It’s been more than six years since Tom Brady set foot in Buffalo’s Highmark Stadium. On Sunday, he’ll be back to call the Week 17 meeting between the Eagles and the Bills for Fox.
The game is one of two 4:25 p.m. ET kickoffs on Sunday, sharing the window only with the Giants-Raiders snooze-fest for the No. 1 pick in the 2026 draft. (Brady, fortunately, will have an inherent distraction from having to watch the team he partially owns.)
And there’s another interesting wrinkle to Brady’s return to Buffalo. During the final years of his time with the Patriots, the fans developed a tradition, literally unlike any other. It involved the throwing of a certain object onto the field.
It first happened, as best we can tell, in 2016. It got to the point where, before Brady’s last visit in 2019, the Bills had to make a public plea to refrain from throwing said object onto the field.
A year earlier, the gesture resulted in an arrest. And it happened at least once when the Patriots returned to Buffalo without Brady.
On Sunday, Brady returns without the Patriots. In the final season of the Bills’ current stadium, the penultimate regular-season home game in a building that will soon be abandoned and destroyed.
Officially, our position is that it would be criminal for one or more Bills fans to do it again. Unofficially, it arguably would be criminal not to.
Regardless, Fox may be wise to install a sheet of plexiglass to the front of the broadcast booth.
