When will the rest of the National Football League, teams and paid observers alike, learn? Just shut up.

Stop treating Week 1, Week 2 or even Week 10 of the regular season when you’re playing the New England Patriots as if it’s the be-all, end-all of your franchise’s existence.

Don’t advertise your hatred in the media, call Guinness to get a crowd-noise measurement or otherwise call attention to the scene when you haven’t been to the playoffs since Bill Clinton was president.

Refrain from the willy-nilly spending of $250 million on free agents as if the AFC East is fantasy football, without even momentarily stopping to consider how those skills will mesh on the field.

After seven days of “ain’t nobody likes the Patriots” and Rex Ryan repeating Bill Belichick’s name with his usual faux-reverential, obsequious, paranoid tenor, has there been a more satisfying regular-season victory since the turn of the century than Sunday’s 40-32 dismissal of the Bills?

Silly me. I didn’t think anything could top the 10-nights-ago nationally televised punishment of Pittsburgh, much to the chagrin of Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth and Roger Goodell, in the aftermath of a seven-month witch hunt.

But then the Bills clobbered the Colts at home (no great accomplishment, as the Patriots have calmly demonstrated a dozen times in the Brady-Belichick Era) and persistently flapped their gums about the opponent next in line.

The week of print and visual hyper-analysis didn’t help Buffalo’s cause. New Buffalo quarterback Tyrod Taylor, last seen as an understudy to decidedly sub-elite Joe Flacco in Baltimore, was verbally bronzed for his bust in Canton after one start.

How about all those shiny, new weapons around him, such as LeSean McCoy and locker-room virus Percy Harvin? And a defense that looked oh-so-stingy in 2014 garbage time was touted as an amalgam of the 1970s Steel Curtain and the 1985 Bears.

It’s all just a smoke screen, people. A haze of wishful thinking and bitter envy.

We’re not dealing with dummies, either. That’s the part that stuns me. Rex Ryan might project the image of Fred Flintstone-meets-Peter Griffin, but he’s a football lifer who understands the vagaries of the game in his sleep. Same goes for Steelers coach Mike Tomlin.

How they can be so inept at managing expectations and controlling the situation relative to Belichick, then, is mystifying. The rest of the league will never fully catch up with the Patriots until they normalize winning; when they stop building up September skirmishes to the level of January games.

The Bills rode the wave of emotion, adrenaline and all that intangible silliness while carving up the Patriots’ defense on the first series of the afternoon. They did the same in fighting back from a 24-point deficit after defensive back Aaron Williams was taken away in an ambulance. 

Credit for the former. Respect for the latter. In between, the Bills were … well … the same, old, overmatched Bills. And Ryan was the same beaten-before-he-put-on-the-headset guy in a differently toned oversized sweater vest.

Belichick’s record against the one who isn’t here to kiss the rings has been OK, as he succinctly pointed out this week. And see, that’s how you handle this foolishness. That’s how professionals act. 

Quickly and painlessly point out that you’ve been here before, and then go about the business of beating the team in front of you. On the field. Not on the bulletin board. Not during the free-agent signing frenzy.

That attention to detail is why the Patriots, a team that notoriously has lacked a pass rush in recent years, sacked Taylor eight times. Why McCoy was a non-factor. Why the Bills, despite their posturing and rodent-like scurrying between plays, couldn’t get within a Zip code of Brady or cover Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman if saving the franchise from moving to Toronto depended on it.

This is a big-boy game. Presidential debates and petty social media arguments may be won with sound bites, but NFL divisional rivalry games aren’t. Then again, I hesitate to call these rivalries, because that implies closeness of competition. Rivals find a way to keep you from winning your division 12 out of 14 years.

The occasional home-field win in the series notwithstanding, the Bills, like the Dolphins and Jets, continue to show that they are rivals in word only. Not in deed. Not in real time. With few exceptions, the Steelers, Colts, Broncos, etc., similarly fail to deliver.

Except when there’s a microphone or tape recorder pointed at their faces.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72 or like his fan page at www.facebook.com/kalleoakes.sj.

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