Frank Reich’s Buffalo Bills Career: Nine Seasons, One Unforgettable Game
The Man Jim Kelly’s Shadow Made Famous
Two weeks before the 1993 AFC Wild Card game, almost nobody in Buffalo was thinking about Frank Reich. That’s not an insult. It’s just the reality of being a backup quarterback for nine years behind one of the best to ever play the position. Jim Kelly was the face, the leader, the future Hall of Famer. Reich was the insurance policy, a third-round pick out of Maryland in 1985 who quietly suited up for games he rarely started and never complained about it publicly.
Reich was born December 4, 1961, in Freeport, New York. He played college ball at the University of Maryland, where something happened in 1984 that, in hindsight, was either a preview or a prophecy. Trailing Miami 31-0 at halftime, Reich came off the bench and led Maryland back to a 42-40 win, the largest comeback in college football history at the time. Then he went to the NFL, sat behind Jim Kelly for nearly a decade, and did it again.
The Bills drafted him 57th overall, and when Kelly signed in 1986, Reich’s role was essentially fixed. He appeared in 58 regular-season games across nine years in Buffalo, starting just ten. By the time the 1992 season ended, he had every reason to feel like a supporting character in someone else’s story. That changed on January 3, 1993.
Life Behind Jim Kelly: What Nine Years on the Bench Actually Looked Like
The Buffalo Bills of the early 1990s were a genuinely strange team to be a backup quarterback on. The roster was stacked with future Hall of Famers: Kelly at QB, Thurman Thomas at running back, Andre Reed and James Lofton at receiver. The offensive scheme under coordinator Ted Marchibroda, and later with input from various assistants, was fast, horizontal, and built around Kelly’s ability to read defenses quickly and get the ball out.
Reich got his first real start in 1989 when Kelly went down with a shoulder injury. He won two straight, including a fourth-quarter rally on Monday Night Football against the previously unbeaten Los Angeles Rams in front of 76,231 fans at Rich Stadium. That game gave a hint of what Reich could do when handed the wheel. The Bills went back to Kelly once he recovered, and Reich returned to his spot on the bench.
He played in all four of the Bills’ consecutive Super Bowls (XXV through XXVIII) in some capacity, entering Super Bowls XXVII and XXVIII as a replacement for the injured Kelly. In those two combined appearances, he completed 5 of 9 passes for 88 yards. Not enough to change outcomes. Enough to keep the offense functioning. That was the job, and he knew it. In 1994, the Bills released him. He was 33 years old and had exactly one season left as a legitimate starter anywhere in the league.
January 3, 1993: The Game That Never Aged
The setup to The Comeback started a week earlier. In the final game of the regular season, the Houston Oilers beat Buffalo 27-3, and Kelly tore ligaments in his knee. That meant Reich would start the Wild Card rematch at Rich Stadium the following Sunday. The Bills were hosts. The stadium held about 75,000. A few thousand seats went empty in what was then an unusual sight for a playoff game in Buffalo.
Warren Moon was playing the best football of his career at 36. By halftime, he had completed 19 of 22 passes for 218 yards and four touchdowns. The score was 28-3. Oilers ball on the first drive of the third quarter, and early in that possession, Houston safety Bubba McDowell intercepted a Reich pass and returned it 58 yards for a touchdown. That made it 35-3. The stadium began to empty. Fans who left would later try to scale the outer walls to get back in.
Head coach Marv Levy reportedly walked over to Reich at halftime when it was still 28-3 and told him: “I understand you led the greatest comeback in college football history. Today you’re going to lead the greatest comeback in NFL history.” Whether Levy actually believed that when he said it is a separate question. Reich later said he took it seriously.
What followed across roughly 28 minutes of football is still the largest comeback in NFL playoff history. Five consecutive scoring drives. Reich threw four touchdown passes. Andre Reed caught three of those touchdowns in the fourth quarter alone, finishing with 136 receiving yards. Kenneth Davis, filling in for the injured Thurman Thomas, ran for 68 yards and a score. Don Beebe caught the other TD pass from Reich.
After Davis’s rushing touchdown made it 35-10, Bills special teams coach Bruce DeHaven called for an onside kick. Steve Christie recovered it. That single decision swung the entire game’s momentum. The sequence that followed, three more scoring drives in under seven minutes, reduced a 32-point deficit to four. Reed’s third TD catch put Buffalo ahead 38-35 with about three minutes left. Houston’s Al Del Greco hit a 26-yarder to force overtime. In overtime, Nate Odomes intercepted Moon. Christie then kicked a 32-yard field goal to end it: Bills 41, Oilers 38.
Reich’s final line: 289 passing yards, four touchdowns, one interception (the pick-six that made it 35-3). The one stat that doesn’t fit the rest of the box score is that interception, which came at the lowest point of the game and preceded the entire comeback. He threw it, then went out and dismantled the Oilers anyway.
How the Scoring Unfolded in the Second Half
Third quarter: McDowell’s 58-yard interception return puts Houston up 35-3. Reich responds with a 1-yard touchdown pass to Don Beebe. Christie’s onside kick is recovered by Christie himself. Reich hits Reed for a 26-yard score: 35-17. Kenneth Davis runs 1 yard: 35-24. The third quarter ends before Houston touches the ball again on offense.
