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    The Bills Rack Up Wins. Folding Tables Get Wrecked.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Bills Rack Up Wins. Folding Tables Get Wrecked.Though the team prohibits it, Bills fans are carrying on a new table-slamming tradition deep into the playoffs.The outpouring of emotions during this Bills season has proved cathartic, yet bittersweet because coronavirus restrictions prevented fans from attending regular season home games.Credit…Libby March for The New York TimesJan. 22, 2021, 4:12 p.m. ETDevoted N.F.L. fans show their love in lots of ways that don’t make sense out of context. Green Bay Packers fans wear foam blocks of cheese on their heads. Raiders fans paint their faces in black and silver and torment visiting players from their seats in the “Black Hole.” In Kansas City, Chiefs fans drive tricked-out school buses painted in red and gold, the team’s colors.Then there are Buffalo Bills fans, who make the ridiculous look routine. For the past few years, growing numbers of Bills tailgaters have ended their pre- and postgame debauchery by jumping from a high place — the back of a pickup truck, say, or the top of a Porta Potty — and slamming into a folding table. The WWE-inspired idea is to destroy the table, entertain friends (many of whom record the mayhem on smartphones) and get fired up for the game.So when Vincent Spano returned to his home in Buffalo around midnight after the Bills beat the Baltimore Ravens last Saturday, he was not surprised to see hundreds of fans down the street cheering a large man as he jumped off a step stool and crashed onto a table in the middle of a busy intersection. He was also not surprised that a video of the pandemonium that his friend posted on Instagram instantly went viral.“The guy jumped cleanly through it, popped up fine and everyone cleaned it up,” said Spano, a lifelong Bills fan who lives in the Allentown neighborhood, a center city area which now welcomes visitors with a sign that reads “Josh Allentown” in honor of the team’s quarterback, Josh Allen. “It’s all adrenaline and you’re so happy for the Bills, it takes over and you don’t think about it.”For his part, Allen said in an interview that he would jump through multiple tables if the Bills win the Super Bowl.The prevalence of table slamming is part of the frenzy sweeping Western New York as the Bills rumble through their best season since their glory years in the early 1990s, when the team played in four straight Super Bowls, losing all of them. Week by week, as the Bills marched toward their first division title and first playoff win in a quarter century, fans across the region have expressed their joy in bigger and more public ways.Seemingly every storefront in the city includes a ‘Go Bills’ sign. Huge banners celebrating the home team hang in front of city hall. Sales of retro Bills gear at Spano’s store, My Cuzin Vintage, have soared more than 50 percent this season. Restaurants as far away as Erie, Penn., are selling pizzas in the shape of buffalos. A Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Buffalo sold folding tables alongside Bills merchandise. Table slamming has become so closely linked to the Bills that ESPN designed a graphic video of Josh Allen jumping off a bus and onto a table.The popularity of table slamming, reckless as it may be, has coincided with the emergence of the Bills Mafia, a Twitter account started as a joke by three fans that has morphed into a kind of virtual identity for fans to show their passion. The seemingly random way in which these two elements quickly turned into traditions is part of their appeal to Bills fans.“We started Bills Mafia before people started jumping through tables,” said Del Reid, one of the account’s co-founders. Though Reid said he has never table slammed, he said he has no issue with the practice. “As long as people are being safe, however they want to express their fandom is fine,” he said. “People are trying to outdo themselves.”The outpouring during this Bills season has proved cathartic yet bittersweet because coronavirus restrictions prevented fans from attending regular season home games. Most fans made do by gathering with a few friends and family to watch games.Ashleigh Dopp, who could not use her family’s season tickets, turned her garage into a fan cave, complete with a Bills-themed mural, a refrigerator, a television and a heater. Dopp said she has not bought a folding table to slam in the driveway, though she got tossed on a table at a road game a few years ago.“Table slamming is about showmanship,” Dopp said. “It kind of ends your tailgate.”The Bills, though, have a complicated relationship with table slamming. Alarmed by excessive drinking and the violence of table slamming, the team told fans in 2018 that they could face criminal charges, have their tickets revoked, or be ejected from team-run parking lots for destroying folding tables.“The viral videos on social media, it’s embarrassing when we see that,” Andy Major, the team’s vice president of operations and guest experience, told The Buffalo News in 2019. He said a few fans “make a big stink out there — a few knuckleheads who wreck it.”So as the Bills began their postseason run and Gov. Andrew Cuomo allowed about 6,500 fans to attend the team’s two home playoff games, the team is discouraging table slamming in the parking lots surrounding Bills Stadium.Eric Matwijow, who lives a three-minute walk from Bills Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. has no trouble with the policy. He runs a parking lot on game days across the street from his home. Matwijow, whose nickname is “The Hammer” because he strictly polices his patrons before games, said his longtime customers clean up after themselves and don’t get out of hand.He has less tolerance for some of his younger customers, whom he calls “junior adults.” He banned table slamming because “people jump off vans and knock themselves out,” he said. “The power of alcohol can be strong.”Some team backers, though, said they will take their flying leaps on the road. The Bills travel to play the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday and are one win away from returning to the Super Bowl. Months ago, Therese Forton Barnes, a Bills season-ticket holder since 1999, reserved a rental house near Tampa, Fla., site of this year’s Super Bowl, to work remotely in the warmer weather. She arrived there this week and one of her first purchases was a folding table that she uses as a desk.If the Bills win on Sunday, she’ll try to get tickets to the Super Bowl and wear the Jim Kelly jersey she brought with her. And if the Bills win their first Super Bowl title, Forton Barnes plans to stomp on her new folding table.“If we win, I may jump through a conference room table,” she said. “Go big or stay home!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    A ‘Super’ N.F.L. Playoff Weekend Is Missing Something. Can You Guess What?

