Canadian Thanksgiving falls on Monday 12 October, and the Bills play at the Los Angeles Rams that night. That is a coincidence of the schedule. Almost nothing else about the Bills and Canada is.
On the same evening the club is running its first Give Thanks, Go Long event at El Mocambo in Toronto, a game-day watch party hosted by eTalk’s Tyrone Edwards, with food from McEwan Catering, a livestreamed set from the Toronto band PUP and all ticket proceeds going to Second Harvest, which moves surplus food into food banks and shelters. Tickets are available online. An NFL team putting on a show in a Spadina Avenue rock club on Thanksgiving is not a normal piece of football news, and a band named PUP playing a football party, when PUP on an NFL roster means physically unable to perform, is a coincidence only a football audience will enjoy.
The courtship is deliberate, and it is not new
Buffalo sits about two hours from Toronto, and the club has spent this season making that proximity explicit. Barenaked Ladies sang O Canada before the home opener against Detroit on 17 September, the first regular-season game at the new Highmark Stadium. In September the club staged a cross-border game of catch across the Niagara River. Niagara Falls is lighting the Canadian side of the water in the team’s colours as a thank-you.
None of it is improvised. Under Ralph Wilson the Bills ran annual Canadian fan appreciation games, a tradition that lapsed roughly two decades ago, and from 2007 to 2013 they played a regular-season game in Toronto every year. The Sabres, owned by the same family, have played both anthems before every home game since 1970. What is happening now is a revival rather than an invention.
Toronto Life reports that Canadians make up around 12 per cent of Bills season ticket holders. For a club with no Canadian market of its own to sell into, that is the number the whole strategy rests on.
Five Canadians, which is the most of any game this week
The football gives the night more than the branding does. Buffalo at the Rams puts five Canadians on one field, more than any other game in Week 5.
Four of the five grew up in Ontario: Brampton, Oakville, Windsor and Ottawa. Two of those, Joshua Palmer of Brampton and Michael Hoecht of Oakville, are from inside the Greater Toronto Area, which is precisely the market the club is courting, and both travel with Buffalo. Alaric Jackson of Windsor is waiting for them on the Rams’ offensive line, with Wesley Bailey of Ottawa alongside him. Dalton Kincaid, a dual citizen, is the fifth. Our Week 5 Canadians watchlist has the full set across the league.
The game, and why our model is nervous about it
The Bills are the best team on our board. They sit first in the NFL power rankings on a rating of 99, at 3-1 with a points difference of +20, and the model gives them a 96% chance of reaching the playoffs.
And it still only has them winning this one 55% of the time, by 1.4 points. That is the second-least confident call it makes all week, a confidence it shares with two other games. The Rams are 2-2 and eighth on the same board at 85, which is a long way short of Buffalo, but they are at home and a one-score projected margin is the model saying it does not really know.
That gap is worth sitting with, because 14 rating points separate these two teams on our board and the model still projects the game inside a single score. Almost all of that compression is home field: the Rams get it, the Bills travel three time zones to the Monday night slot, and a short projected margin between a first-ranked team and an eighth-ranked one is what that adjustment looks like when it is doing real work.
Monday night football airs on TSN and CTV2 in Canada, kicking off at 8:15pm ET. The model’s read on every Week 5 game is in our Week 5 predictions.
Why it is worth paying attention to
There is no NFL team in Canada and there is not going to be one soon. What there is instead is a club two hours from the largest city in the country, actively building a Canadian audience, fielding three Ontarians, playing on a Canadian holiday, and throwing a party downtown while it happens. For a Canadian NFL fan that is as close to a home team as the league currently offers.
19+ (18+ in AB/MB/QC) | Please play responsibly | Event and season-ticket details reported by Toronto Life; anthem and Toronto Series history from ESPN; projections from the Squawka Signal model and accurate at the time of writing | ConnexOntario: 1-866-531-2600 (ON). See your province’s helpline for resources elsewhere.