Season Ticket: Four and Counting
Wide receiver Lee Evans
Bills historian Dave Staba contextualizes the team’s 4-0 start:
Winning your first four games, an accomplishment Buffalo achieved with Sunday’s 31-14 win in St. Louis, does not guarantee a great season. Over the nearly half-century since the creation of the current Bills, though, it comes pretty close.
Seven previous editions have opened with at least four straight triumphs. Two won a league championship, two others earned a Super Bowl berth, one reached the conference title game and another remains the subject of the franchise’s most tantalizing what-if discussion.
Only once, in 1975, did a Buffalo team win four games before losing one, yet fail to reach the playoffs.
Blame that one on O.J. Simpson, since it’s easy and fun and he’s otherwise occupied with all that Las-Vegas-hotel-room unpleasantness. As in his 2,003-yard season two years before, the future repeat felony defendant set a National Football League record, this time by scoring 23 touchdowns, yet his team—perhaps drained by the force its superstar’s ego —somehow faltered before the postseason.
The other six 4-0 starters account for most of the franchise’s high points.
