By Staff Reporter
ORCHARD PARK — There are 300-pound men all over the NFL. There is only one who walks into a room in Buffalo and makes it feel like a snow day.
Dion Dawkins, the Bills’ left tackle, has spent a decade making the least glamorous job in football look like a fashion statement. He protects Josh Allen’s blind side for a living. He also wears bright red cleats, a face mask bent into a snowflake and, on a red carpet, whatever color suit the moment calls for. He grins the whole time.
That is why he’s the first subject of Buffalo’s Finest, a new Chronicle column about the striking, magnetic people of Western New York, doing what they do and looking great doing it.
Swagged up in the trenches
Offensive linemen are supposed to be anonymous. The best ones get noticed only when something goes wrong. Dawkins never accepted that.
“We’re not just big fat guys. We’re swagged up,” Dawkins told GQ last November. “We’re just in a different position. We have to be bigger, but we can still be swaggy. I wear bright red cleats for a reason: I know I stand out. The face mask is just another way to stand out.”
The face mask is the boldest piece. Starting at the end of the 2024 season, Dawkins began wearing a Riddell mask with the bars twisted into a snowflake. GQ called it “the most audacious custom job in the league.” It is a nod to his nickname, the Shnowman, which he picked up as a kid in Rahway, N.J., shoveling neighbors’ walkways for pocket money.
He did not take Riddell’s first draft. “It just wasn’t correct,” he told the magazine. “So we sat down and then I was like, ‘How about, let’s put a bar here, let’s put the snowflake here, let’s do this.’”
Chris Kays, Riddell’s vice president of product development, said the request was part style and part engineering. “He was kind of a nice blend of being creative to get the look that he wants, but also we had to do some things to make it to where he could use [his helmet] the way he likes to,” Kays told GQ.
Dressing to play well
For Dawkins, looking sharp isn’t vanity. It’s part of how he gets ready to play.
“You put your uniform on, you look in the mirror before you hit the field, and you know you look good,” he told GQ. “If you’re going out there and you’re like, ‘Man, I look kind of fat today,’ you’re going to be insecure, upset, and you won’t play well.”
He compared wearing the snowflake mask with the Bills’ Cold Front uniforms to wearing the best tuxedo at a wedding. “From the brooch, to the jewelry, to the watch, to the laces, to the cufflinks, everything was just perfect,” he said.
Off the field, the look gets louder. At the 2023 ESPYs in Hollywood, he wore a sea-green suit from Gentleman’s Playbook, and SB Nation declared that he “won the red carpet.” He was quick to say who deserved the credit. “That is the brand, but the influence is all me,” Dawkins said.
Earlier this month, before the Bills’ trip west, he went on WGR’s Schopp and Bulldog to talk about the overtime win over the Rams. The conversation turned, as it often does with him, to his shoe collection and what he’d be wearing in Las Vegas.
The work behind the look
None of it would land if he couldn’t play. A second-round pick out of Temple in 2017, Dawkins became a fixture on the line and, by GQ’s count, a Pro Bowler in four straight seasons through 2024. He anchors the left side for a Bills team that left Las Vegas 5-1 on Sunday after a 33-30 win over the Raiders, and that heads into its bye before facing Baltimore on Nov. 1.
What makes him one of Buffalo’s finest is what he does with the attention. His foundation, Dion’s Dreamers, says it exists to mentor young people in underserved communities and those facing “mental, financial or physical hardship.”
Last fall, the NFL Players Association named him its Week 10 Community MVP for “Shnow Day,” a program that sends Western New York classrooms on all-expenses-paid field trips. More than 450 classrooms applied. One kindergarten class from the Charter School for Applied Technologies arrived at the Aquarium of Niagara by limousine, the union said. Other trips went to Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Highmark Stadium.
According to the union, he also adopted Buffalo’s BPS #131, the Academy School, an alternative school, in 2023. And he helped deliver meals for Ms. Triggs’ Thanksgiving effort on the East Side, which fed 9,000 people in 2024.
“The kids had a crazy time,” Dawkins said in the NFLPA’s announcement. “Over the years, the community of Buffalo has graduated into something way bigger than just the word ‘community.’ And in my life, they’ve graduated to real family.”
Why it works
Plenty of athletes have stylists. What Dawkins has is harder to buy: he looks like he’s having more fun than anyone else in the building, and he makes everyone around him feel invited.
The snowflake mask, the red cleats and the sea-green suit all say the same thing. A big man in a small-market city can be the most stylish guy on the field, and Buffalo is better for it.
Know someone who belongs in Buffalo’s Finest? Send nominations to editor@buffalochronicle.com.
Featured photo: Dion Dawkins (73) blocks for the Bills in an earlier season. Photo by Erik Drost via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
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