If you are yearning for the old 1 p.m. kickoffs, the Buffalo Bills probably aren’t the team for you.
The Bills have turned into one of the NFL’s big box office attractions over the last few years, playing 22 primetime games since 2021. And they were the sixth-most watched team in the league last year, averaging 23.1 million viewers.
Coming off a fifth consecutive AFC East championship, a trip to the AFC championship game and reigning NFL MVP Josh Allen at the helm, that’s not likely to change this year. The Bills also have a star-studded series of opponents this year and with Allen scheduled for NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday and Pro Bowl offensive tackle Dion Dawkins slated to be a part of NFL Network’s schedule release cast, signs point toward a big scheduling matchup.
Games will trickle out ahead of the NFL’s full 8 p.m. reveal Wednesday, with the Eagles and Cowboys already announced for the season opener on Thursday, Sept. 4. Fox also announced a Saturday doubleheader featuring the Eagles at Commanders and Packers at Bears in Week 16.
Star-studded last call
The schedule for the last season at the old version of Highmark Stadium is daunting on paper. And it should appeal even to Western New York’s non-Bills fans.
Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, Jalen Hurts and Baker Mayfield are among the quarterbacks slated to lead their teams into Orchard Park. Right now that’s two former NFL MVPs, two Super Bowl MVPs, two No. 1 overall draft picks and three Super Bowl quarterbacks.
The Bills will host both Super Bowl participants for the second consecutive season. And it marks the sixth season in a row that both Super Bowl teams from the previous season are on their schedule — the price paid for winning.
Primetime players
The Bills should certainly be in line for a handful of primetime games, and because of how the schedule shakes out, a number of them should come at home. That would be a change of pace since 13 of their primetime games have come on the road since 2021.
The Bengals, Chiefs, Eagles and Ravens appear to be the prime candidates for night games this year, although the NFL also likes divisional matchups for those contests. Since the league began mandating each team play at least one Thursday night game per year in 2012, the Bills have played one intra-division primetime contest every year but 2013, including two the last three seasons.
Buffalo has also played a primetime game in one of its first two games the last three seasons.
CBS and Fox also like to bank a few premier matchups considering the 4:25 p.m. games are usually the most-watched non-holiday games on the schedule. The Bills have faced the Chiefs in that time slot two years in a row and last year’s November matchup drew 31.2 million viewers, the most-watched non-holiday game of the regular season.
The mark of a box office team is getting 4:25 p.m. games, especially for an east coast team. The Bills have played nine 4:25 p.m. games the last two years — they were flexed into home games against the Patriots and Jets last year — after getting seven total over the previous decade.
Buffalo has opened the season with a divisional opponent 29 times since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. But it played the Cardinals a year ago, marking the second time in three years an NFC team has been its Week 1 opponent after having seven previous occurrences.
The NFL has backloaded the schedule with divisional games over the last decade. Not only have the Bills not closed the year against a non-AFC East team since 2009, a divisional opponent has been scheduled 20 times in the last three games of the season since 2016, including each of the last three weeks in 2024.
Happy Holidays
The Bills appeared on Thanksgiving three times in four years from 2019-2022, but haven’t since. They don’t have the Lions or Cowboys on the schedule this year so the only hope for a Thanksgiving game is the nightcap, a game they played in against the Saints in 2021.
But now the NFL will have a Black Friday game on Amazon Prime for the third consecutive season and three on Christmas, with two on Netflix and one on Amazon Prime because it falls on a Thursday.
The Bills have never played on Christmas and there is a strong bet they can’t dodge it for the second year in a row.
Foreign affairs
Buffalo has been able to dodge foreign games, having played just twice overseas since the NFL regularly began playing in 2007. Both trips were to play against the Jaguars in London and they lost both.
Although the Bills willingly forfeited home games to play in Toronto once per year from 2008-2013, an endeavor that was panned.
But the league is expanding the number of international games annually. Seven games will be played outside of the United States next year, with three in London, one in Dublin, one in Madrid, one in Berlin and one in São Paulo, Brazil.
The Bills have scheduled road games against the Browns, Dolphins, Jets and Steelers, all of whom are tied into international games. The NFL hasn’t scheduled an intra-division international game since 2019, so the most likely candidates if the Bills were to play overseas would be the Steelers in Ireland or the Browns in London.