Around 12:30 on Saturday afternoon, Bills PR chief Derek Boyko was behind the wheel with team COO Ron Raccuia sitting shotgun, the two having just navigated a circumstance they’d probably never anticipated encountering in their careers in professional football. The 77 inches a three-day winter storm dumped on the Southtowns region of the Buffalo suburbs was mostly on the ground by then, and they’d just picked up a stranded member of the team’s traveling party. The Bills were scheduled to leave for Detroit at 3 p.m.
When I asked Raccuia and Boyko which was the steepest hurdle in a week full of them, the answer was academic.
“Getting Dion Dawkins from his house,” the COO responded.
I laughed, knowing Dawkins, the team’s 6'5", 320-pound left tackle, was sitting right there in the backseat.
“It’s really not a joke,” Boyko then said, “if you were in the car with us, you would know.”
Dawkins added: “I’d not left my house. I’d been in the house the whole time, me and my kids and my lady, we've just been watching how bad it’s been. We couldn’t honestly believe how it just kept coming down and coming down and coming down.”
A sliding door on the side of Dawkins’s house had been sealed shut behind a wall of snow and, if he’d not had a small, elevated patio, with steps that spared one door from the worst of the accumulation, he’d have had an even harder time getting out. “If my back door was my front door,” he said, “it would’ve been impossible.”
Worse, getting to the neighborhood where Dawkins lived proved just as tough as it was for Dawkins to get himself out of the house. On their way there, Boyko and Raccuia encountered a jackknifed tractor trailer in an area that, Boyko says, “tractor trailers shouldn’t be driving in.” They never got an explanation for why the 18-wheeler was there, but they did get Dawkins to the plane.
About 70 minutes later, all the Bills were present and accounted for at the team’s practice facility, in the parking lot of Highmark Stadium, to board buses for the short trip to the airport. The buses left 15 minutes late, at 3:15, and a ride that normally takes 20 minutes took 45 due to a closed interstate. The Delta charter was wheels up just before 5 and landed at 6:10 in Detroit. About 26 hours later, at 8:20 on Sunday, the Bills were back in Buffalo, with a short week ahead and a return trip to Detroit less than 72 hours away.
Oh, and the Bills arrived home with a 31–23 win over the Browns. And a lot of amazing stories.
