How Long Island has become a hotbed for loyal Buffalo Bills fans

Bills fans on Long Island get one home game a year. They’ll be taking advantage of it on Sunday.

As the first-place Bills stampede into MetLife Stadium for Sunday’s contest against the Jets, throngs of their deeply loyal local supporters are planning to be there as well. Some have been planning this attendance assault for months, others are scrambling to find last-minute tickets on the secondary market, and a number of them have been attending this annual division game to root for the Bills in person for years.

Combining that, the Bills’ impressive 7-1 record, and a floundering Jets team that has lost four straight, could lead to a situation where the Buffalo Mafia outnumbers Jets fans in the building.

“It’ll be a Bills takeover,” predicted Matt Roth, one of the founders of the Long Island West Bills Backers club, who is leading a contingent of about 30 fans from their base in Lynbrook to the game. “The Jets are not where they want to be and the Bills are where they should be. It should be an exciting event for us.”

Kailey Sewell of Rockville Centre has been to three Bills games in Buffalo. She became a fan while attending college in Geneseo. Sunday will be her first time watching her team play at MetLife Stadium.

“I’ve been a Highmark [Stadium] purist,” she said of the Bills’ home field. “But I am excited to go to a game closer to home and get the vibe going for the Bills. I’ve been counting down the days. I have my outfit picked out. I 100% anticipate a great game for us.”

Bills are New York's team

Long Island’s football leanings are still heavily tilted toward the Giant and Jets, the two “local” teams, but in recent years many more Bills fans have emerged. There are a variety of reasons for that. The Bills have been perennial playoff contenders over much of the past decade while the Giants and Jets have not. The Bills have an MVP-caliber player at quarterback in Josh Allen. But the most common answer when you ask fans why they root for a team that plays its games nearly 500 miles away from the middle of Long Island comes down to geography. The Giants and Jets play in New Jersey.

Said Alison Grigo of Freeport: “The Bills are a New York team. Why not support the New York team?”

Joe Reiter of Lynbrook said he inherited his Bills fandom from his father, who grew up in Queens and was a die-hard Jets fan.

“But when they left he felt really abandoned so he became a Bills fan,” he said of the Jets’ move from Shea Stadium to New Jersey in 1984. “He said, ‘They still represent New York, so I’ll root for those guys.’ He loved it and he pawned that off on me.”

That type of lineage is common. Shir Zalicha of Roslyn Heights said she too followed in her father’s Bills-rooting footsteps, only he became one for a different reason. The family was from Israel and when it moved to Long Island they wanted to be more involved in American culture so started watching American sports.

“He always had football on TV and always leaned the Bills,” she said. “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, he just always leaned Bills.”

Zalicha said he father, Ronen Trigoli, passed away earlier this year.

“They’d better make it to the Super Bowl,” she said of the team doing so to honor him.

Other Bills fans are created by marrying into the “family” or by word of mouth. Vinny Heller from Bellmore went to college in Fredonia and when he returned to Long Island he started telling all of his friends about his experiences as an upstater rooting for the Bills. Even though he never actually went to a Bills game he attended several tailgates outside the Bills’ stadium.

“I came back and I was like, ‘The Bills are the team! Josh Allen is the truth!’ ” he said.

One of those who listened to him was Kara McLaughlin from Lynbrook.

“Bills fans are so dedicated to the team,” she said. “It’s different from being a Jets or a Giants fan. It’s cooler.”

Bills Backers on LI

That wasn’t always the case. The Bills are one of 12 NFL teams that have never won a Super Bowl, and one of just five that have never won a championship in either the NFL or AFL before the Super Bowl era began with the 1966 season.

They did go to four straight Super Bowls at one point between the 1990 and 1993 seasons but lost all four, including one to the Giants on a missed field goal as time expired.

“I wasn’t young enough to not know enough,” Roth said of being very young for those events. “I shed some tears.”

Then came nearly two decades without making even the playoffs.

The latest Bills Renaissance began when the team drafted Allen as their quarterback in 2018. They have made the postseason every season since 2019 and seem well on their way back this year too.

With that has bloomed a culture of Bills fans who once lived in isolation but now gather together for games and other events. The team recognizes hundreds of such clubs around the world with its official stamp of approval.

