Buffalo, New York (AP) The Buffalo Bills’ wild-card playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, originally set for Sunday, has been rescheduled to Monday due to a prediction of catastrophic winter weather, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Saturday.
Hochul and other officials claimed they were making the modification for safety reasons. “We want our Bills to win, but we don’t want 60,000 to 70,000 people traveling to the football game in what will be terrible conditions,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference in Buffalo’s suburbs.
Officials encouraged locals to avoid the roads beginning at dusk on Saturday, with a driving ban in force at 9 p.m. The game will now be played at Highmark Stadium at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, rather than 1 p.m. Sunday.
Hochul stated that she began communicating with the NFL on Thursday about the potential of having to reschedule the game. She ended her news conference from Buffalo with the words, “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 65 mph (105 kph) Saturday, with 1 to 2 feet or more of snow eventually piling up. The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning lasting through 7 a.m. Monday, saying that “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 predicted to concentrate in a narrow belt of lake-effect snow over Buffalo’s southern suburbs, including the Bills’ home in Orchard Park.
The Steelers have rescheduled their trip to Buffalo for 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.
