Back to the big time: Your guide to the Bills season

LAKE TAHOE, Nev. – This is about the last place one might expect to find Sean McDermott.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in early July and some of the biggest names in the sports and entertainment worlds have descended on the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course. They’ve come to enjoy the amenities of a five-star resort that promises “luxury beyond limits” while also participating in the American Century Championship – a celebrity golf tournament in one of the world’s more idyllic settings.

Ask about building off last year, and the Buffalo Bills are quick to downplay the idea. What outsiders might view as picking up where they left off, they view as a restart. 

“I think our guys understand – and we've stressed that all year and all offseason – is what we did last year was really good, but it means nothing,” general manager Brandon Beane said on the first day of training camp. “We're 0-0. One of the coaches, I heard him talking to a couple players yesterday, talking about re-climbing the mountain. We don't get a start up here, we're starting at the bottom.

Here is how News sports writers project the highly anticipated Buffalo Bills season: 

Jay Skurski

Here are The News' predictions on some stat leaders and more for the Buffalo Bills this season.

Predictions by Jay Skurski, Katherine Fitzgerald, Mark Gaughan, Jason Wolf and Rachel Lenzi.

Brian Manley drove a rented silver Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon down Elmwood Avenue with Stefon Diggs in the passenger seat and the Buffalo Bills wide receiver’s wardrobe in the back one day this summer in between commercial shoots for Manley’s Buffalo-based company, Imagine Staffing.

“I was sort of showing him a little bit of the Elmwood Village area because, unfortunately, when he came here last year, it was in the midst of Covid, so he wasn’t able to experience Buffalo as the city that it is,” Manley, the company’s president and CEO, told The Buffalo News. “It was a beautiful day and people were out and it was really exposing him and his team to Buffalo, which I think they loved.”

On Thanksgiving night, the No. 53 TV market Buffalo Bills meet the No. 50 TV market New Orleans Saints on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”

The Nov. 25 matchup between two of the three smallest market teams on one of the biggest nights of the National Football League season illustrates how little market size matters in the selection of attractive matchups.

Here are The News' predictions for NFL division winners, playoffs and individual award winners:

Buffalo Bills fans pack the stadium in Orchard Park and travel to support their team in an ordinary year. And this is not expected to be an ordinary year.

Entering a season with Super Bowl aspirations, the Bills are becoming an even hotter ticket. According to TicketIQ, the average price for a Bills game is $414, an increase of 159% over 2019, the last time fans were allowed at full capacity. Consider that prices for NFL tickets are soaring as fans return and prices for the league overall are up 87%. The percentage increase for Bills tickets is almost double the increase.

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Don Beebe broke his leg in a game against the Miami Dolphins a couple of days before Christmas 1990. Weeks later, he watched the Buffalo Bills lose their first Super Bowl. He had a 14-inch rod in his left tibia.

“I thought maybe my career was over,” he says.

Former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky reaches for a golf analogy to describe the challenge facing Josh Allen in 2021.

“Golf is one of my favorite games, and the hardest thing to do in golf is follow a birdie with a birdie,” said Orlovsky, an ESPN analyst. “I want Josh Allen to follow a birdie with a birdie. That’s my realistic expectation. I want to see him have another dominant season. I want to see him have another MVP-worthy campaign. They kept their offensive coordinator, their offensive line and their skill position guys. So that should be something that I don’t even think is unrealistic. I believe that’s fair to expect.”

Here are players with Western New York ties on NFL rosters, injured reserve or practice squads entering Week 1: 

Rosters

If the “Inside the NFL” crew is right, Buffalo Bills fans either will be dancing in the street or crying in their beer on Super Bowl Sunday in California on Feb. 13.

Three members of the crew on the Paramount+ streaming site Tuesday night predicted the Bills will be in the Super Bowl and two of them predicted they would win.