**Opening** Hello fellow prognosticators…and farewell? This is probably my last season writing ‘Predict the Score!’. The changes this site made are great for the site but bad for fans who like to post and desire engagement. I’m done offering suggestions for how to improve the feed for fan created content. They received all the feedback from everyone for 2 years now and have decided to keep things the way they are for a myriad of reasons. We now live in the less than 12-hour cycle for sports content, which is great if you like to consume lots of little trinkets of information about your favorite team, and not great if you want consistent reliable post contributions. PtS was always just a gap-filler, recalling the age-old practice of guessing the football scores that I would read in the Sunday morning papers, which only exist online now and most probably behind a paywall anyway these days. I get it, time moves on, time for me too. So, enjoy my final year of observational witticism, movie posters where I super-impose familiar faces from our beloved team in a way that only makes sense to me, and getting stabbed with intelligent game-day information about the game. Ok, Stabby can do whatever he wants to next year, but if The Shiv lives on, it will most probably be outside of this post. I truly do treasure the little community within the Rumblings community at large that we created here. For not the first time (unfortunately), I get to say “you were right, COVID20”. I’m not mad or sad or bitter-- parting is such a sweet sorrow, after all. All that said, we have a game coming up! Time to get tap into your mystical reverie powers to predict the score for this week’s game! If you’re new to this weekly regular season post, and want a quick run-down---just drop a guess of the final game score in the comments, I will officially announce the winner in the next week’s post, if you guess against the Bills (totally allowable), you may be mocked by GIF’s. Try to have fun with your guesses, comments, GIF’s, mine usually relate somehow to the hype movie poster I created, or sometime to a specific random line in my post, but you can do whatever you want, while always knowing that the mods are lurking and may delete a comment if they think it too offensive, and with Gen Z moderating, pretty much everything is seen as offensive. They were offended that I just said that. If you win, you get immortalized on the Wall of Winners for a week---a wall if you can call it that, because it certainly isn’t one continuous wall, but a hodge podge of whatever pops into my head at the time…
**Week One, Texans host Bills:** The Battle of the Chattel. Buckle up because we get high octane matchups shooting out of the starting gate this year. Before the Bills get to roam into their new home, they stampede over the fences into Texas to visit the Texans in what looks like a fantastic matchup on paper. Will our new Defense rise to the test? By all accords (ok, by my accord), they passed the eye-test this preseason. Will Josh and Cook come out swinging? Let’s hope so. If we don’t give the Texans short fields from turnovers I think we come out on top.
**Bills 32, Texans, 22:** Bills come out firing from the hip and notch an impressive Scorigami-win to start the season. Josh has a banger of a day, with 320 yards, 2 passing TDs, 1 INT, 1 Rushing TD. Cook breaks an impressive run in the red zone to hit the end zone.
**The Shiv: Week One** Buffalo travels to Reliant Stadium to take on the Houston Texans. It seems like the National Media has already penciled this in as auto loss for the Bills. I honestly wonder why?
Offense: Early season games are hard to predict due to small sample size. The biggest factor will be **limiting procedural penalties** that put the offense behind schedule and allow the best dline in football to pin its ears back. Brady will need to **give Josh a dump off** **option** and **use two tight end sets** to help with Anderson and Hunter. Josh needs to process quickly and take what’s there. No first game sugar rush antics**. Don’t get cute**, **stick to the ground game** even if it’s slow in the beginning. Limiting possessions for the Texans will make CJ Stroud have to speed up his tempo to try to play catch up. **Take the field goals**. Points should be at a premium. Oh, and **don’t turn it over**.
Defense: Jim’s new look 3/4 needs to start hot by putting **pressure on Stroud**. Luckily for Buffalo, that Texans OLine is bad. If Buffalo can **get home with its front** it’s going to be a long day for the Texans offense. David Montgomery presents a challenge, but I’m not really worried about the Texans aerial attack. CJ Stroud has regressed terribly in recent years so I suspect there will be a lot of screens and dump offs out of a power play action set. Again, **attack that Oline**, and when you get a shot you have to **make your tackles**.
**Buffalo 20/ Texans 10**
This is going to be a slugfest. With all due respect to the Texans defense, last year’s Buffalo loss was a product of Buffalos inability to stop the run, a Dawkins concussion and Spencer Brown playing with one good arm; poor coaching by not taking the FGs when they could have really hamstrung that last drive.
Buffalo picks Stroud twice and sacks him four times.
Buffalo keeps Josh clean and throw a major blow into the National Media and Vegas sports books plans.
As always, our QB is 17x better than theirs. **Go Bills.**
**Hype Poster:** The blockbuster movie of the summer makes it as the inaugural hype poster of the season. Did I have a wasted childhood playing with these dolls action figures and watching the TV show religiously? I don’t think so. Do I now watch those stupid reels of Skeletor telling us to remember things until we meet again? Of course. Hopefully you do too, it will make you a better person. First timers to get some poster love include Tommy Dorman (not counting the special edition rookie poster I do for no reason), whose beautiful punts will pin the Texans all the way back to Snake Mountain, and CJGJ, who will make his presence felt with a fantastic interception and several key defensive plays throughout. Beer and Wings on me boys…welcome aboard.
**Closing:** As always, this weekly feature is best with more participation, so come on and join in the fun! Remember, if this post disappears off The Feed quickly, you can usually bring it back by clicking _most recs_ or _most replies_ up at the top of the feed. Or you can be a maniac and copy the post link directly and then you can just go right to it from your browser instead of hitting the main page first. I always take poster recommendations as a nice challenge if you have one, even the weird movies I’ve never heard of. Thanks for all your contributions over the years and **_happy prognosticating!_**
**Wall of Winners: TBD**