The Bills Mafia name started with a dropped pass, an angry tweet, and a hashtag. It has since turned into a phenomenon that yes, has to do with fans jumping through folding tables, but has also has raised millions of dollars for charities around the country. It has also become an identity for not just Western New York Bills fans, but the small-market team’s supporters around the globe. Here is why Bills fans are called Bills Mafia.
The history of the Bills Mafia name
After four straight Super Bowl losses in the 1990s, the Buffalo Bills became one of the worst teams in the NFL year after year.
The team lost in the 1999 NFL playoffs (on the heartbreaking “Music City Miracle”) and didn't get back for more than a decade and a half.
During one of those down seasons (2010’s 4-12 campaign, to be precise) the Bad News Bills played the Super Bowl-bound Pittsburgh Steelers. Buffalo went down 13-0 but ultimately came back to tie the game at 16 and take Ben Roethlisberger and company to overtime.
In the extra period, Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick dropped back and hit a wide-open Stevie Johnson in the end zone.
The only problem was Johnson, a seventh-round pick ad Buffalo cult hero, dropped the ball.
The Steelers would go on to win the game 19-16, and after the loss, Johnson unloaded a still-epic social media post on a relatively new platform at the time called Twitter.
“I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!!,” Johnson tweeted at his favorite Higher Power. “YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…”
The tweet went viral (back when Twitter had around 30 million users as opposed to 330 million). A full day later, ESPN’s Adam Schefter retweeted the outburst. Bills fans on the platform started making fun of Schefter for being late to the party, and the NFL insider blocked several of them. Later, one user — Buffalo diehard Del Reid — used the hashtag #BillsMafia to describe the group.
A few months later in the offseason, Green Bay Packers linebacker Nick Barnett signed with Buffalo as a free agent, saw the hashtag on Twitter, and took a liking to it. And the rest, as they say, is history.
From the 2011 offseason on, Bills fans were now the Bills Mafia.
The Bills fans' charity donations
As the legend of Bills Mafia grew over the next half-decade, so did the group’s antics.
By 2017, the Bills Mafia name had outgrown the Twittersphere and came to describe all Bills fans, especially the ones who tailgated in the parking lots (and front lawns) of Orchard Park. These Bills fans liked to drink, jump through folding tables, cover “Pinto Ron” in ketchup and mustard, drink, and toss inappropriate items on the field during games against the hated New England Patriots.
The viral videos of Bills Mafia being wild and jumping through folding tables at everything from pregame tailgates to weddings to gender reveals became the fan base’s calling card.
That is, until Week 17 of the 2017 season.
At that point, the team on the field was in the midst of a 17-year playoff drought. In fact, the Bills were the only team in the NFL at that point that hadn’t made a playoff appearance in the 2000s.
That all changed in the final week of the season when Andy Dalton and the Cincinnati Bengals upset their division rival, the Baltimore Ravens.
In 2017, under first-year head coach Sean McDermott, the Bills finished the season 9-7, on the doorstep of the playoffs. They needed a little help, though, from the Bengals, and when Dalton led his team to victory it allowed Buffalo into the postseason through the backdoor.
As a thank you for ending the dry spell, Bills Mafia flooded Dalton’s Andy & Jordan Dalton Foundation with donations, mostly in $14 increments in honor of Dalton's jersey number. Bills Mafia ended up donating over $400,000 to the cause.
Over the years, this became Bills Mafia’s thing.
The Bills fans have made donations when a Buffalo player got hurt (Tre’Davious White), got snubbed by the Hall of Fame (Steve Tasker), lost their grandmother (Josh Allen), lost their brother (Dawson Knox), and even when a rival player got knocked out of playoff game with a concussion (Lamar Jackson).
And in 2023, Bills Mafia is so synonymous with giving that when Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field (against the same Bengals franchise that helped start this whole trend), the football community stepped up and donated over $8 million to Hamlin’s charity.
And $4 million is a long way to come from a dropped pass, an angry tweet, and a hashtag.
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