Amid a Las Vegas Backdrop, Bills’ Playoff Heartbreak Rings True

Buffalo has a communal longing to lean on as Bills Mafia and NFL fans alike wonder: What if it was them instead?

It’s hard not to imagine the NFL being truly happy here in Las Vegas. This place is overwhelming until one gets the general idea: Everything has to exist within the orbit of something just a little more famous than itself. It’s like a solar system with many suns (and a surprising amount of Bobby Flay).

And so, sure, having the Super Bowl feature the State Farm guy and the Taylor Swift guy vs. the running back your grandparents know to draft in fantasy all tucks very neatly into this galaxy of recognition (and marketing). One would assume that, if the NFL had the power to handpick these things, or gently guide them toward a certain outcome, this would be a pair of teams that was high up on the master list.

The NFL and Las Vegas are in many ways a perfect pairing :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

It is undeniably good for business (and who couldn’t see Patrick Mahomes taking up residency here one day doing trick-shot throws in front of the still-chain-smoking casino crowd?), but I do wonder if we’ve taken the time to mourn the Super Bowls that could have been. Don’t get me wrong, San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs is just fine. But for a game that has the power to change lives and communities—the Cincinnati Bengals’ playoff run was a massive, life-altering event for people across the city, like bartenders earning extra cash to get them through the lean months—we could have manifested more than the dynastic Chiefs or the 49ers, who have also had many halcyon days.

For example, Buffalo Bills vs. Detroit Lions would have been decidedly less commercial. It would have been way less Las Vegas. But imagine the sheer force of meaning that could come from two teams like that matriculating their way to the biggest moment in U.S. sports. That was on the table until a field goal shanked wide right in the divisional round.

I spoke with Bills superfan Scott Rubin recently, crystallizing some thoughts about what the Super Bowl really is now, and what it is not anymore. Rubin wrote, directed and starred in a movie about what would happen if the Bills actually won the Super Bowl called UnBillievable. It came out at the end of last year and had a six-theater run through January 2024, coinciding with the Bills’ playoff push. Rubin used to be the editor-in-chief of the revered National Lampoon magazine, the home for some of America’s premiere comedy writing and satire. The movie is wild, a kind of frantic, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia-meets-the-“Fishes”-episode-of-The Bear love letter filled with Buffalo Easter eggs.

Rubin loves the Bills so much that he has, to my knowledge, developed some original conspiracy theories as to the cause of their cosmic misfortune. He can artfully draw a line from a man named Booth Lusteg, a Bills kicker from the 1960s who was chased down Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo and beaten by the team’s fans after missing a kick against the Chargers, to Tyler Bass, who was the latest Bills kicker to be associated with this unique kind of fan hell. In the movie, Rubin’s myriad theories on the Bills’ tragedy also involve the hiring of herbal exorcists to cleanse the grave of the assassinated president William McKinley (who was shot at the ’01 Buffalo Pan-American exposition).

Bass missed a potentially game-tying field goal against the Chiefs.  :: Jamie Germano/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle/USA TODAY Network

I asked Rubin about seeing teams such as San Francisco and Kansas City here, and seeing the game all dressed up and distant from its roots. How does it feel for a Bills fan, a Lions fan, just wanting to win once before they die? And does it at all feel like the ever-evolving, commercially aspirational NFL is leaving something behind?

“We were talking to a few of our friends who were Red Sox fans after the team broke the curse [and won the World Series in 2004] and I asked them: ‘What’s it like?’” Rubin says. “They said, ‘You know, it’s kind of not the same anymore. It’s like, eh, I dunno. Losing was how we related to one another and now we don’t have that.’

“It’s not the same thing that brought us all together.”

Rubin’s silver lining is this kind of idea that Detroit and Buffalo don’t need to win Super Bowls—they have something else that is, in some ways, better and more meaningful. Sean McDermott can’t sell that to ownership, but there is an undeniable, communal existence between the fan bases in Las Vegas this week, who seem so comfortably at home in a strip mall full of Cartier and Wolfgang Puck, and fan bases who are bonded in knowing that they may never become the haughty, success-addled followers of Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes that they’ve now detested for the better part of three decades.

“We deserve it, we deserve to have a championship, but, like we said in the movie, it’s kind of O.K. the way it is, too. What I heard from people who came out to see the movie was that they felt better about the season. Nobody tells you that it's O.K. to lose and have an awesome experience.”

I won’t spoil the ending to Rubin’s movie, as I’d encourage you to see it yourself. But as Buffalo is on the precipice of defying years of futility, there is a near-death experience in the city’s east side. It could just be a good ending, or it could be a little bit of symbolism. Making it here, to Las Vegas, to where you are the kind of team that fits neatly into the most grandiose of the NFL’s plans, requires a death in and of itself. Sometimes, it’s more fun to stay home.

“The heartbreak,” Rubin says, “may be the prize.”