BUFFALO — The irony is off the charts.
A long-suffering franchise from arguably the NFL’s most blue-collar city is being led — perhaps back to the playoffs for the first time in over a decade — by a Harvard graduate who was nearly the second player ever to get a perfect Wonderlic score.
Ryan Fitzpatrick looks a little like actor Zach Galifianakis and shares the comedian’s quirky sense of humor, but even Hollywood couldn’t have imagined a script like the one the Buffalo Bills quarterback is writing these days.
“He’s the brainiac and the rest of us are a bunch of goons, but we don’t mind,” linebacker Shawne Merriman joked yesterday. “There’s no doubt Ryan’s a smart guy, but he’s proving he’s a heck of a player, too.”
Fitzpatrick’s numbers are indeed impressive, and we’re not just talking about the SAT scores that led to his Ivy League economics degree.
The journeyman and former seventh-round pick has emerged from nowhere to come into his own this season, and will lead the surprising Bills (4-1) into MetLife Stadium Sunday against the Giants as the second-ranked passer in the AFC behind Tom Brady.
It’s no longer outlandish to include Fitzpatrick in the same sentence as the Patriots’ certain first-ballot Hall of Famer, considering the Buffalo signal-caller is completing 66 percent of his passes and is on pace to throw for a career-high 4,000 yards and 32 touchdowns.
Fitzpatrick has good size (6-foot-2, 225 pounds), a relatively strong arm and is mobile (he was the only quarterback to run for more than 1,000 career yards at Harvard), yet the Rams, Bengals and even the Bills at one point considered him little more than an afterthought.
If anything, Fitzpatrick said this week that his Harvard degree worked against him in the NFL — especially after he scored 48 (50 is perfect) on the predraft Wonderlic intelligence test.
“In any other line of work where you talk to them about a job, having a Harvard degree is obviously a huge deal,” said Fitzpatrick, who breezed through the Wonderlic in just nine minutes and left one question blank on purpose. “But in the NFL, they go, ‘Harvard? Well . . .’ ”
It took the confidence of the man Fitzpatrick will try to beat Sunday — Giants defensive coordinator Perry Fewell — for the Phoenix-area native to finally overcome that reverse discrimination.
Fewell was promoted to interim head coach with the Bills in the middle of the 2009 season, and one of his first moves after taking over for Dick Jauron was to replace Trent Edwards with Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick showed flashes the second half of that season and in Chan Gailey’s debut last year, but it has been sustained brilliance this year as the Bills try to make reach the playoffs for the first time since 1999.
The quarterback is getting a big assist from the emergence of running back Fred Jackson, but the Bills are potent through the air, too. Fitzpatrick has thrown for 1,233 yards and 10 touchdowns while suffering just four interceptions, and his 96.4 rating through five games is second in the AFC behind Brady’s 109.5.
“I thought Ryan was an excellent quarterback when we had him there and I thought that he was the better quarterback,” Fewell said yesterday. “That’s why I played him and [why] he was the starter. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s doing what he’s doing.”
Nor does it surprise Fitzpatrick, who has believed in himself as a pro football player since his coach at Harvard convinced him to attend the Manning family passing camp in Louisiana in 2004 to see how he stacked up against football-factory quarterbacks.
Aside from getting the Bills back to the postseason, Fitzpatrick’s biggest wish now is that his famed alma mater become just a footnote in a stellar NFL career.
“It’s the same questions over and over again about me being a Harvard guy and about the Bills being no-names,” Fitzpatrick said. “I don’t mind the Harvard thing, but I wish it wasn’t the first thing people talked about.”
If Fitzpatrick keeps this up, he might soon get his wish.