Photo: Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The one thing everybody knows about the Buffalo Bills is that they lost four Super Bowls in a row, from 1990-93. The most famous loss was after a missed field goal by Scott Norwood against the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV. It was so traumatizing to Bills fans that, seven years later, Buffalo native Vincent Gallo made a movie called Buffalo ’66 about a man who dedicates his life to murdering a kicker named “Scott Wood” who missed a field goal to cost the Buffalo Bills the Super Bowl. What people tend to forget is what happened with the Bills over the next 25 years: Nothing.
From 1994 (the year of Bills’ last Super Bowl loss) to 2018 (the year they drafted Josh Allen, their All-Pro quarterback who is going to win the MVP this year and has been justifiably anointed as the franchise and region’s savior), the Bills won exactly one (1) playoff game, the next season, in 1995, before losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers the next week. Then the Bills went 25 years, exactly 9,149 days, without winning another playoff game. Whenever Bills fans are discussed, it’s always in the context of those four Super Bowl losses. But Bills fans watched their team be miserable for 25 years after that. The Bills’ pain was so profound for 20 years that losing four straight Super Bowls — basically the worst thing that can happen to a fanbase — was as good as it got.
Then Josh Allen — a future Hall of Famer, a transcendent player, the sort of quarterback every fanbase dreams of — arrived. And somehow it has gotten worse.
On Sunday night, the Bills’ misery reached an audaciously torturous new level, and the only way I suspect Bills fans could make it through it was by telling themselves that they saw it coming all along — and of course being right. Despite playing a fantastic game, despite putting together a second half that they mostly dominated, despite being one of the best teams in football for the fifth straight season, despite absolutely deserving a win as much as they ever have… the Bills lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game. Again.
It was nothing Allen did, or the Bills did, or — despite the usual, tired caterwauling on social media — anything the referees did. It was the same thing it always is: Patrick Mahomes. Every time the Bills would do something amazing (as Allen regularly did, including a dazzling fourth-down touchdown to tie the game in the fourth quarter), the Chiefs, and specifically Mahomes, would do something amazing in response (including a game-clinching first-down run as the Chiefs ran out the clock). If that sounds familiar, well, I could have written the same thing the last three seasons. The Bills have now lost to the Chiefs in four of the last five years, with the last three losses being by a combined 12 points. Allen joins the Ravens’ Lamar Jackson — who has won two MVPs himself and was Allen’s main competition for this year’s trophy — as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history who may never win a Super Bowl, simply because he keeps running into Mahomes. It is a cruel fate for Allen, who, like his team’s fans, deserves so much better. But deservedness ain’t got nothing to do with it.
Because everyone is sick of the Chiefs, there was the rush after the Bills’ loss to blame the referees, or to construct elaborate conspiracy theories that the fix was in for the Chiefs. (QBAnon?) The predicating incident for this, other than being pissed that the Chiefs won again, which I am sympathetic to, was a fourth-down call in the fourth quarter in which Allen may or may not have crossed the imaginary first-down line. The call on the field was that he hadn’t reached the line, which was as reasonable as a call that said that he had. It was so close that it was impossible to tell either way on replay, let alone in real time — which is why the call was not overturned, as opposed to, say, because Big NFL wants Taylor Swift in a skybox in New Orleans in two weeks. (For what it’s worth, Buffalo reaching the Super Bowl would have arguably been a bigger story than the Chiefs reaching it anyway.) The Bills had multiple opportunities to win this game both before and after that play, and Mahomes and the Chiefs’ defense kept one-upping them, as they have time and time again. In the game’s actual most important play that came a few minutes later, the Chiefs brilliantly disguised a blitz that forced Allen to chuck a fourth-down heave down the field, one that, because Allen is also brilliant, was this close to being a first-down anyway. How close? This close:
Kincaid replay pic.twitter.com/v2Arb8ZXid
— CJ Fogler 🫡 (@cjzero) January 27, 2025
That inch right there, the difference between winning and losing, is what has happened over and over to the Bills every time they face the Chiefs. It’s what happens when two great teams face each other, as they have four out of the last five years. And it keeps going against the Bills. This is the glory of having Mahomes and coach Andy Reid and that kismet the Chiefs keep finding, the way the sun always seems to be shining on them and only them. Mahomes now has the opportunity to do something that Tom Brady never did, that Joe Montana never did, that no one has ever done: He can win a third consecutive Super Bowl. And the Bills and their fans have to scream into a mirror for the next 11 months once more … until they have to do it all again next January.
Back in January 2018, I wrote about the Georgia football team’s gut-wrenching last-second loss to Alabama in the College Football National Championship game. It one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen done to a fanbase: pure elation, decades of torture seconds away from being released, suddenly snatched away in the most sadistic possible way. The only humane way to cover it was to speak to Georgia fans as if they had just been in a terrifying automobile accident, and to tell them, as dazed and broken as they might be at that moment, that someday they will heal, that this will be something in their past, something that made them stronger. After seeing this happen to the Bills again, I’m afraid I don’t have the stomach to offer that sort of solace this time.
Bills fans have now suffered the worst things a fanbase can suffer three different times in three entirely different ways. They’ve come to the cusp of glory four straight years only to fall short each time; they’ve spent decades in the wilderness watching a lousy and irrelevant team; then, worst of all, they’ve been given a savior meant to deliver them from all that who, it turns out, keeps bumping up into an even bigger savior on another team. It’s monstrous that this keeps happening to Bills fans. I would love to say, like I did to Georgia fans, that someday this will all be worth it. But it probably won’t be. It will probably just hurt worse next time.
