Buffalo Bills vs Miami Dolphins: Full Head-to-Head Record, 2025 Scores, and 60 Years of AFC East Rivalry
125 games. One tie. Two franchises that have spent six decades taking turns owning each other. The Bills lead the all-time series 61–63–1 in Miami’s favor depending on which database you check, and the number flips depending on whether you count playoffs, but what the numbers won’t tell you is how lopsided some stretches have been. Miami won 20 straight in the 1970s. Buffalo went 14–2 against the Dolphins from the moment Josh Allen took over as starter. The 2025 season split things 1–1, which is actually more competitive than this series has been in years.
2025 Season Results: Bills and Dolphins Split Both Games
Week 3, September 18, Highmark Stadium. Bills 31, Dolphins 21. Thursday Night Football, and the game played out roughly the way most people expected it to. Buffalo jumped to a 14–7 lead after Allen hit tight end Dalton Kincaid for 20 yards and then found rookie Jackson Hawes on a shovel pass for Hawes’ first career touchdown. Miami tied it at 14 before halftime, converting five of five third downs on the drive. That kind of efficiency on third down against the Bills defense was the one number that didn’t fit the final result.
James Cook ran for 108 yards on 19 carries, which matters because Cook was the first back to eclipse 100 rushing yards against Miami in 36 straight games. Allen finished 22 of 28 for 213 yards and three touchdowns, including a 15-yard go-ahead score to Khalil Shakir in the fourth quarter that turned out to be Allen’s 200th career passing touchdown. Linebacker Terrel Bernard sealed it with an interception of Tua Tagovailoa with 3:06 left. Bernard said afterward he’d seen the play on film earlier that week – Miami’s quick-game concept into a three-deep zone. He broke on it immediately.
The second game was different. Week 10, November 9, Hard Rock Stadium. Dolphins 30, Bills 13. Miami led 16–0 entering the fourth quarter, and Allen was eventually pulled for Mitchell Trubisky after De’Von Achane’s second rushing touchdown made it a 17-point game. Allen threw for 306 yards, but also turned the ball over three times, including an end-zone interception by safety Ifeatu Melifonwu when the Bills had driven to the Miami 5. Achane finished with 174 yards on 22 carries and two scores. That was the game that snapped Buffalo’s seven-game win streak in the series.
After it was over, Tua said: “They’ve had our number for years.” Factually, that’s accurate. But the way he said it suggested the win meant something beyond a single result.
Bills vs Dolphins All-Time Head-to-Head Record
Through the 2025 season, the two teams have met 125 times including five playoff games. Miami leads the overall series 63–61–1. In regular season play only, the Dolphins hold a 62–57–1 advantage. The Bills, however, are 4–1 in the postseason. Worth noting: that single Dolphins playoff win came in January 1999, and they haven’t beaten Buffalo in the postseason since.
The rivalry started badly for Miami. The very first game, September 18, 1966, went 58–24 Bills. Buffalo scored 48 points in the first half alone. The Dolphins didn’t get a win until their second season, a 17–14 final in which Bob Griese hit Howard Twilley for a 31-yard touchdown late. The only tie in the series came in 1968, 14–14. Then Buffalo won their last game in 1969 before going 0–20 against Miami across the entire 1970s – a stretch that remains the longest winning streak by one team over another in this rivalry’s history.
On September 7, 1980, Buffalo ended it. Two fourth-quarter touchdowns, a 17–7 final, and fans stormed the field at Rich Stadium and tore down a goal post. That detail always gets me – a regular-season win in September, and they tore down the post. That’s how deep the 1970s run had cut.
Playoff History Between the Bills and Dolphins
Five postseason matchups, all of them in the 1990s except for the most recent in January 2023. The breakdown:
January 1991 – AFC Divisional Round, Bills 44, Dolphins 34. Kelly threw three touchdowns at Rich Stadium.
January 1993 – AFC Championship Game, Bills 29, Dolphins 10. In Miami. That margin is harder to explain when you consider Marino was the quarterback. The Bills defense held Miami to a field goal in the first half.
December 1995 – AFC Wild Card, Bills 37, Dolphins 22.
January 1999 – AFC Wild Card, Dolphins 24, Bills 17. Miami’s only playoff win in the series, and it came in overtime.
January 2023 – AFC Wild Card, Bills 34, Dolphins 31. Miami started Skylar Thompson at quarterback because Tua was out with a concussion. They still nearly won. Thompson had the Dolphins driving in the final minute before they turned the ball over on downs.
The 1970s: Miami’s 20-Game Run and Why It Still Defines This Rivalry
Don Shula took over as Miami’s head coach in 1970, and for the next ten years the Bills might as well have not been on the schedule. Twenty straight losses, 12 of them by 10 or more points. The closest game in the entire run came in 1972 – the year the Dolphins finished 17–0 – when Miami won 24–23 in the Orange Bowl. That 24–23 was the tightest margin Shula’s perfect-season team had in any game that year.
