I could feel a restful night of slumber coming on. I had just watched the Bills and Chiefs play a fantastic football game against each other, and I was floating around my house on that particular kind of emotional high that a great football game can bring. I let the dog out, and while I stood waiting for her by the door I thought about all the great plays I had seen Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes make, and James Cook's heroic goal-line stretch, and Steve Spagnuolo calling one of history's greatest blitzes. The dog came back in, and I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I was looking forward to sleep, and couldn't wait to wake up this morning and resume thinking about how awesome that game was. While swishing my mouthwash, I idly took my phone out of my pocket and opened Twitter. That's when I saw this:
Why did he write that? Why did he use the phrase "composite matchups"? Surely he just means "nine games," right? He's trying to tell us that in their last nine games against the Bills, the Chiefs have outscored Buffalo 245-240. That's a pretty simple piece of information that I feel like I should be able to receive without staring at my phone and frowning for 120 seconds while mouthwash starts to burn a hole in my cheek.
My best guess is that Schefter felt like he needed to come up with a way to signal that those nine games have taken place across the regular season and postseason, and for some reason settled on the word "composite" to do that. "Combined" might have worked better there, but no descriptor was really necessary. The Chiefs have outscored the Bills 245-240 across their last nine matchups. See? Simple.
Schefter is no stranger to crafting odd word couplings that stick in the mind, and this one got deep in mine. I was now going to sleep agitated. I slept like shit, and had horrible dreams. In one of them, I was at an office building where I worked, waiting for an escalator malfunction to resolve itself so that I could go home. As I looked down at the large crowd of employees who were stuck standing on a broken escalator, the entire thing collapsed and I watched them fall to injury and death. I ran to the stairs to try and get down there to help them, but was soon lost in a labyrinthine office structure where two of my colleagues accosted me and tried to hit me with a shovel.
"Composite matchups" is the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning, and I am in a terrible mood.
