Gregg Easterbrook is an NFL columnist like no other.
Who else writes game predictions in haiku? Or 8,000-word columns instead of 800? Or is as apt to offer commentary on gun control as on ball control?
Easterbrook, 70, grew up in the Town of Tonawanda, near the Kenmore line. And today his column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, makes a triumphant return – in all its idiosyncratic glory – after five years off.
TMQ debuted in Slate, the online magazine, in 2000. Since then it has run on ESPN.com and on NFL.com and in the New York Times, among other platforms. He put the column on hiatus following the 2018 season because he had book projects to do. Now it’s running on Easterbrook’s Substack.com page.
“I had four books I wanted to finish,” he says. “Two are now published, and two are complete for publication next year. So, having done the task I set for myself, I said, ‘Aah, what the heck, I’ll try TMQ again.’ ”
He grew up rooting for the Buffalo Bills but writes about the whole league in his column. Given that, does he still have a rooting interest in his old hometown team?
“Oh, of course,” he says. “I have a Buffalo Bills genetic defect.” (TMQ, in this case, stands for Tonawanda Man Quips.)
Easterbrook usually gets back for one Bills home game each year. He sits in Mary Wilson’s box. It is a friendship that goes back 25 years or so to when Mary’s husband, Ralph, read an opinion piece that Easterbrook wrote about him in U.S. News & World Report.
“It was the late 1990s, and everyone was worried Ralph was going to sell the Bills or move them to Los Angeles,” Easterbrook says. “When he committed to keeping the Bills in Buffalo, I wrote that this was a Jimmy Stewart moment – where you favor a small town and find out who really loves you. And he read that, liked it, and called me up to invite me to sit with him at a game. We discovered through a chain of coincidences that he had the same birthday as…
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