Steve Kornacki on the Buffalo Bills and Doug Flutie.
Steve Kornacki has been a staple in many of our lives since November. If you don’t recognize his name, you’ll recognize the glasses, khaki pants and touch screen behind him on your television.
The voting-night specialist from the recent Presidential election has taken his talents to Football Night in America on Sunday’s during NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcasts. In that role, Kornacki has broken down all the playoff scenarios across the NFL for fans.
He’s a natural at it.
After his second-straight weekend appearance breaking down the postseason this past Sunday, Kornacki was a guest on Peter King’s podcast. King, an analyst for NBC Sports himself, got right to it with Kornacki. What is his background with football and the NFL?
Kornacki explained that growing up in Massachusetts he was a New England Patriots fan.
Yikes… we know.
But Kornacki did admit he was briefly a Buffalo Bills fan, too. When mentioning his favorite players in the past, Kornacki talked about a guy that bridges his Patriots-temporary Bills fandom: Doug Flutie.
Kornacki labeled Flutie as one of his favorite players and mentioned that Flutie’s magic in the 1988 NFL season hooked him. That year, Flutie went 6-3 under center for the Pats and they nearly made the playoffs.
Flash forward a decade, Flutie’s historic time with the Bills occurred after his CFL days. The ol’ Flutie or Rob Johnson debate. As you can probably guess by now, when the Bills latched onto Flutie in 1998, the Pats fan did still have a soft spot for him up in Buffalo.
Here’s how Kornacki broke it down with King:
“Well the one, for me, it was… my favorite player, all-time, will always be Doug Flutie. Because in there, in that period, was the (Patriots’) 1988 season. Flutie stepped in and there was a little bit of Flutie magic. (The Patriots) ended up missing the playoffs by one game. But they overachieved, he got them to 9-7. I think a lot of kids like me just became huge Doug Flutie fans and it was right after that, pretty much, when he went up to Canada. It just didn’t work out with the Pats.
And it was always this… you know, especially as the team descended in the next few years to the depths that it did, it was always like, ‘Boy, they shouldn’t have gotten rid of Doug Flutie, if only they had kept him… When he came back about a decade later, late 90s to the Bills and he had that basically two-year run there, I will say, I was kind of a Bills fan for those two years.”
Kornacki then went on to say something that… maybe wasn’t very nice to Buffalo. Kornacki admitted the Music City Miracle brought a huge smile to his face.
But, at least the guy is loyal. Kornacki explained being happy about the illegal forward-lateral had nothing to do with being a New Englander. It was completely because he wanted the Flutie-led Bills to keep churning along and we all know how Rob Johnson factored into that equation.
“I swear, he just made the team better… and they won,” Kornacki said. “It drove me crazy, and I remember the whole thing in Buffalo when he got benched right before the playoffs.
“(The Bills) looked at Rob Johnson and said, ‘This is an NFL quarterback, Doug Flutie, even though he’s won 20 games in two years here, is not a quarterback’ and no one was happier than me when the Music City Miracle happened.”
Hindsight is 20/20… but most of Bills Mafia will probably level with him there…
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