The Buffalo Bills’ wild-card playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers scheduled for Sunday was moved to Monday amid a forecast for dangerous winter weather, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Saturday.
Hochul said she started talking with the NFL on Thursday about the possibility of having to reschedule the game. From her hometown of Buffalo, she closed her news conference by saying, “Go, Bills.”
The NFL and Bills issued a statement citing “public safety concerns” as the reason to push back the game by a day.
The forecast for the Buffalo area called for heavy snow and winds gusting as high as 105 kilometres per hour Saturday, with 30 to 60 centimetres or more of snow eventually piling up. The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning lasting through 7 a.m. Monday, saying “travel will be very difficult to impossible at times,” with the combination of snow and very strong wind causing near-zero visibility.
Much of the storm was expected to be concentrated in a narrow band of lake-effect snow hovering over Buffalo’s southern suburbs, which includes the Bills’ home in Orchard Park.
The Steelers have pushed back their travel plans and will now head to Buffalo on Sunday.
The Bills are familiar with weather-related schedule changes. In 2022, a lake-effect storm led to Buffalo’s home game against Cleveland being moved to Detroit in November. A month later, a massive blizzard forced the Bills to delay their trip home, forcing them to stay overnight in Chicago on Christmas Eve.