By November 1978, the streak had reached 17 games, which tied the NFL record at the time for consecutive wins by one team over another. Miami broke the record on November 12, winning 25–24 in Buffalo. They ran it to 20 by the end of 1979. It’s a useful reminder that the Bills’ current run of dominance – impressive as it is – still has a long way to go to match what Miami did in that decade.
The 1980s and 90s: Kelly vs. Marino and the Rivalry’s Best Era
Dan Marino’s first NFL start came against the Bills, November 1983 in the Orange Bowl. He gave up a 14–0 lead, the Dolphins came back to lead 35–28, and then Bills quarterback Joe Ferguson drove 80 yards in the final minute to tie it. Overtime. Uwe von Schamann missed two field goal attempts. Joe Danelo made a 36-yarder for Buffalo. Ferguson finished with 419 passing yards and five touchdowns. The franchise record held for years. That game is worth knowing if you want to understand why the 1980s edition of this rivalry had real weight.
From 1986 to 1996, Kelly and Marino met 21 times counting playoffs. Miami offensive lineman Richmond Webb described it at the time as “the Game of the Year every time.” That wasn’t PR. The 1990 playoffs started a run of four postseason meetings in eight years. The Bills won three of them, including the 1993 AFC Championship 29–10 in Miami’s building – which might be the most dominant single postseason result in the series, accounting for the talent on both sides.
Josh Allen’s Record Against Miami and the Modern Era of Bills Dominance
Allen entered the 2025 season 13–2 against the Dolphins as a starter, with 43 touchdown passes in those games and a passer rating of 128.8. For context, Tua Tagovailoa had a passer rating of 80.5 against Buffalo across his full-time starts. Those two numbers probably tell you more about the recent history of this series than any win-loss record does.
The Week 3 result in 2025 ran Allen to 14–2. He’s been more than just efficient in these games – the 200th-career-passing-touchdown milestone happened against Miami, which felt appropriate given the degree to which Buffalo has owned this matchup since 2018. Head coach Sean McDermott is 9–0 versus Miami at Highmark Stadium. Buffalo had won 10 straight home meetings when the 2025 season started.
The Week 10 loss at Hard Rock Stadium broke a seven-game streak. Allen acknowledged it directly: “I’ve got to be better. We’ve got to be better in the protection game, in the pass game, in the run game, all of it. Anytime you turn it over three times – that’s a recipe for disaster.” He’s not wrong, but three turnovers in Miami on the road against a defense that was motivated is a different situation than the usual Bills-Dolphins dynamic.
Tua Tagovailoa Against Buffalo: What the Numbers Actually Show
Before November 9, 2025, Tua was 1–8 as Miami’s full-time starter against the Bills. His one win came in Week 3 of the 2022 season, a 21–19 final that also happened to be the last time Miami won the series before the 2025 Week 10 result. In the losses, his passer rating averaged below 81. Against every other AFC East opponent, he’s been considerably better.
Week 10 of 2025 was different, though only to a point. He threw for 173 yards and two touchdowns in a controlled game where Achane and the running game did most of the damage. He also had a first-half interception on the opening drive. The Dolphins won by 17 despite Tua not being particularly sharp, which is the version of a Miami win against Buffalo that might actually be sustainable – one where the defense and Achane carry the load and Tua doesn’t have to beat Allen in a throwing contest.
De’Von Achane, James Cook, and Why the Running Game Decides This Matchup
James Cook’s 108-yard performance in Week 3 was notable precisely because it hadn’t happened to Miami in 36 games. That’s a genuinely good run defense. De’Von Achane’s 174 yards and two touchdowns in Week 10 was the kind of performance where the Dolphins basically played a different sport than the Bills were prepared for. Twenty-two carries, 174 yards – that’s 7.9 yards per attempt against a defense that was ranked in the top half of the league.
The pattern in this matchup over the last three seasons: whoever wins the running game wins the game. The two 2025 results broke exactly that way. Buffalo controlled the ground in September, Miami controlled it in November. In the Bills’ dominant 2021 blowout – the 35–0 game that remains the largest margin in the series’ history on Buffalo’s side – they held Miami to 65 total rushing yards.
Where the Series Stands Heading Into 2026
The 2025 season ended with the series split 1–1, Miami on a one-game winning streak, and the 2026 schedule not yet released. Buffalo finished the year 8–9 and lost to Denver in the Wild Card round 33–30. Miami went 5–12. The gap in the standings is still wide, but the November result suggests the series might actually be competitive again in a way it hasn’t been since 2022.
One oddity about the all-time record that rarely gets mentioned: the average score across all 125 games is 21.43 Bills to 20.76 Dolphins. For a series where one team went 20–0 in a single decade and the other has won 14 of the last 15, those aggregate scoring averages are remarkably close. The dominance has always been concentrated in runs rather than spread evenly, which is part of what makes this rivalry feel more volatile than it probably is. When Miami finally wins a game in this series after a long drought, it tends to be convincing. When Buffalo’s streak breaks, it looks like 30–13, not 21–19.
Comments