Bills

For years the division ran through Foxborough, and Buffalo's task each autumn was to find a way past a team that had already worked out how to beat them.

Ralph Wilson put the franchise together on 28 October 1959, one of the original clubs in the American Football League, and ran it himself until he died in 2014. Terry and Kim Pegula bought the team that year for roughly $1.4 billion; in December 2024 the league signed off on selling a 20.6 percent stake to a group that included Arctos and Accel-KKR.

The early Bills won back-to-back AFL titles, beating the San Diego Chargers 20–7 in 1964 and 23–0 in 1965. The team they are better remembered for came decades later: Marv Levy's Bills, with Jim Kelly at quarterback, reached four straight Super Bowls from 1990 to 1993, a run no other NFL club has matched. They lost every one of them, closest in the first, against the Giants, and by a wider margin each time after.

Josh Allen, the current quarterback, was drafted in 2018 and has carried the franchise back into contention, though the thing Kelly's teams reached four times running and Allen's have not yet touched is a Super Bowl win itself.