ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — During the Buffalo Bills’ playoff drought, ESPN anchor Kevin Connors used to have a running joke on air. Connors, a lifelong Bills fan from Long Island, would refer to the Bills as America’s Team. It would elicit a laugh from his co-anchor, one baked in sympathy for Connors and the other fans enduring the slog of 6-10 and 7-9 seasons.

Now, though? Connors looks like he was on to something.

“They really have kind of become America’s team,” Connors said this week ahead of Buffalo’s latest playoff clash with the Kansas City Chiefs.

“America loves the story of it. America loves an underdog, but I think they really respect a team that has been there, was bad forever, built it up, gotten pretty good and just keeps getting up off the mat. There’s a level of respect for that.”

It’s not easy to quantify the country’s rooting interest in any particular postseason. BetOnline attempts to do so based on geotagged data from X posts to see how many posts with the official team hashtags are coming from each state. Earlier in the playoffs, their data showed that half of the states in the country were rooting for the Detroit Lions, another franchise that hasn’t ever reached the mountaintop. But the Washington Commanders, a feel-good story in their own right, eliminated the Lions last week. The other remaining NFC team is the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that has won a Super Bowl recently and has a fan base that doesn’t have the coziest reputation. And then there’s the Chiefs, who have won two straight Super Bowls and been to three of the last four. The Bills are the only team left in the field without a Super Bowl win.

When BetOnline re-ran the data after the conference championships were set, it showed two-thirds of the country is pulling for the Bills. That’s not an exact science, but it makes anecdotal sense.

“People get tired of seeing the same thing over and over,” said Bills guard Conor McGovern, who played for the Dallas Cowboys, the team traditionally referred to as America’s team. “That’s probably why people are rooting for us. They see us as the underdog.”

The Bills aren’t exactly David against Goliath. They’ve been to the playoffs six straight seasons, won a playoff game in five straight seasons and have three 13-win seasons in their last six. Josh Allen is one of the best quarterbacks in the league and arguably the most exciting to watch.

But this is also a team and a fan base that has been repeatedly kicked in the shins. Forget about the four straight Super Bowl losses in the 1990s or even the 17-season playoff drought, both gut-wrenching in their own ways. Throw out the fact that this region, one of the smallest markets in professional sports, has never experienced a Super Bowl or a Stanley Cup championship. Even without that history as a backdrop, this version of the Bills has built up its own scar tissue. As the Bills became a fixture in national television games in recent years, their lowest moments were on display for the football-watching public. The football world felt the collective anguish of a fan base during Buffalo’s 13-seconds loss to Kansas City. Home playoff losses to the Cincinnati Bengals and Chiefs in the divisional round the last two seasons have made it easy for people outside of Buffalo to wonder how fans keep getting back up.

And all of that on-field sorrow seems trivial when you consider the non-football adversity the team and community have endured. In 2022, the country rallied around the Bills when Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and nearly died. That same year Buffalo endured tragedy when a racist shooter murdered 10 people and wounded three others at a supermarket in the city’s east side. A devastating Christmas blizzard left 47 people dead in 2022. Too often, the country’s window into Buffalo is centered around struggle.

The Bills have a chance to change that like they did for three hours on Sunday during a thrilling divisional round win against the Baltimore Ravens. More than 42 million people tuned in for what turned into a party at Highmark Stadium. Fans who had been in the parking lots tailgating since the early morning hours finished their night with a vintage Buffalo celebration first in the stadium and then in those same parking lots.

Earlier that week, a Baltimore radio personality called Buffalo, “a city of losers.” After the game, Bills coach Sean McDermott gritted his teeth at the mention of it and delivered an impassioned defense of his adopted hometown.

“It’s a city of winners, it really is,” he said. “These people in this town are winners. I’ve been here just eight years but I consider this my hometown. This place is different and the people here are different. They deserve more than whoever said that about them.”

“Buffalo is a city of winners and the people here are different.” ❤️💙#GoBills | #BillsMafia pic.twitter.com/Lny6lLl70S

— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) January 20, 2025

Bills safety Micah Hyde started this season on the outside looking in while pondering his playing future. Sitting at home in San Diego gave him a different perspective on how much people outside of Buffalo are pulling for the Bills.

“I think it’s been like that for a while now,” Hyde said. “We’ve been so close to getting over the hump.”

Hyde has also seen this story evolve. He arrived in 2017 as one of the first signings in Sean McDermott’s tenure as head coach. He’s been through every high and low with this regime. He made his career and a home away from home here. And this season, he decided to return as a member of the team’s practice squad to do whatever he could to help this team get across the finish line. Hyde’s son likes to watch highlight videos of his dad before he goes to bed. And those videos make it hit home for Hyde just how far the Bills have come.

