Josh Allen scores five touchdowns as Bills open record $2.2 billion stadium with rout of Lions

The Buffalo Bills opened the most expensive stadium in NFL history the way they had hoped to, with a national television audience watching quarterback Josh Allen account for five touchdowns in a 41-31 win over the Detroit Lions on Thursday night. The game was the first regular-season contest at the new Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, New York, a $2.2 billion venue that replaced the team's home of five decades across the parking lot.

Buffalo scored touchdowns on each of its first three possessions and led 27-7 at halftime, an outburst that held up despite a late push from Detroit. The result, confirmed on the league's official game center, pushed the Bills to 2-0 to start the season and dropped the Lions to 1-1 after they had opened with an overtime win over New Orleans four days earlier.

The numbers

Allen finished 20 of 31 passing for 248 yards and three touchdowns, and added 69 yards and two more scores on the ground, according to the Bills' own recap of the game. His short touchdown run in the second quarter was the 83rd rushing score of his career, tying him with Green Bay Hall of Famer Jim Taylor for 18th on the NFL's all-time list. Running back James Cook added more than 130 rushing yards and a touchdown, and Buffalo finished with 446 total yards, 34 first downs and a touchdown on all five of its trips into the red zone.

Detroit did not go quietly. Jared Goff threw for 327 yards and four touchdowns, and wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown caught nine passes for 142 yards and two scores on 13 targets, per the Lions' game recap. Buffalo's defense supplied the counterweight: end Greg Rousseau recorded multiple sacks for the second straight week, becoming only the second Bills player — after Bruce Smith in 1996 — to open a season that way, while Bradley Chubb and Michael Hoecht added pressure off the edge. Buffalo listed defensive lineman Ed Oliver (hip) and wide receiver DJ Moore (shoulder) among those hurt in the game; Detroit's Avonte Maddox left with a foot injury. The 41 points allowed by Detroit's defense in the loss left the unit having given up more than 70 points through two games, an early concern for a team that reached the playoffs a year ago.

How Buffalo got here

Thursday's kickoff was the payoff of a three-year construction project that broke ground in June 2023 and became, by most published estimates, the costliest stadium ever built for an American professional sports team. Local television station WKBW's parent group reported on the ribbon-cutting ceremony over the summer, putting the total price at $2.2 billion, of which roughly $850 million came from New York state and Erie County taxpayers — the largest public contribution ever made to an NFL stadium. The Bills and the league covered the remainder. The new building seats 60,108, making it the smallest venue in the NFL, with a partial canopy over about two-thirds of the seats and a heated, sub-surface air system designed to keep the field playable through Buffalo winters. Team officials have also pointed to features built for players rather than fans, including a dedicated dining hall, an indoor warm-up field and expanded recovery facilities, part of an effort to sell the venue as a competitive advantage and not simply a bigger box office.

The stadium replaced the open-air facility the Bills had played in since 1973, built essentially in the same parking lot in Orchard Park rather than downtown Buffalo, after years of public debate over financing and location that at times threatened to send the franchise elsewhere. Thursday's game had been previewed for weeks by the team as a showcase moment for the region, with a pair of national anthems, performances and fireworks built into the pregame program before the Bills got around to playing football in the building for the first time in a game that counted.

Who is affected

The most direct financial exposure belongs to the taxpayers of Erie County and New York state, who are now backing debt on a stadium expected to host Bills games for the coming decades in exchange for a projected regional economic boost the state has estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Fans absorbed a more immediate cost: according to Front Office Sports' reporting on the secondary ticket market, the average get-in price for Thursday's opener was $569, the highest of any NFL game in Week 2 and among the highest entry prices of the season leaguewide.

The building's debut also underscored the Bills' cross-border following. The band Barenaked Ladies performed the Canadian national anthem before the game, the first time a second anthem has been part of a Bills home game, a nod to a fan base in which roughly one in eight season-ticket holders live in Canada. For the two teams on the field, the stakes were more conventional: Buffalo, under first-year head coach Joe Brady, became the first team in franchise history to start a new coaching tenure 2-0, while Detroit now needs a response after its defense allowed points in bunches for a second straight week. The Lions reached the playoffs a year ago on the strength of a defense that ranked among the league's best, so the early slippage has drawn attention in Detroit even though the offense, led by Goff, St. Brown and running back Jahmyr Gibbs, has kept pace so far.

Reaction and what happens next

Both locker rooms described a lopsided first half that hinged on Buffalo's fast start. Brady, who had said before kickoff that the "city of Buffalo, it's a night that they deserve," credited his quarterback afterward: "Anytime the ball's in his hands, good things happen. And yeah, love that guy," he said, according to an Associated Press account of the game. Allen, who has become accustomed to milestone nights in Buffalo, said he found himself absorbed by the moment during the anthems.

"I caught myself taking it all in and understanding how cool what I get to do is. My job is the coolest in the world."

Detroit's Dan Campbell was blunter about his team's slow start. Miked up for Amazon's broadcast at halftime, the Lions' coach told his players, "We have not handled what we need to be doing right now." Bills players, meanwhile, marveled afterward at the noise the new building generated, crediting the sound-amplifying, soccer-inspired bowl design for disrupting Detroit's offense early and fueling the fast start. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who has toured the project, has called the finished stadium "something spectacular and something that I think is going to make the people of Buffalo really proud."

Both teams turn around quickly for Week 3. Buffalo hosts the Los Angeles Chargers at Highmark Stadium on September 27, according to the NFL's official schedule, while Detroit returns home to face the New York Jets the same afternoon as it looks to shore up a defense that has now been stretched thin twice in a row. For Buffalo, the larger test is whether Thursday's offensive display, and the environment that produced it, can be sustained across a full season in the building the region spent three years and billions of dollars waiting for.