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ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — During the Buffalo Bills’ playoff drought, ESPN anchor Kevin Connors used to have a running joke on air. Connors, a lifelong Bills fan from Long Island, would refer to the Bills as America’s Team. It would elicit a laugh from his co-anchor, one baked in sympathy for Connors and the other fans enduring the slog of 6-10 and 7-9 seasons.
Now, though? Connors looks like he was on to something.
“They really have kind of become America’s team,” Connors said this week ahead of Buffalo’s latest playoff clash with the Kansas City Chiefs.
America loves the story of it. America loves an underdog, but I think they really respect a team that has been there, was bad forever, built it up, gotten pretty good and just keeps getting up off the mat. There’s a level of respect for that.
It’s not easy to quantify the country’s rooting interest in any particular postseason. BetOnline attempts to do so based on geotagged data from X posts to see how many posts with the official team hashtags are coming from each state. Earlier in the playoffs, their data showed that half of the states in the country were rooting for the Detroit Lions, another franchise that hasn’t ever reached the mountaintop. But the Washington Commanders, a feel-good story in their own right, eliminated the Lions last week. The other remaining NFC team is the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that has won a Super Bowl recently and has a fan base that doesn’t have the coziest reputation. And then there’s the Chiefs, who have won two straight Super Bowls and been to three of the last four. The Bills are the only team left in the field without a Super Bowl win.
People get tired of seeing the same thing over and over, said Bills guard Conor McGovern, who played for the Dallas Cowboys, the team traditionally referred to as America’s team. That’s probably why people are rooting for us. They see us as the underdog.
The Bills aren’t exactly David against Goliath. They’ve been to the playoffs six straight seasons, won a playoff game in five straight seasons and have three 13-win seasons in their last six. Josh Allen is one of the best quarterbacks in the league and arguably the most exciting to watch.
But this is also a team and a fan base that has been repeatedly kicked in the shins. Forget about the four straight Super Bowl losses in the 1990s or even the 17-season playoff drought, both gut-wrenching in their own ways. Throw out the fact that this region, one of the smallest markets in professional sports, has never experienced a Super Bowl or a Stanley Cup championship. Even without that history as a backdrop, this version of the Bills has built up its own scar tissue. As the Bills became a fixture in national television games in recent years, their lowest moments were on display for the football-watching public. The football world felt the collective anguish of a fan base during Buffalo’s 13-second loss to Kansas City. Home playoff losses to the Cincinnati Bengals and Chiefs in the divisional round the last two seasons have made it easy for people outside of Buffalo to wonder how fans keep getting back up.
And all of that on-field sorrow seems trivial when you consider the non-football adversity the team and community have endured. In 2022, the country rallied around the Bills when Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and nearly died. That same year Buffalo endured tragedy when a racist shooter murdered 10 people and wounded three others at a supermarket in the city’s east side. A devastating Christmas blizzard left 47 people dead in 2022. Too often, the country’s window into Buffalo is centered around struggle.
The Bills have a chance to change that like they did for three hours on Sunday during a thrilling divisional round win against the Baltimore Ravens.
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