Fred Jackson and, for the last two games, Marshawn Lynch. A group like that should be able to move the ball and score, but it can't. And while it's easy to lay it all at the feet of the unimaginative Jauron or "Captain Checkdown" QB Trent Edwards, the big problem with the Bills is the five great big guys up front. With an offensive line like this, how can they possibly be good?

"I said it last week and I'll say it again this week -- this is a low point for the organization and for the fan base," Bills GM Russ Brandon said after Sunday's fiasco. "We worked our tails off in the off-season to put us in a position that should be better than where we are now."

But with all due respect to Brandon, his pain and the amusing accuracy of the first part of his quote, we must respectfully disagree with the second. The Bills may well have done some hard offseason work in certain areas, but they obviously ignored the offensive line. The result is a patchwork mess that is costing their offense any chance to operate.

This isn't to let Jauron or Edwards off the hook, as neither is without his flaws. But when you're playing behind an offensive line that still needs to hand out "Hi, my name is..." stickers in its meetings, you're not set up to succeed.

"It's frustrating, because we have guys who know the snap count, we know the cadence and we were trying to use that as a weapon," Edwards said of the Sunday penalty-fest. "Their D-line, we saw on tape, tended to jump offsides a little bit, so we were using some hard counts and some quick counts as well. For some reason or another we weren't set."

It could be because the offensive line, as a group, hasn't played together long enough to get into sync. Of the five starting Bills offensive linemen from Sunday's game, only one -- center Geoff Hangartner -- played a single NFL game in 2008. And he played it for the Carolina Panthers. Starting tackles Demetrius Bell and Jonathan Scott were members of the Bills organization, but neither one suited up for a single 2008 game. And starting guards Eric Wood and Andy Levitre were playing for Louisville and Oregon State, respectively.

Last year's line? Gone. Set out on the curb like fallen leaves. Left tackle Jason Peters, a 13-game starter in 2008, was traded to the Eagles. Langston Walker, who started 16 games at right tackle last year, was cut a couple of days after Schonert was. Left guard Derrick Dockery was released and is a Redskin. Right guard Brad Butler? Out for the year with a knee injury. And last year's center, Duke Preston, is a Dallas Cowboy.

The result is a lack of continuity at a position where continuity matters more than anything. The best counter-example at this point is the New York Giants, who have started the same offensive linemen and quarterback for 37 games in a row and whose offense runs like a Patek Philippe. The Bills are going with an old digital Seiko they put together themselves, and the result is that the Saints get sacks on plays where they rush only three defenders and the Browns get a free win thanks to nine false starts

"I don't know what to tell you about it," Hangartner said. "It's inexcusable and we've got to do something to change it. We are killing ourselves. We are putting ourselves in bad down-and-distance with the negative plays because of the penalties, and we just can't have it."

But they do have it. They have a big old mess in Buffalo, and the biggest reason seems to be that they have obviously ignored the most crucial foundation aspect of their offense. There's nothing that can fix this except the time this offensive line needs to play together and learn each other. And unfortunately for the 2009 Bills and their lame-duck coach, the 11 games left in this season aren't enough time for that.