Listen up, casual football fan, because this is your wake up call. The Buffalo Bills are back. Yes, the butt-of-every-football-joke, AFC East-basement-dwelling, Superbowl-losing Buffalo Bills who have made the phrases “Wide Right,” and “Music City Miracle” profanity in any Western New York household are back. It has been a long time, but after a twenty year eternity the Bills are finally poised and ready to show the league that this season, this time around they will finally… well, that they will finally find an identity.
In football circles, it goes without saying that the Buffalo Bills have become synonymous with losing. Name a team with a longer playoff drought than the Bills – there is none. Bills fans certainly don’t embrace the losing identity of the team nor do they enjoy them being the perennial laughing stock of the NFL, so they, along with members of the team itself, have taken to Twitter to give themselves a new, more intimidating identity, and it all started with a simple, fortuitous hashtag: #BillsMafia.
This hashtag has spread like a brushfire through Bills fans and players alike, uniting them in their decades long quest for a new identity; something they seemed to have lost the last time Darryl Talley donned his Spider-Man undershirt at Rich Stadium. Now, one might think that associating with a group best known for its role in organized crime might be a bit of a miscalculation. Well, the simple truth is that it wasn’t much of a calculation at all. In fact, the red hot #BillsMafia movement is somewhat of a fluke.
The group’s official website tells the story of its fledgling existence. In short, the hashtag, #BillsMafia, was first used as a practical joke by the groups founding members or “Original Gangsters” (OG) in response to being blocked from reporter, Adam Schefter’s twitter feed. The hashtag initially was meant to convey the “outlaw” status of the these founding #BillsMafia members. As one OG, @mrdeadlier, described to me last month, “[After being blocked by Schefter] the term stuck around in a different forms (primarily “#TeamBillsMafia”) with a small group of us using it every now and then until [recent Bills signee] Nick Barnett’s alter ego, @MufasasHair, tweeted on 7/31 that he liked the term “#BillsMafia” when he saw [OG, @bre_88] use it and from there everything just blew up.”
Blew up is putting it lightly. The group now boasts a Twitter following of nearly 1,200 on their official twitter account, @thebillsmafia, a Facebook page liked by nearly 400, and a banner featuring the group’s half Twitter bird, half charging Buffalo logo that over 500 fans have added to their Twitter profile pictures through Twibbon. Additionally, their website has a message board and a blog for the Twitter and Facebook-resistant mafia member to keep in touch with goings-on of the group, information on tailgates and other events hosted by the group, a store replete with #BillsMafia merchandise, and offers fans a free @billsmafia.com email address which will forward to the email address of their choice.
There are myriad ways for fans to get involved with the movement, and fans everywhere have responded. As @mrdeadlier put it, “#BillsMafia has become a way for Bills fans to connect on a much larger scale. We have participants from Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and Japan. And Nick Barnett brought several over from Green Bay as well….We’re everywhere.”
Yet, behind the mafioso allusion and the inherent fanaticism, the group serves a much more magnanimous purpose; one that is not so obvious to the casual observer. The group has generously pledged 100% of the profits from sales of its merchandise to be donated to Roswell Park Cancer Institute, a cancer research and treatment center in Buffalo, NY. The initiative is a unique way for fans, and players to use the momentum of the #BillsMafia movement for the good of the community. Considering that #BillsMafia is scarcely a month old, who knows what else this group can give back as it progresses?
As @mrdeadlier explained, “What’s great is that [#Billsmafia] has given Bills fans (at least the ones that choose to participate) an identity. The term ‘nation’ is used for every team in every sport it seems. Very few, if any, have a mafia… As [one follower] on Twitter put it, #BillsMafia ‘alludes to a society of people united for a single purpose who will be ruthless in reaching that goal.’ The players have embraced the term ‘Bills Mafia’ as well so the identity really belongs to them as well.” In the case of #BillsMafia, that purpose is not only supporting the team and players that they know and love, but supporting a noble cause in the community they represent as well.
To the casual observer, the #BillsMafia movement may seem cultish, presentational, or just plain ridiculous, but at its core, #BillsMafia really is a family composed of both fans and players who have joined forces in creating a bold, roguish identity to show their love for their team, their community and help in the fight against cancer.
References:
“What is #BillsMafia?,” billsmafia.com