A NEW GENERATION OF FANS GOES BEYOND BROKEN HEARTS AND BROKEN TABLES
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By Erik Brady
“‘Bills Mafia’ is the term that has come to embody this notion of oneness. It means that the Bills and their fans are family.”
uffalo loves the Bills. This is not unusual. Many NFL cities love their NFL teams. Ah, but Buffalo loves the Bills in a way that other cities do not. And cannot. That’s because of the bison on the helmets. Other professional sports teams have logos that feature their mascots–Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!–or sometimes simply the initials of their cities. But only Buffalo has a buffalo. It tells the world that the Bills are not merely our team. They are us. “Bills Mafia” is the term that has come to embody this notion of oneness. It means that the Bills and their fans are family. The hashtag began as a joke and morphed into a movement. The short version goes like this: Bills receiver Stevie Johnson dropped a game-winning touchdown pass in 2010. On Twitter, he blamed God. (“I praise you 24/7! And this is how you do me!”) This made national news. ESPN’s Adam Schefter tweeted about it a day later, which is an eternity in Twitter time. Some Bills fans mocked him for being late to the party: “Man Invents Fire #SchefterBreakingNews.” The hashtag #BillsMafia was born of this back and forth. Bills fan extraordinaire Del Reid coined the term after being blocked by Schefter on Twitter. He meant it to convey twin thoughts. First: Hey, national media, we are going to stand up for our team. Second: Hey, Buffalo Bills, we’ve got your backs.
The term was an inside joke that Reid figured would soon be forgotten, like most things on Twitter. But then the Bills signed linebacker Nick Barnett–and he embraced #BillsMafia giving the term a massive boost. Soon other Bills did, too. From there it just snowballed, as things in Buffalo tend to do. The Bills are best known nationally for losing four consecutive Super Bowls, and Bills fans for leaping on folding tables. But broken hearts and broken tables don’t come close to telling the whole story.
“The Bills are that extra family member in every household in Western New York”
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