Another infamous moment in Bills' History

[ChevyVanMiller]

Was doing a little research and stumbled across this nugget of bleak Bills' history on wiki. I'm sure that I knew this at one time, but must have blocked it from my memory. Add it to "Wide Right" and "Music City Miracle" in infamous Bills' lore.

 

 

AFL History

 

The Canadian Defeat

The date was August 8, 1961. The AFL, desperate to prove that it was the real deal, challenged the Canadian Football League to an exhibition game. It was decided that the game would be between Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Buffalo Bills. The Bills, who had finished near the bottom of the league in 1960, and Ticats, one of the best teams in the CFL at the time, were chosen because they were geographically close to one another. It was thought that beating a CFL team would prove that the AFL was at least the second-best football league in North America. After all, the NFL had sent several teams against teams from the CFL and had won every game so it was thought that victory against the CFL would be easy. Playing at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, the game proved to be a disaster for the AFL as the Ticats crushed the Bills 38-21 playing a mix of AFL and CFL rules. The Bills returned to Buffalo and it marked the only time a pro football team from Canada defeated a pro football team from the United States. No team from a U.S.-based football league has since competed with a team from a Canada-based league (U.S./Canadian professional team matchups within one league, however, have happened, such as the Toronto Rifles of the 1960s, the Montreal Machine of the early 1990s and the CFL USA of the mid-1990s).

 

The Tiger-Cats continue to occasionally use this victory as a vehicle for its own promotion, particularly in light of the Bills' playing games in Toronto.

[Sisyphean Bills]

Yep. Only team to lose a #1 overall draft pick to the CFL as well.

[SKOOBY]

My mind is off it already.