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccination StrategiesVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn Pro FootballA ‘Super’ N.F.L. Playoff Weekend Is Missing Something. Can You Guess What?No, not Tom Brady. He made it. But the pandemic is forcing teams to keep large numbers of fans away.A limited number of fans, socially distanced, at a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game this season.Credit…Jason Behnken/Associated PressJan. 9, 2021, 7:30 a.m. ETThe N.F.L. playoffs are one of the biggest sporting obsessions in the United States, typically among the most-watched television programming of the year.And this year the postseason will get an extra boost because the N.F.L. has added two playoff games, for a total of six games over Saturday and Sunday in what the league is calling “Super Wild Card Weekend.”Yet the monthlong postseason party — which will include perennial contenders like the New Orleans Saints and the Seattle Seahawks as well as rarer participants like the Buffalo Bills and the Cleveland Browns — will be drained of some of the color, sound and pomp as the league navigates the coronavirus pandemic.Most games will be played with no or very few fans in the seats, sapping some of the drama — not to mention live crowd noise — from the football festivities. There will be only a few hundred, not thousands of, Terrible Towels waved in Pittsburgh. There won’t be any “12s,” as Seahawks supporters are known, shaking the rafters in Seattle, because spectators will be barred. Just 3,000 Saints fans will be yelling “Who dat?” in the cavernous Superdome.“I hate it for the fans,” Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger told reporters on Wednesday. “I think about what Heinz Field would be like Sunday night. I hate it for the Steelers, for the energy and excitement that it brings. But once again, that is what we are doing. That is what we are living in.”The Bills, who will kick off the bonanza of games on Saturday afternoon at home against the Indianapolis Colts, needed intervention from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and an elaborate testing program to be able to host a few thousand fans for the first time this season.Viewers at home have become accustomed to seeing stadiums filled with cardboard cutouts and to hearing recorded cheers. But those make a poor substitute during the playoffs, when sold-out stadiums help add excitement for a television audience expanded by a surge in casual viewers.“Football this time of year is part of Americana, our town squares on Sundays and Saturdays and now even Wednesday,” said Andy Dolich, who ran business operations for four professional teams, including the San Francisco 49ers. “You have all sorts of digital devices and sound being pumped in, but there’s nothing like seeing fans sitting shoulder to shoulder with beer and brats being dumped in their laps.”The empty seats will hit Browns fans the hardest, Dolich said. After they ended the N.F.L.’s longest playoff drought last Sunday, their fans will not be able to attend the game in Pittsburgh. The Steelers expect to have fewer than 1,000 fans on hand on Sunday, limiting attendance to friends and relatives of players and staff members.With strict limits on attendance this weekend, there will be far fewer Terrible Towels at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field.Credit…Justin K. Aller/Getty Images“It’s like Edmund Hillary getting to the top of Everest and not being able to tell anybody,” he said.The buzz-less stadiums have become one of the defining features of the league’s 2020 campaign, along with hundreds of positive coronavirus tests among players, coaches and staff members that forced games to be rescheduled, including one that was ultimately played on a Wednesday afternoon. Thirteen teams had no fans in attendance this season, and several other teams had fans at just a few games before health authorities banned large gatherings as the number of virus cases spiked this winter.The league drew a combined 1.2 million fans this year, less than 10 percent of last season’s number. The league’s 32 teams this season lost roughly $4 billion in sales of tickets, luxury boxes, food, parking and sponsorships. Even television viewership, the lifeblood of the league, fell 7 percent during the regular season, the first decline since 2017, when a substantial number of players knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest racial and social injustice.The Super Bowl will be muted, too. To limit potential exposure to the virus, the teams will arrive only a day or two before the game. Many of the league’s biggest sponsors, who often host hundreds of their most important clients at the Super Bowl, will not travel to Tampa, Fla., for festivities before the game. The N.F.L. might fill just 20 percent of the seats at Raymond James Stadium, including vaccinated emergency medical workers invited by the league.Still, some fans will get a chance to see their teams play in person for the first time this season. The Bills will have about 6,000 fans this weekend, and the Packers said they would host about the same number of fans at their first home game, in the divisional round next weekend. The Tennessee Titans will have about 14,500 fans, or 21 percent of their capacity, at their home game; that number is in line with the attendance at many of their regular season games.In the future, though, when fans look back at pictures of this year’s playoff games, the empty seats are sure to stand out as much as, if not more than, the plays.“Intellectually, people will say it was remarkable that there were games, but that they were lacking the passion, which is a key element of live sports,” said Phil de Picciotto, the president of Octagon Sports, a talent agency and event management company. “It will feel lacking. But the alternative was to do nothing.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More