Bills exclude O.J. Simpson from new Highmark Stadium honors

The Buffalo Bills will not include O.J. Simpson in the honors display at their new Highmark Stadium. Pete Guelli, the Bills’ president of business operations, said Simpson “is not a fit” to display there.

The family circle outside the stadium is meant to present team history and Western New York in a year-round gathering space, with the Bills also planning to feature their three bison statues there. The decision comes as the club settles into a $2.1 billion stadium that took three years to build and opened with a ribbon-cutting last week, and it follows internal uncertainty that lasted into this spring, when the design team was still preparing for either outcome.

Simpson’s omission is a break from the old stadium, where the Bills created a Wall of Fame in 1980 and made him its first inductee. The No. 1 pick in the 1969 NFL draft spent nine seasons in Buffalo from 1969 to 1977, became the first NFL player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season when he finished with 2,003 in 1973, and earned five first-team All-Pro selections.

In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside Brown Simpson’s Los Angeles home, setting off the 1995 criminal trial that ended in acquittal and later a civil case that found Simpson liable and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the Brown and Goldman families. Simpson died of cancer in April 2024 at 76, and the Bills did not issue a statement or publicly acknowledge his death. The Pro Football Hall of Fame still lists him.