Len Pasquarelli has a nice piece up about Buffalo Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who remains anonymous after a 3000-yard season—with 23 touchdowns against 15 interceptions—as the surprise starter in 2010. Fitzpatrick is best known, if he's known at all, for his Harvard degree and near-perfect-score on the Wonderlic test, but there is one group to whom he will always be a celebrity: Fans of the final moments of Mike Martz's career as an unstoppable offensive mad scientist.
↵Of all the implausible things that happened to the Rams in those years, perhaps the craziest was in 2005 when Fitzpatrick, a third-stringer and rookie, came into a November game after Jamie Martin left with an injury and won a high-scoring overtime game with the Houston Texans by going 19-for-30 with 310 yards and three touchdowns. Already that season Marc Bulger, a similarly unheralded rookie, had emerged as an outstanding quarterback in his own right out of the shadow of Kurt Warner; at that moment it seemed almost like Mike Martz could make any quarterback into a high-yardage dumb terminal for the delivery of his ridiculous offense.
↵Then, of course, he was terrible the rest of the year and Martz got himself fired.
↵I was excited to see Ryan Fitzpatrick emerge as the emergency starter for the Bills, and even more excited when he put together some games that rivaled that inexplicable rookie performance. He might not be final proof of Mike Martz's mad genius, but he is, it turns out, pretty good.
↵