Is This The Year The Buffalo Bills Achieve Playoff Redemption?
When it comes to sports heartbreak, few can match the agony endured by fans of teams hailing from Buffalo. Their dedication to their teams, especially the NFL’s Bills, could arguably be described as one of the most passionate of any fanbase in North American sports. This is especially true when one considers how their history is littered with examples of painful disappointment.
The most famous examples of this, of course, would be the experience of the Bills teams of the early 1990s, a powerhouse in the American Football Conference led by coach Marc Levy, quarterback Jim Kelly, and in the Super Bowl, beginning in 1991 and ending in 1994. No other team in North American sports has made it to within one game of a championship that many consecutive times, and it has become the quintessential reference to make by sports pundits whenever they describe a team that fails over and over again in the playoffs.
Unfortunately for Bills fans, the years after those failed Super Bowl attempts would make them long for the days when they at least came within an arm’s length of holding up the Lombardi Trophy. The team would transition from perennial also-ran to perennial disappointment- although the team would still make some postseason appearances led by Kelly’s successor at quarterback, Doug Flutie, they would fail to win a game in that era.
To add insult to injury, one of the Bills’ losses during this period would go down as one of the most iconic in modern sports history- the “Music City Miracle.” With a late lead against the Tennessee Titans, the Bills kicked off, and the Titans then executed multiple lateral passes (including one that Bills fans to this day insist was an illegal forward pass), in order to set up a return of the ball for a kickoff and win the game as time on the clock expired.
This marked the descent of the Bills into a period of ever-increasing futility, as the team would continually miss the playoffs again and again after the “miracle” (which Bills fans refer to by their own nicknames such as “The Forward Lateral” and “The Immaculate Deception”. Head coaches would come and go unsuccessfully, even ones who were hired with previous playoff success, such as Rex Ryan. The team posted nine consecutive losing seasons between 2005 and 2014, with the organization clearly being in need of a top to bottom overhaul.
That overhaul would begin with a 2014 change in ownership upon the death of longtime owner Ralph Wilson. The team was then sold to natural gas billionaire and Buffalo native Terry Pegula and his wife Kim, who promised to bring winning football back to the city. Although their first major hire (Ryan as head coach) would not work out, their second attempt at an overhaul seems to have finally given the Bills the right team in place on and off the field in order to reinvigorate the franchise.
These first signs of success came in 2017, as the Bills brought in Sean McDermott as head coach and Brandon Beane as general manager. McDermott and Beane both came from the Carolina Panthers organization, which over the previous decade had seen a great deal more success than Buffalo, most notably a trip to the Super Bowl in 2016 (although they lost to the Denver Broncos). The Bills finished that first year under the new regime 9–7, only their second winning season in the preceding decade, and more importantly, made the postseason for the first time in eighteen years, since the Music City defeat.
The Bills would fall short in that first game back in the playoffs, losing a defensive slugfest to the Jacksonville Jaguars. The following season saw something of a step back, as the team would finish 6–10 and fall back out of the playoff picture. But at the 2018 draft, the team would end up acquiring that all-important key to NFL success it had not had in decades- an elite quarterback.
Josh Allen, drafted seventh overall out of the University of Wyoming, was seen as a risky selection- possessing elite physical tools but question marks around whether or not those could translate to the NFL. Allen’s first season showed he had room for improvement, but also showed flashes of his potential as a dual threat, leading the team in rushing yards. This was the first time in history that a Bills quarterback had done so.
In 2019, it became clear that Beane and McDermott were trying to build the Bills along the blueprint that their old Panthers team had been constructed around- and with successful results once again in Buffalo. That year, Buffalo’s defense took the next step into being one of the NFL’s best, just as the Panthers’ had been in their Super Bowl year. And Allen began to show even more signs of developing into the kind of terrifying dual threat quarterback that onetime Panther star Cam Newton had been in his prime.
And this season, in 2020, Allen took yet another step and has become a full fledged MVP candidate as a quarterback for Buffalo, proving his doubters wrong in spectacular fashion. McDermott and Beane also made smart trades in order to give Allen more weapons to work with, such as acquiring star wide receiver Stefon Diggs. The result is that, on December 19, Buffalo clinched its first division title since 1995 with a resounding win against the Denver Broncos, with Allen the star of the show.
Of course, two important milestones remain to be conquered by the Bills. Their postseason drought stands at twenty-five years, and if they fail to deliver a victory this time, their fans may yet grumble that not much has actually changed since the bad old days. And of course, there remains the elusive Super Bowl crown, one that some of the biggest names in sports punditry are starting to predict that Buffalo can actually win. McDermott and Beane were part of building an outstanding Super Bowl runner-up in Carolina, but that will not be enough for Buffalo’s long-suffering fans- nothing short of going all the way will suffice.
