Goodbye to The Ralph

January 1, 2026

Highmark Stadium, then Ralph Wilson Stadium, 14 Sept. 2014 (A. Kotok)

On Sunday afternoon, the Buffalo Bills play their last regular-season home game at Highmark Stadium in nearby Orchard Park, against division rival New York Jets. The Bills are in the National Football League playoffs this year, but in second-place in the AFC East division, so they will likely play their playoff games elsewhere, making Sunday’s game probably their last game at Highmark.

My photo of that stadium, taken during a 2014 season game, is probably my most-viewed shot ever. Here’s how it happened.

The stadium, built in 1972 started out as Rich Stadium with naming rights sold to a local dairy products company, but in 1998 became Ralph Wilson Stadium after the team’s owner, which lasted until 2016. Thus the stadium became known locally as The Ralph, and that nickname stuck as other naming rights came and went. Highmark is a health insurance company that bought the naming rights in 2021.

For several years my two brothers and I — all Buffalo natives — along with their kids and grandkids, went to a Buffalo Bills home game each season. Bills fans, called the Bills Mafia, have a fierce legendary loyalty, despite the team’s ups-and-downs, portrayed in indie films old and new. The Bills Mafia is even the subject of a Hallmark feature film, released this past holiday season.

In Sept. 2014, we got tickets to the Bills game against division rival Miami Dolphins at The Ralph. We discovered, however, that those mid-field seats were up in the nose-bleed section, near the last row. (By the way, the Bills won that game 29-10.)

So I decided to make lemonade out of those lemons. With my Canon point-and-shoot camera, I took three slightly overlapping photos of the field and crowd, then after the game stitched them together with Microsoft’s photo-editing software into a panorama image.

After the game, I posted the image on my Flickr page, and gave it a Creative Commons license, making it freely available with attribution and a link back to the original Flickr file. About a month later, the photo was imported into Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

The image soon appeared on the Ralph Wilson Stadium, now Highmark Stadium page on Wikipedia, where it still resides. For some time, it also appeared on the Buffalo. N.Y. Wikipedia page. Plus, Bills defensive back Jordan Poyer used the photo for a while as the title image on his Twitter page.

The team is building a new stadium, also called Highmark and also outdoors, across the road from the current stadium. I will have to get nose-bleed tickets next season for another photo.