Bison

Buffalo met the Browns three times for the All-America Football Conference title and lost every time, including a 49–7 beating in both 1946 and 1947, and a further 42–13 defeat at Ebbets Field in 1948.

James Breuil, an oil company owner, put the franchise together in 1946 as one of the league's charter members, and the players wore Royal Blue, Silver and White. The name Bisons carried over from older Buffalo teams in baseball and hockey rather than from the city's defunct 1920s NFL side of the same name. It lasted one season. A fan contest in 1947 renamed the club the Buffalo Bills, after Buffalo Bill Cody, and the team played the rest of its existence under that name.

Red Dawson coached the Bisons in that first year, giving way to Clem Crowe by 1949. Quarterback George Ratterman set a rookie record with 22 touchdown passes in 1947 and led the league in completion percentage in 1949, while halfback Chet Mutryn topped the league in rushing in 1948 and made First-Team All-Pro in both 1948 and 1949. Buffalo drew an average of 26,000 fans a game in 1949, better than the NFL managed that year, but when the AAFC folded into the NFL for 1950, only Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore were let in. Breuil took a minority stake in the Browns instead, and Buffalo's team folded that December, eleven years before Ralph Wilson revived the Bills name for the American Football League. It started, in 1946, as the Bisons.