Billsism’s Cathedral

Consternation over a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills is understandable. In fact, it’s almost mandatory, because most people do not fully understand that the Bills are neither a sports team nor a business. The Bills are a religion.

I’m kind of not joking. Religion is a slippery concept. It does not require a deity. There are a number of nontheistic religions, include Buddhism, which is practiced by about seven percent of the world’s population, making it the fourth most practiced religion in the world. It is not an outlier.

At its most basic, the term religion can be any system of beliefs and practices. Devotion to the Buffalo Bills gets past those markers. Though most people would agree that a religion should reach for the large, the spiritual. Billsism does that too.

Billieve is plastered on billboards and bumper-stickers all over the region (if not all over the world.) We are encouraged to support the team’s actions and goals pretty much on faith. That faith has been tested in saint-like trails over the years. They went 1 and 13 in 1971. They went to four super bowls in a row, 1990-1993, losing all four. Snowstorms, below zero temperatures, traffic, flaming folding tables – through it all, fans are asked to endure, focus and Billieve. And so we watch every game, shaping our lives around game times. We read newspapers. We listen to AM radio. Am, people. We participate in endless discussions of possibilities, hopes and torments. There are Bills-specific phrases, like wide-right. While general football fans understand the denotation, Bills followers have a much more moribund connation: We have lost at the moment of triumph. It ties into one of the many Bills parables and acolytes. Where would you rather be than right here, right now?

The most critical aspect of a religion has, with regard to the stadium conversation, become the most impactful. Like most religions, Billsism defies common logic. People outside the faith cannot be expected to fully comprehend the need for a place of worship. Mesoamerican pyramids ate up unimaginable resources for those civilizations. What kind of people started Notre Dame de Paris in 1163, with no cranes or bulldozers or nail guns? Or nails that weren’t hammered out individually, by hand? Those people were Bills fans . . . the equivalent there of.

Understanding that fact can help us understand why there will never be a consensus on how best to build a new stadium. The Buffalo Bills is a private company, making substantial profits. There is no reason to support that endeavor with public funds. Yep. They should build exactly what they need to better their business goals and keep the government out of it.

Or the Buffalo Bills are an ever-changing pantheon of near deific heroes worthy of a Parthenon. Also yep. Let’s create an architectural miracle that exemplifies our love and devotion, as well as the profound abilities and stature of our community.

Compromising those positions gets you a large bowl surrounded by acers of nothing eighteen miles from the center of this civilization. No retractable roof, with very little utility beyond a dozen or so games a year - three percent of the year - placed conveniently next to the previous, now empty and crumbling billion-dollar bowl. Future archeologists will look back on us and write papers trying to discern why.