The Buffalo Bills: Founding, Heartbreak, and Four Super Bowls

The stadium you are passing in Orchard Park has gone through several names, but the team that plays here has one of the most singular identities in professional football. The Buffalo Bills were born in nineteen sixty as one of the charter members of the upstart American Football League, and the man who made it happen was Ralph Wilson, a Michigan insurance executive who stepped in when no one else would bankroll a team in western New York.

Wilson paid twenty-five thousand dollars for the franchise, which was considered a gamble. The other founding AFL owners were nicknamed the Foolish Club, and Wilson would be the last of them still active in the league when he died in two thousand fourteen at ninety-five. The Bills won back-to-back AFL championships in nineteen sixty-four and sixty-five before the league merged into the NFL in nineteen seventy.

The stadium itself opened in August of nineteen seventy-three as Rich Stadium, cost about twenty-two million dollars to build, and was completed in about sixteen months. It was renamed Ralph Wilson Stadium in nineteen ninety-eight in honor of the man who kept the team in Buffalo through decades of economic pressure.

The Bills reached their peak in the early nineteen nineties, when quarterback Jim Kelly led the team to four consecutive Super Bowls from nineteen ninety-one through nineteen ninety-four. They lost all four, a record of persistence and heartbreak no other franchise has matched. To Bills fans, those teams proved something: that western New York could compete with anyone. The wins just kept not coming.

The old stadium played its last game after the twenty twenty-five season. A new sixty-thousand-seat facility is being built directly across the street, and the original structure will be demolished. Ralph Wilson's name goes with the team, not the building.