Will the Buffalo Bills be featured in the 2023 NFL Kickoff Game?

The NFL rumor mill has been churning out a ton lately regarding the upcoming season’s schedule. I don’t know about all of you reading this, but once I start seeing dates and matchups written in ink, it ups the enthusiasm level for me exponentially. In anticipation of that uptick in fandom, Ari Meirov from The 33rd Team dropped this gem. His list of potential season-opening matchups for the Kansas City Chiefs includes the Buffalo Bills.

Now of course, only one of the possible permutations here is all that exciting for Bills Mafia and there’s no guarantee it’ll come to fruition. Let’s hype it up anyway though. Feel free to disagree in the comments, but I’d love to see the Bills travel to Missouri and face the Kansas City Chiefs to open up the 2023 NFL season.

You might recall that Buffalo demolished the defending champions this last season in the NFL Kickoff Game and it was a blast. Aside from the fun factor, there’s an advantage in being featured in the first game of the new season. The season will start on a Thursday as is tradition, which means a mini-bye week.

There are plenty of additional reasons to be excited by this, like the simple fact we’d get to see the Bills at full speed a few days earlier. But the big unknown is how likely this is to happen. I think there’s a real shot this could happen. I won’t dissect the odds in my eyes for each team, but from the list Buffalo does provide a tantalizaing matchup.

A Super Bowl rematch with the Philadelphia Eagles would make for a great story line and arguably one that gives KC vs. Buffalo a run for its money. Similarly, the Cincinnati Bengals might be the new second fiddle in the AFC and edge out our beloved Bills.

All that said, there’s one thing that the NFL responds to and the Buffalo Bills have delivered it time and again. That would be ratings. A big deal was made last season about Josh Allen being the first quarterback to win on Thanksgiving in all three time slots. That feat was made possible by huge audiences tuning in on turkey day to see our team trounce the, uh...team that’s not the Bills. (Sorry, my alliteration ran out of steam at the end there.) Anyway, the NFL has put a spotlight on Buffalo and fans all over have eaten it up.

If the league thinks the Bills ratings boon is likely to continue, we may just see the Buffalo Bills return to action on September 7.