Why Some People Blame the Buffalo Bills for Making the Kardashians Famous
There’s a meme going around the internet that blames the Buffalo Bills for the Kardashian’s fame.
To be honest, it’s kind of a flimsy argument that uses flawed logic. But there seem to be a lot of people discussing this, so let’s take a closer look.
Does the New York professional football team have any blame for our current Kardashian obsession?
What do the Buffalo Bills have to do with the Kardashians?
If you haven’t seen the meme, you’re not missing much. It’s basically a photo of the Buffalo Bills and a very long written explanation below that starts with the word, “Reminder,” before launching into its reasoning.
To paraphrase, the meme claims that because of the Buffalo Bill’s performance in 1970, they were allowed the first pick of the draft that year. They chose O.J. Simpson, which brought him to Buffalo, New York, where he met his future wife, Nicole Brown. Then as we all know, Simpson was accused of killing his wife, and he had to hire a team of lawyers to defend him in the infamous trial.
One of those lawyers was Robert Kardashian, and that’s how the Kardashian name became known to the general American public.
Years later, Robert Kardashian’s daughter, Kim Kardashian drops a sex tape to further her fame, and the Kardashian name becomes known everywhere. Now, we can’t escape the Kardashians, and according to this meme, it all started with the Buffalo Bills.
The logic is fairly easy to follow, but there are a few problems with their conclusion.
Can we blame the Buffalo Bills for the Kardashians?
First, as one commenter on Reddit pointed out, Simpson didn’t actually meet Brown in Buffalo. He was a player for the Bills at the time, but he met Brown while she was working as a waitress in Beverly Hills. Because of this, it’s hard to know if we can still blame the Buffalo Bills for their meeting. Simpson might not have traveled to Beverly Hills at that time if it hadn’t been for his NFL career. But it’s hard to say for sure. The logic isn’t straight forward.
Then we have another big question about this logic. Would the Kardashians have still been famous without the help of the Simpson trial? Sure, the case is what first brought the Kardashian name into the mainstream. But there were many years between the trial and when Kardashian’s daughters became famous.
Kim Kardashian was the first of the younger generation to get attention. But she worked hard to get herself into the popular crowds. It wasn’t a given because of her father’s connection to Simpson.
Certainly her father’s wealth helped. But he didn’t earn that money solely because of Simpson. He was a successful lawyer for the rich and famous before the trial, which is why he was hired by Simpson in the first place.
So Kim grew up in Los Angeles with plenty of money. She ran in the same social circles as other rich girls, like Paris Hilton. These were girls who were fighting their way into the limelight. “We’d go anywhere and everywhere just to be seen,” Kim once told Rolling Stone about her friendship with Hilton in the early 2000s.
And their strategy worked, first Hilton, and then Kardashian earned a famous reputation. She might have had an easier time because people knew her father from the Simpson trial, but we can’t say if it still would have happened without that link.
Does any of this even matter?
Even if you can prove a link between the Buffalo Bills and Kardashian fame, so what? There are lots of timelines that can be broken down, where one event has far-reaching consequences.
Would Hilton and her little dog have still been famous if Conrad Hilton hadn’t purchased his first hotel in 1919?
Would Miley Cyrus have been famous if the world hadn’t fallen for her father’s Achy Breaky Heart?
Would Billie Eilish have made it big if she hadn’t been inspired by Tyler the Creator, Lana Del Rey, and Amy Winehouse?
The point is that every event happens because of the events before it. Maybe we can blame the Buffalo Bills for the Kardashians, but does it make any difference?
