Tag: Levy

The Buffalo Bills went to four straight Super Bowls – but they aren’t remembered for that feat. Instead, they’re remembered for losing each of them.

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While Josh Allen and his Bills are currently attempting to break the team’s Super Bowl drought, in the early 90s the Bills were the team to beat.

But unfortunately for Marv Levy’s men, they produced their worst games in each of those four championship matches to go down in history as the NFL’s biggest losers.

“There’s always that – ‘but you didn’t win the Super Bowl’,” Bills Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly said on his legacy on Kayo documentary Four Falls of Buffalo.

And still to this day, the Bills are yet to claim a Super Bowl victory – one of 12 teams in the NFL to never taste that Lombardi Trophy success.

Bills fans will ask: How different could Buffalo’s dynasty be had kicker Scott Norwood’s potential Super Bowl match-winner not sailed wide right in 1991 – the first of the four straight defeats?

What would have happened if assistant Chuck Dickerson hadn’t lit a fire under Washington players with his pre-Super Bowl ‘hog’ taunts in 1992?

Would Thurman Thomas have made an impact if a member of Harry Connick Jnr’s band did not move his helmet during Super Bowl XXVI – ensuring he missed precious match time looking for it/searching for a replacement?

The Bills of the 1990s could be considered cursed.

Norwood would become the poster boy for Buffalo’s misery – with his missed 47-yard field goal with just eight seconds to play in Super Bowl XXV etched in every NFL fan’s mind as the infamous ‘Wide Right’.

Everything was riding on Norwood’s kick but as Al Michaels famously called it in commentary, it was “no good … wide right” and the Bills were defeated 20-19 in crushing scenes.

The kicker, who would later be dumped by the Bills after their second straight Super Bowl loss – missing the next two defeats, relives the moment in the Four Falls of Buffalo documentary.

“I had expected a very, very positive, exciting result (in the first Super Bowl appearance). To so quickly turn to the other end of the spectrum is really quite an emotional flip-flop,” he said.

“What recollection I would have after would definitely be categorised as a blur.

“I almost relate it to being in some kind of accident where it’s almost shock, the magnitude of it not working out kind of seeping on top of me.

“Sorrow, I guess, and disappointment in letting down teammates that are there on the field of battle with you (were the first emotions).

“I get choked up thinking about it, putting myself back in the situation on the sidelines.”

By the time they made their way to a fourth straight Super Bowl in 1994, there was nothing left to give.

“We got together as a team and almost said let’s not go (to a third straight Super Bowl),” Bills star James Lofton said on Four Falls of Buffalo.

“If you lose, you will be the greatest losers of all time,” Buffalo general manager Bill Polian was warned at the time.

The likes of Kelly, Thomas, Bruce Smith and Darryl Talley would all finish their careers without that ultimate victory – despite double digit win seasons in four straight years of dominance (and four straight AFC Championship titles).

“It hurt me then, it still hurts me now,” Thomas says.

“I’m still upset about losing four Super Bowls.

“I went to all four!”

The Bills were so bad in the championship game that fans dubbed them the acronym Boy I Love Losing Superbowls (BILLS).

Current day Buffalo fans are desperate for their team to be remembered for something other than the four straight Super Bowl losses.

Could Sean McDermott’s men, led from the front by star quarterback Josh Allen, be the ones to do it?

The 2024/25 NFL playoffs begin from January 11, with the Bills taking on the Broncos in the Wildcard Playoff from 5am AEDT.

Watch the Four Falls of Buffalo documentary onKayo.