He Colts vs Bills that we will see this Saturday at noon in Mexico in the Wild Card Round of the 2021 NFL Playoffs is a duel with a very long history because they are old divisional rivals, however, Saturday will be the first meeting in the playoffs.
By Ignacio Iglesias.
The general numbers
A long tradition of dueling with each other, something unknown to some, dates back to 1970 and in total they have played 70 games: 37 for Buffalo, 32 for Indianapolis and a single draw. At home, the Bills are 23-13 over the Colts; The funny thing is that all these games were in the regular season and most of them are registered as divisional games. That is, there are no records of playoff games.
The duels between both franchises began when the NFL and the AFL merged in 1970, a season that would happily end for the Colts, then installed in Baltimore, with the consecration of Super Bowl V (the only one until the 2006 season). In that championship with 26 teams, the conferences had 13 participants in three divisions each: East, Central and West. Colts and Bills would be two of the founding franchises of the first AFC East (along with Patriots, Jets and Dolphins). This division lasted until the 2001 season inclusive. At this time, the record would be in Buffalo’s favor 34-28-1.
With the formation of four divisions in 2002, the Colts moved to the new AFC South and these teams would only play as conference games in the regular season. In these years, they only met seven times: Indianapolis had four victories and Bills three. Of these games, four were played in Buffalo and the locals managed to keep the last three of them.
Playoff history
These teams could never meet in the postseason, on the one hand, because many times the classification of one, implied the elimination of the other. On the other hand, the good moment of a team rarely coincided with a good period of its rival. Finally, luck and fate sometimes work in a mysterious way and make some teams, after 50 years, only able to meet in the playoffs.
What can happen in this Colts vs Bills?
The overall matchup and game advantage in Buffalo is clearly for the Bills, but history sometimes has little to do with particular situations. This will be the first time that both have faced an elimination situation and anything can happen. Whoever can best pass the ball will advance and in this it is likely that the locals will have a better advantage. The Colts will have to surprise in some way if they want to advance to divisional games.
