By CHUCK POLLOCK , Wellsville Sun Senior Sports Columnist
When the Super Bowl ends on the second Sunday of February, it seems there’s a long wait until the National Football League re-enters our mental awareness.
Not so.
This year Indianapolis’ NFL Combine ran from Feb. 27 to March 2. Then came the Draft in Green Bay from April 24-26.
Suddenly the Bills’ rookie minicamp for draftees and undrafted signees comes up this Friday with voluntary Organized Team Activities (OTAs) booked for consecutive Tuesdays (May 27 and June 3) followed by mandatory minicamp, June 10-13.
Finally, in late July, Buffalo will commence training camp at Pittsford’s St. John Fisher University though the exact dates have yet to be announced.
AT THIS point in the NFL year teams are permitted a 90-player roster right through the first cutdown in late August. Currently, the Bills are one light of that figure with 68 veterans, 12 undrafted players and nine draftees.
That 90 figure exists until teams must cut to the regular-season limit of 53 on Aug. 27.
THIS COMING season, the Buffalo News will be without Bills beat writer Mark Gaughan who retired following the draft after 43 years on the job.
When I met him, I’d been covering the Bills since 1973 and he wasn’t far from graduation at Buffalo State. But from the first meeting, it was clear to me that was Mark was a genuine quality human being.
When I started at the Times Herald, the Buffalo Courier-Express and Buffalo Evening News were fierce rivals, one claiming the morning, the other afternoons. But when the C-E folded that competitiveness did too. I was never part of it as, sequestered 65 miles away at a medium-market paper, I was no threat to them.
But Jay Skurski, the current lead Bills writer for the News who wrote a glowing tribute to Mark, called him a “mentor,” and that resonated with me. When I started, my mentor was Larry Felser, one of the most respected NFL writers in the country. He taught me the business, took me to classy road restaurants where he always seemed to know the owner and introduced me to the likes of Raiders legend Al Davis and fiery Colts general manager Joe Thomas.
Mark eventually served as president of the Pro Football Writer’s Association and, as a Hall-of-Fame voter, was instrumental in the selection of Joe DeLamielleure, James Lofton and Andre Reed.
He was transfixed by statistics even before analytics and was so pleasant and approachable it never bothered me to ask him, “Do you have anything on this?” And he invariably did.
I’ve always been proud to call Mark a friend and, like everybody else in that media room, we’ll miss him.
YOU CAN expect the Bills preseason schedule probably within the next week or so as the league will release the entire league schedule on May 14 on the NFL Network.
This year the Bills, who have nine regular-season home games, have only one preseason (don’t call it an exhibition) meeting at home and two on the road.
In case you’ve forgotten, Buffalo’s home games are division foes Miami, New England and the Jets, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay and New Orleans. Hardly a soft schedule.
The Bills road games are the three AFC East foes plus Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Houston.
(Chuck Pollock, a Wellsville Sun and Olean Star senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@wnynet.net.)
