Chiefs vs. Bills playoff game weather forecast: Is any snow expected in Buffalo?
Credit the volunteers and stadium crew that slogged through nearly two feet of snow and gusty winds to prepare Highmark Stadium for the Buffalo Bills' wild-card round victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
It looks as though, at least for this week, they won't have to do it again – but only barely.
As the Bills prepare to host the Kansas City Chiefs in Sunday evening's divisional round playoff game, conditions are expected to be far improved from last week, when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had to postpone the wild-card round game, citing public safety concerns. On Jan. 14, the day the game was supposed to be played, a winter storm dumped around 17 inches of snow and lashed the area with blizzard conditions and wind gusts of up to 40 miles per hour. Hochul instituted travel bans and the Bills relied on volunteer snow shovelers to get the stadium in order for the rescheduled kickoff, Monday at 4:30 p.m. ET.
Once game time arrived, the NFL and Bills announced that there would be no assigned seating because of the volume of snow mounded on the seats, a first in NFL playoff history.
Against the Chiefs, fans should expect a more conventional experience.
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Here's everything you need to know about Sunday's forecast:
What is the weather for the Bills-Chiefs game?
After a week in which snow and wind swirled unabated, the weather gods appear to be smiling on Orchard Park, N.Y., where Highmark Stadium is located. The U.S. National Weather Service is forecasting a "warmup" Sunday, with a high temperature near 24 degrees. By comparison, Saturday's high temperature in Orchard Park is projected to be near 15 degrees. Wind gusts are expected to be about 14 miles per hour, per the NWS, with a wind chill of 12 degrees.
With kickoff scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET, temperatures are expected to cool slightly as the day wears on, though the temperature is projected to be about 23 degrees at the start of the game. Game time wind remains flat at about 14 mph, with a projected wind chill of around 10 degrees.
Snowfall is another area that should see improvement Sunday. After the area was slammed with lake effect snow during the weekend of the Bills-Steelers game, another wave coated Orchard Park with heavy snowfall and blizzard-like conditions Wednesday night into Thursday. The forecast continued to project snow through Saturday, but on Sunday, the NWS is calling only for mostly cloudy skies.
How often do the Bills play in the snow?
Given Buffalo's location on the eastern tip of Lake Erie, arguably no NFL team has had to manage snowfall more than the Bills.
Conditions on the field for the Bills-Steelers game, however, weren't significantly impacted by that weekend's snow. The field had been almost entirely cleared and sidelines also remained fairly clean, though fans in the stands flung snow around to celebrate plays.
In November 2014, a winter storm unleashed almost seven feet of snow in Orchard Park, over a four-day span. Several of the team's players then had to be transported from their homes by snowmobile because conditions had made roads impassable. The NFL opted to relocate Buffalo's Week 12 game that year against the New York Jets – originally scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 23 in Orchard Park – to Ford Field in Detroit on Monday, Nov. 24. The Bills would go on to win, 38-3.
Eight years later, the NFL moved another Bills game to Detroit's Ford Field, this time in a preventative measure. The Bills played the Cleveland Browns there on Nov. 17, 2022, an eventual 31-23 Bills victory, because forecasts were projecting a winter storm to lash the region.
In a Dec. 7, 2021 game against the New England Patriots, it wasn't the snow as much as it was wind. Gusts of up to 40 mph whipped the area that day, as intermittent snow showers fell, leading to Patriots quarterback Mac Jones attempting just three passes. The Bills lost 14-10.
