The Buffalo Bills have a handful of the NFL’s most exciting players, are fueled by a heartbreaking playoff loss last season and are the overwhelming favorites to end one of the most famous championship droughts in sports.
“It’s a good story,” Chicago Cubs manager David Ross said.
Ross — and the rest of his teammates on the curse-busting 2016 Cubs — would know, better than perhaps anyone else in American sports.
The Bills head into tonight’s game against the Tennessee Titans in the rarest of early-season spots as both the unquestioned sentimental and logical favorite to win the championship.
After falling to the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game following the 2020 season and in the AFC Divisional Round in January — in a game that will forever be known for “13 Seconds,” the amount of time it took for Kansas City to drive for the game-tying score that forced overtime — and adding two-time Super Bowl winner Von Miller to their defense, the Bills opened the season as +600 favorites at BetMGM and +550 at DraftKings to win it all.
“One of the best games I think I’ve seen in a long time,” Ross said of the Bills-Chiefs rematch. “(Josh) Allen’s the real deal.”
The Bills have never won the Super Bowl and haven’t won a championship since winning the AFL in 1965 — one year before the Super Bowl debuted and pitted the champions of the AFL and NFL.
“Do we have the team? One hundred percent,” said Bills wide receiver Stefon Diggs, the favorite target for video game quarterback Allen, during training camp.
Then the Bills went out and further cemented those internal and external beliefs by routing the defending Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams 31-10 in the season opener Sept. 8.
The convincing week one win has made almost everyone else in the AFC afterthoughts — including the Cincinnati Bengals (+1600 odds to win the AFC at DraftKings), who fell to the Rams in Super Bowl 56, and the Titans (+2500 odds to win the AFC at DraftKings), who finished the 2021 regular season as the no. 1 seed in the conference. The Bills are a 9.5-point favorite tonight in their home opener.
Buffalo’s odds to hoist the Lombardi Trophy are now +400 at DraftKings and +450 at BetMGM. The Chiefs (+700 at DraftKings, +650 at BetMGM) and Tampa Bay Buccaneers (+700 at both books) are the only other teams whose odds are shorter than +1000.
“We’ve been places,” Diggs said during training camp. “Have we been to where we’re trying to go? No. So we know where we’re trying to go.”
No team in the major four American sports has been this clear a favorite this early in the season since the 2016 Cubs, who arrived as a contender in 2015 by winning 97 games and advancing to the National League Championship Series, where they were swept by the New York Mets.
“I think we talked about the expectations from day one,” Ross, now the manager of the Cubs, said during a series against the Mets at Citi Field last week. “I think we put ourselves on the map (the) second half of ’15, coming in here, getting our butts kicked pretty heavily by a really good team.”
After the Kansas City Royals beat the Mets in the 2015 World Series, oddsmakers established the Cubs as the favorites — at 11/1 — to win the championship in 2016. Those odds continued dropping all the way to 5/1 by Opening Day — before the Cubs raced out to an 8-1 start and played 31 games without suffering back-to-back losses.
“I think the one thing about expectations is it’s good, right? We don’t have expectations, it sucks,” Ross, managing a team that will finish under .500 for a second straight season, said with a rueful laugh. “The underdog role is only so good. When you go in having expectations, those are good things and those are good problems to have — not problems, those are great things to have.”
The Cubs, who augmented their mostly homegrown core with free agent signee John Lackey and the midseason acquisition of eventual World Series MVP Ben Zobrist, finished 103-58 — with a +252 run differential that suggested they should have gone 107-54 — before overcoming a three games to one deficit to beat Cleveland in the World Series and win the franchise’s first championship since 1908.
THE @Cubs WIN THE WORLD SERIES!!! #OpeningDayAtHome pic.twitter.com/1mh9dsb3Tb
— MLB (@MLB) March 27, 2020
Ross can appreciate the delicate balancing act that awaits the Bills as they revel in the task of trying to snap a legendary drought for a franchise known for Sisyphus-esque heartache while avoiding getting caught up in the rollercoaster of emotions ridden by generations of fans yearning for the championship most of them have never seen.
The Bills’ championship drought is “just” the seventh-longest in the NFL, but losing four straight Super Bowls in the 1990s — including their first appearance in Super Bowl XXV, when Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal on the penultimate play sailed just right in a 20-19 loss to the New York Giants — stands as perhaps the preeminent near-miss achievement in American sports.
“We felt like we (had) our own little cocoon and group inside all the way through the World Series and winning the whole thing,” Ross said. “I don’t think the outside narrative ever crept into our clubhouse. And I don’t know how to credit for that (or) what to credit for that. But I remember pretty vividly, whether the fan base was for us or against us or people in the world were for us or against us I don’t feel like that ever creeped into (the room).”
Exorcising our demons 😤 @TheBuffaloNews #joshallen #billsmafia #buffalobills https://t.co/sYFobeeblV pic.twitter.com/0PQPjR93dd
— Adam Zyglis (@adamzyglis) September 14, 2022
Ross also understands that as dominant as the Bills look right now, there’s a long way to go — and a lot of good fortune that needs to be experienced and a lot of focus that needs to be maintained— between here and a parade in upstate New York.
The story of the 2016 Cubs might be entirely different if six position players didn’t play in at least 125 games and all five members of the starting rotation hadn’t made at least 29 starts — or if Cleveland pitcher Trevor Bauer hadn’t injured himself flying a drone earlier in the playoffs, or if Jason Kipnis’ foul ball in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 sailed a little further and to the left of the foul pole or if Kris Bryant fully slipped while throwing over to Anthony Rizzo for the championship-clinching out.
“Look, we want to predict everything,” Ross said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to go out there and produce and those guys go out and play for each other and stay healthy and a lot of things (have) got to go right. There’s luck involved in the whole thing. What happens is, you get a talented group, you have success, you go into the playoffs the year before, you say, wow, we’re right there with the (league) champs. And that gives you a sense of confidence and then there’s a taste of, like, greatness, that will carry into the off-season.
“There’s that hunger like ‘We’re right there. We’re great. We’re great. We’re great.’ You keep the confidence and you work hard in the offseason to try to clean up the areas that you can.”
