Buffalo Bills

On Black Friday, I attended a Friendsgiving party where I watched the Chiefs-Raiders game with a friend who is a die-hard Chiefs fan. I’m a Bills fan, and I detest the Chiefs and their legions of bandwagon fans with every fiber of my being. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes endorses seemingly every product in America, and I do my best to boycott them all. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his insufferable girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are just as unavoidable, and being forced to watch her gleeful celebrations of Chiefs touchdowns is arguably even more unpleasant than listening to her favorite politician, Kamala Harris, wax poetic about the passage of time.

Fans of the NFL’s thirty-two teams don’t agree on much. You’ll get a broad range of opinions on who the best and worst teams are, who should be the league MVP, who should be the first pick in the next draft and a host of other football questions. But there is broad agreement on one thing: NFL officiating stinks worse than maggot-infested roadkill and the league has no plan to fix it. PolitiFact might brand me a conspiracy theorist for this opinion, but, like many other football fans who think their teams never get the pivotal calls, I’m pretty sure the league is committed to preventing my beloved Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl. Take one game we played against the Eagles this year, for example.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.