“There were some highlights from 2017, it was a home game and there was hardly anybody in the stands,” Hyde said. “To see the organization from where it was to where it is now, it’s two totally different things and it’s honestly really cool to see. That’s why I felt like coming back was a no-brainer. I wanted to be a part of this. I was able to see it from when it was, honestly, a dumpster fire, it was terrible when we first got here, to where it is now. We’re one of the pinnacle places in the league to be a part of.”

Buffalo as one of the pinnacle places in the NFL is more than lip service to the players in the locker room. The word love is frequent in players’ vocabulary. Love for each other. Love for the game. And love for the community.

“We’re literally like the core of the community,” McGovern said. “It’s all intertwined here. I don’t think there’s a better thing in football than that.”

Or as Hyde put it, “It’s a homegrown team. Everyone sees it as an organization run by good people with good people in the organization, a very good quarterback and a small-town kind of feel. This is America in a nutshell if you want to talk about it.”

Defensive tackle Jordan Phillips is on his third stint with the Bills. His first was in 2018 and 2019. He came back in 2022 for two seasons. Most recently, he started this season with the Cowboys and was released in November. The Bills picked him up. Every time it’s been a no-brainer to return.

“It’s everything,” Phillips said. “It’s all the appreciation you get. I can do what I want to do. I can wear my coat out there. It’s just fun. The people around us rally with it. Why wouldn’t you want to come back? Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of this? The destination wasn’t so much of a destination but now it is. I think that’s the best way to say it. That speaks to the team and the community around it. When you come here you’re like, ‘S—.’ But when you’re here, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this is it.’”

Phillips would know about destination cities. He’s played in some of the league’s biggest markets like Arizona, Miami, New York and Dallas. The more he bounced around, though, Phillips realized how much different Buffalo is. The weather and the nightlife don’t make a destination. In those bigger places, Phillips said there was almost too much other stuff to do and teammates didn’t all live close together. Hanging out away from the facility was rare. In Buffalo, there’s stuff to do but it’s usually stuff the team is doing together.

“You have a bigger bond,” Phillips said. “It’s college vibes. It takes special people and special management to be able to build something like this. Because even before Sean and them got here it wasn’t like this. It does take the people but once you get the right people and the right personnel to buy into what you’ve got going and then you’ve got an MVP quarterback, this is what you can get.”

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This week, as Allen was speaking to reporters, mounds of snow left behind by another lake-effect snowstorm were behind him on the practice field. The temperature dipped and had approached zero. That weather may deter some players from entertaining Buffalo, but it’s helped this group of players find their identity individually and collectively.

“It’s kind of hard to put into words but typically when people think of Buffalo they think of what’s going on right now with the snow and the cold,” Allen said. “You have to be pretty tough to be in a place like this. We feel like we have guys in this locker room that maybe haven’t gotten all the recognition they deserve, coming here on the last leg of their career and just coming here trying to prove something to not just the world but to themselves.”

That’s part of what makes it believable to think two-thirds of the country could be pulling for the Bills the rest of the way. But even if so many people are behind them, that doesn’t change the underdog feeling the Bills are trying to harness. Phillips quickly pointed out the lack of Bills on the All-Pro and Pro Bowl teams. In his eyes, Buffalo will never get the recognition it deserves.

“That’s not what this is about here,” he said. “It sucks because guys don’t get the national attention that they deserve. But the community gives you so much more. You’re loved here, you know what I’m saying? It’s almost like you’re legends damn near. At the end of the day, that’s all you really need.”

A lot of players on the Bills mention that they’ve deleted social media. So they don’t necessarily notice how much the bandwagon might be filling up. They also know it has a lot to do with the simple fact that the Chiefs have won. Repeatedly. Some fans may complain about the perception that the Chiefs get favorable calls or that Taylor Swift appears on the broadcast too often. But the root of it all is the Chiefs have been standing in the way of the entire league.

Bills tight end Dawson Knox is a Star Wars fan, so he smiled at the comparison of the Chiefs to the Evil Empire.

“We’ll take the extra fans but our fan base as it is we don’t need to add anybody else to make us feel good,” Knox said. “I always view us as the good guys and them as the bad guys, whoever we’re playing.”

During a meeting before the Bills’ game against the Ravens, coaches showed a video of talking heads disparaging the Bills for one reason or another. They leaned heavily on the underdog role. External motivation shouldn’t be needed this time around. Despite a 4-1 record against the Chiefs in the regular season since Allen and Patrick Mahomes took over, Buffalo is 0-3 in the playoffs against Kansas City. That, and a potential trip to the Super Bowl, are motivation enough.

“It’s like when you’re a little kid and you’re tired of your big brother beating your ass all the time,” Phillips said. “If you want to be the king you have to take the kings out.”

Regardless of how it ends, it’s clear this Bills team isn’t the same one Connors used to jokingly call America’s Team on SportsCenter. This version is the real deal.

“It’s hard to get around it,” Phillips said. “In the coming years, especially when the new stadium is built, it’s going to be like, ‘We’re here.’”

(Top photo: Kathryn Riley, Steven King, Timothy T. Ludwig / Getty Photos)