Fourth quarter: Reich finds Reed for a 18-yard touchdown: 35-31. Then, with 3:08 remaining, a 17-yard strike to Reed puts Buffalo ahead 38-35. Del Greco answers with a 26-yard field goal to tie it with less than a minute left. Overtime: Odomes intercepts Moon. Christie kicks a 32-yarder. Final: 41-38.
Several thousand people who had given up and left the stadium heard the crowd noise build from the parking lot and outside the walls. The Bills organization later said a number of fans tried to get back inside by any means available. The local TV broadcast was blacked out due to an attendance threshold, which meant Buffalo residents were listening on radio during the actual comeback.
The Record and What It Actually Means
For years, this was called the largest comeback in NFL history, period. That framing eventually became more complicated. In December 2022, the Minnesota Vikings overcame a 33-point deficit against the Indianapolis Colts in a regular-season game, which technically surpassed the Bills’ margin by one point in non-playoff play.
The distinction matters. The Bills’ 32-point comeback against the Oilers is still the largest in NFL postseason history. No playoff game has matched it. That context gets dropped in casual conversation, which is worth keeping straight: what Reich did in 1993 remains the definitive comeback in postseason football.
Buffalo won the following week in Pittsburgh, 24-0, with Reich still starting. Kelly returned for the AFC Championship Game, the Bills beat Miami, and the franchise went to its third consecutive Super Bowl. They lost to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl XXVII, 52-17. Reich entered late in that game too, completing 4 of 7 passes for 48 yards after Kelly went down again. The Bills went back to the Super Bowl the following year and lost to the Cowboys again. Four consecutive Super Bowl appearances, four losses. That’s a different article.
After Buffalo: The Coaching Career Nobody Fully Predicted
The Bills released Reich in February 1995. He signed with the Carolina Panthers as the expansion team’s intended starter, started the first three games of the 1995 season, then lost the job to rookie Kerry Collins. He bounced to the Jets in 1996 and started seven games. Detroit in 1998 was his final NFL stop. He retired after 14 seasons and began working in ministry and speaking before eventually finding his way into coaching.
He started at the bottom. Coaching intern with the Indianapolis Colts in 2006. Then offensive coaching staff assistant in 2008. Quarterbacks coach in 2009 and 2010, where he worked with Peyton Manning. That relationship with Manning clearly mattered. Reich later said Manning’s preparation habits and obsessive film study shaped how he approached the game as a coach.
Wide receivers coach for the Arizona Cardinals in 2012. Offensive coordinator with the San Diego Chargers from 2014 to 2015. Then two seasons as OC under Doug Pederson with the Philadelphia Eagles (2016-2017). In Philadelphia, Reich worked with Carson Wentz during his breakout 2017 season and then helped coordinate the offense when Nick Foles took over in the playoffs. The Eagles beat the Patriots in Super Bowl LII, 41-33. Reich had a Super Bowl ring as a coordinator.
The Indianapolis Colts hired him as head coach in February 2018. He went 40-33-1 in the regular season over five years, made the playoffs in 2018 and 2020, and was fired in November 2022 after a 3-5-1 start. The 2023 season with the Carolina Panthers lasted less than a full year. Owner David Tepper fired him in November 2023 after an 1-10 start, in a press conference that became notable for Tepper mispronouncing Reich’s name twice while explaining the dismissal.
In 2025 he served as interim head coach at Stanford, finishing 4-8. In February 2026 the New York Jets hired him as offensive coordinator under first-year head coach Aaron Glenn, the same Aaron Glenn who had been a defensive back and Reich’s teammate during the 1996 Jets season. Reich is 64.
Reich and the Bills in 2026: The Name That Keeps Coming Back
When the Bills fired Sean McDermott in January 2026, Reich’s name surfaced almost immediately in local Buffalo coverage. It made intuitive sense: prior NFL head coaching experience, a Super Bowl ring as an OC, a deep and genuine connection to the franchise that the current fanbase still associates with the golden era of the early 1990s.
Reich didn’t get the job. He went to the Jets instead. But the fact that his name came up at all after a decade away from Buffalo, after a failed head coaching stint in Carolina and an interim college job at Stanford, says something about how that 1993 game continues to define how Bills fans think about him. In western New York, The Comeback isn’t just a game. It’s the game. Highmark Stadium (formerly Rich Stadium, then Ralph Wilson Stadium) hosted 262 regular-season wins and 16 playoff wins across its history. When the Bills polled fans and media before the stadium’s final game in early 2026, the consensus on the greatest game ever played there wasn’t close.
Reich told the Buffalo media in a 2025 interview that he still gets asked about that game more than anything else in his career. More than the Super Bowl wins as a coordinator. More than any season he coached in Indianapolis. A 32-point deficit in the third quarter of a January playoff game, and 28 minutes later, the Bills had won. He said the details are still sharp.
What’s hard to fully account for is how much of that game came down to one decision nobody expected. The onside kick after Davis’s first rushing touchdown, with the score still 35-10 and the deficit still sitting at 25 points, was the hinge. Had Houston recovered, the comeback never gets off the ground. Special teams coach DeHaven called it. Christie executed it. Reich then had to do something with the ball. He did.
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