The Buffalo Bills are named after the famed Old West showman and frontiersman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, via an earlier Buffalo football team that first adopted his name in the 1940s.

Name origin in a nutshell

  • In the 1940s, Buffalo’s All-America Football Conference team ran a public contest to rename the franchise, which was then called the Bisons.
  • A winning entry compared the team to a band of “Buffalo Bills,” referencing frontier legend Buffalo Bill Cody, and the club adopted “Buffalo Bills” as its new name.
  • When the modern AFL franchise was founded in 1960, owner Ralph Wilson chose to reuse that same name for the new Buffalo team.

Who was “Buffalo Bill” Cody?

  • William Frederick Cody was a 19th‑century scout, buffalo hunter, and showman who became famous for his traveling “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show, which dramatized and romanticized the American frontier.
  • His nickname came from hunting large numbers of buffalo (bison), and his celebrity status made “Buffalo Bill” a recognizable symbol of frontier lore, which is why the name resonated for a team owner themed around the American West.

Why “Bills” for a Buffalo team?

  • “Bills” is simply the plural of “Bill,” taken from Buffalo Bill Cody’s nickname rather than from the animal or from financial “bills.”
  • The pairing of the city name Buffalo with “Bills” ties the franchise both to its location and to the Old West image of Buffalo Bill, even though Cody himself had no direct connection to the city of Buffalo, New York.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.