On Long Island it began with the Long Island Bills Backers, a club based out of the bar Instant Replay in Huntington. Soon others sprouted as well. The 631 Mafia South Shore Bills Backers began several years ago and currently are based at RipTides in Lindenhurst. There, bar owner Dawa Sherpa, who was never even much of a football fan, began rooting for the Bills. He already had the famous wings on his menu but to make the Bills fans even more at home be began stocking Labatt’s, their favorite beer.

Like many of the clubs, the 631 Mafia also raises money for local charities with raffles and other fundraisers. It’s part of the credo of Bills fans who have been known to donate money to the causes or foundations of players on other teams whose performances have helped the Bills succeed. Said Jody Tibbetts of Babylon who runs that part of the club: “You want to give back to your community.”

Just this year Roth’s crew, the Long Island West Bills Backers, became a recognized club at Elsie Lane, a bar in Lynbrook.

Roth said he used to go to watch games at Instant Replay or at Penn 6 in Manhattan, New York City’s main Bills bar, and he had been to watch games at bars in Houston and Charlotte, but he wanted to find someplace more local to him and his family. Last year, after a volunteer firefighters’ event, he was looking for a place to watch the Bills in their opener against the Ravens and happened to stop by Elsie Lane.

With the blessing of bar owner Mike Wells, Roth began printing flyers to draw other Bills fans to the bar. At first there were a handful of them, maybe a dozen, who watched the game. Then it grew to 30 or more.

During the offseason they applied for official Bills Backer status. To achieve that required the bar to show every Bills game on the majority of its televisions with the sound on. Wells was in.

On Monday night this week, when the Bills played the Vikings, the place was packed with Bills fans all screaming at the TVs and watching the victory.

Said Roth: “The movement is real.”

A friendly rivalry

Being a Bills fans on Long Island is one thing. Being one during Jets week is quite another. Jeff Citron of West Babylon, president of the 631 Mafia, often trades barbed texts and one-liners with his uncle, Joe Accardia, who is a Jets fan.

On Monday night, the day after the Jets lost to Kansas City, they were watching the Bills from RipTides. Accardia was the only person in the place wearing a Jets cap.

“It’s a rivalry, but it’s still friendly,” Citron said. “It’s like the movie ‘Step Brothers.’ You go head-to-head, but nothing will really come of it.”

Citron said he senses Bills fans are “really amped up” for this Sunday’s game. “They come out from all over,” he said. “You see more red, white and blue around than green sometimes.”

That will undoubtedly be the case at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, too. As of Tuesday morning the get-in price for the Bills-Jets game was $130 and the average ticket price was $487, according to TickPick. That certainly wasn’t because of any clamoring on behalf of the browbeaten Jets fans to watch the game in person. Other future Jets games are roughly half that price. The cheapest ticket for the Dec. 13 game against the Broncos is $56 with an average of $292 and for the Jan. 3 game against the Vikings it is $54 and $288. Only the Dec. 27 game against the Patriots comes close to this Bills game at $84 and $344.

“It’s the one game that has stayed stubbornly expensive,” Drew McLaughlin of Lynbrook said.

That makes it slightly difficult for Bills fans who want to attend to get in. Christina Conway of Mineola said she was seeing tickets in the 100 section of the stadium going for nearly $1,000. She’d like to go, but isn’t sure if she can.

“Ten years ago those were $150 tops,” she said, attributing the rising cost to the growth in Bills popularity in the region.

If she doesn’t splurge, she said she’ll be at Elsie Lane watching the game with her friends Jeremie Neptune and Shir Zalicha.

“It’s the only place to watch the Bills on Long Island,” Zalichia said.

The contingent going from the Long Island West Bills Backers already has their tickets, though. Eddie Roth, Matt’s brother and co-founder of the club, bought them early in the spring when the schedule was announced.

On Sunday, that group plans to be in the parking lots early for tailgating. It will raise its new chapter flag at a Bills game for the first time. Then they’ll go watch the Bills play along with what should be tens of thousands of other Bills fans.

The one catch for Eddie Roth? Because he bought the tickets through the home team he has to have the Jets app on his phone to manage them and get in.

“I’m not too happy about that,” he said of having to look at that green and white logo each time he glances at his home screen. “But Monday morning, that app is gone.”