By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Scott Norwood – Signed by the Bills in 1985

The United States Football League was mighty good to the Bills. They scooped up a lot of important refugees when that league dissolved. Scott Norwood was one of the finds.

Norwood played college football at James Madison, and then joined the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL in 1983. He lasted a little more than a year, converting on about 75 percent of his field goals. Then he was let go. The Bills signed him to a contract for the 1985 season, and he replaced Joe Danelo in the starter’s spot. His best season might have been in 1988, when he converted on 32 of 37 field goals and was picked for the Pro Bowl.

Sadly, Norwood is best remembered for his missed kick in Super Bowl XXV, which was a little out of his range. Scott never even kicked a 50-yarder in his career until his final season as a Bill, which was in 1991. He made a lot of clutch kicks for some good teams before and after that famous miss, and perhaps we should remember those as well.

Here’s some alternative history:

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(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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