Buffaloes

The Bills open another season chasing what has eluded them for three decades: a run deep enough to end at a parade rather than a press conference explaining why it didn't. Josh Allen remains the answer to most questions asked of this roster, and the division has bent toward Orchard Park in recent years, with the club taking the AFC East title in four straight seasons through 2024.

That kind of sustained control of the East was unthinkable for long stretches of the franchise's history. The Bills reached the Super Bowl four times running, from the 1990 season through 1993, and lost all four — a run that still frames how the era of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed and Bruce Smith gets discussed. Before that group, the defining figure was O.J. Simpson, whose 1973 season, when he became the first back to rush for 2,000 yards, remains one of the individual feats the club points back to.

Rivalry with the New England Patriots has shaped much of the last twenty-five years in the East, sharpened lately by divisional meetings with Miami and the Jets that carry their own weight. Supporters travel and organise under the name Bills Mafia, a following that has attached itself to the team's identity as firmly as the charging buffalo on the helmet, a mark drawn from the same source as the franchise's name: Buffalo Bill Cody.

The club took that name and the charter membership that came with it on 28 October 1959, when Ralph C. Wilson Jr. brought Buffalo into the newly forming American Football League. Two AFL Championships followed in 1964 and 1965, won before the merger with the NFL in 1970 folded the league into the one the Bills have played in ever since.