The New York Giants are a pretty popular NFL team, despite their poor recent history, but they don’t represent all of NY.
New York has three NFL teams, the Giants, Jets, and Buffalo Bills. There is an old rivalry between two of the three, and the reason the third team is not involved is that they play in a different division.
The rivalry is shared between the Bills and the Jets, who both play in the AFC East. They square up against each other twice every season as a result. Most Bills fans can be found in upstate New York, with the Jets faithful mostly in the NYC area.
The Giants do their thing in the NFC East, mostly poorly, and, for the most part, have their fans in New Jersey.
The rivalry between the Bills and the Jets is not simply based on the fact that they play in the dame division, it is also due to the contrast between the greater New York metropolitan area and the rest of New York state.
The Bills are the only team actually located in NY, which is another factor. But their biggest rivalry is not even with the Jets, it’s with the Miami Dolphins.
The Jets, on the other hand, count the New England Patriots as their fiercest rivals.
It would help the Bills/Jets rivalry if they were successful at the same time but that has hardly been the case. The two teams have only ended a season with a winning record at the same time on four occasions. The Bills have enjoyed more victories when the teams clash, with the head-to-head record 67-56, and were victorious the one time they met in the playoffs back in the AFC Wild Card round of 1981.
They can’t boast plenty of memorable games either as there have only been a few, none of them from recent memory. Older Bills fans will probably still boast intercepting Joe Namath five times to give Buffalo their only win of the season in 1968, though there is not much else to be pleased about as the Jets won the Super Bowl that year. There is also O.J. Simpson surpassing Jim brown’s rushing yard record to give Buffalo a commanding 34-6 win over the Jets.
The only playoff game between the Bills and Jets came in that Wild Card game mentioned above. The Bills went up 24-0 on a great starting run but would fall behind 31-24. They did manage to hold on for a win, intercepting Richard Todd’s pass late in the game to seal the deal.
The 1983 NFL Draft saw the Jets overlook Dan Marino in favor of Ken O’Brien. That same draft also saw them land Jim Kelly as the QB and they would go on to dominate the division for several years.
The teams played two important regular-season games in the 90s that would shape their playoff futures. The Jets missed three field-goal attempts vs. the Bills to miss the playoffs in 1993 but won their first division title in 1998 by Beating Buffalo.
They had another go over quarterback selections in 2018, with both clubs trading up to get a top thrower. The Bills took Josh Allen as the seventh overall pick that year while the Jets went with Sam Darnold third overall. Unfortunately for the players, they were not able to face each other at the first opportunity as they were both injured.
They would clash in December of that year and we imagine New York sports betting apps saw lots of odds selected on that particular game. The Bills went up 14-3 early but New York tied the game at 20 apiece in the fourth quarter. Buffalo took the lead again via a field goal with two minutes to go but Darnold put on a winning drive that included a 37-yard pass to Robby Anderson before a touchdown run from Elijah McGuire.
Another memorable one came in the 2019/20 season when the Bills overcame a 16-0 deficit to win 17-19 on the first day of said campaign although they turned the ball over four times. The Jets lost their advantage after linebacker C.J. Mosley got injured and sloppy kicking from Kaare Vedvik did not help.
Allen is still with the Bills but Darnold was traded to the Carolina Panthers in April 2021. The latter has been replaced by Zach Wilson.
Both teams recently brought in several new players via the 2022 draft. It will be interesting to see how things work out for them next season.
