Well, the Bills 2023-24 schedule has now been set but the complaining about its makeup started Wednesday morning, over 30 hours before the full slate was released by the NFL last night.

By then we knew the Bills’ London game would be the morning of Oct. 8 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium against Jacksonville and that the regular-season opener would be the Sept. 11 Monday nighter against the Jets at the Meadowlands.

Thus, I was quickly reminded why I’m not on Twitter, the Book of Face or any other social media vehicle.

My notification came via cell phone as the Bills make their announcements through tweets that are available even to non-Twitter subscribers such as me … including the responses.

Many complained that the Bills “lost a home game” and that it was against one of Buffalo’s most appealing opponents.

But the NFL announced months ago what nine teams would be playing in Europe (three games in London, two in Frankfurt, Germany). The only question was which of the four teams on the Bills schedule to be playing overseas — Jacksonville, Kansas City, Miami or New England — would provide the opposition.

By process of elimination, the Jags, who play two London games this season — were an obvious choice. The NFL doesn’t like to schedule division games in Europe, pretty much eliminating the Patriots and Dolphins, and Chiefs-Bills is one of the campaign’s marquee games and wouldn’t figure to be relegated to a Sunday morning start an ocean away.

That didn’t stop the complaints from Bills Twitter followers who seemed to forget, given the league’s 17-game schedule, conference’s alternate on which one gets the ninth home game. This is the AFC’s year, so Buffalo still has eight home games and the ninth is at a neutral site, albeit 3,500 miles away. Clearly, Orchard Park has surrendered one of its most appealing games of the season, but one reason the Bills and Jags were picked is that it matches two elite teams in a wide-open time slot for a nationwide audience, though at a non-traditional time.

WHAT’S CERTAIN IS, the Bills got the respect they so desperately crave from the schedule-makers..

Their slate contains the league limit of six prime-time games, equally divided between home and away. There are two Monday nighters (at the Jets, Sept. 11; home with Denver, Nov. 13), two Sunday nighters (Giants at home, Oct. 15; at Cincinnati, Nov. 5), a Thursday nighter (home with Tampa Bay, Oct. 26) and a Saturday nighter (at L.A. Chargers, Dec. 23).

There’s a skein of four prime-time games in a span of five weeks (Oct. 15-Nov. 13), three of them (Giants, Buccaneers and Broncos) at home.

There’s also the national telecast of the Jaguars game from London, Sunday morning Oct. 8.

Buffalo also has a brutal four-game stretch from mid-November to mid-December all of them in the late Sunday afternoon window with 4:25 starts, lending them to national TV.

It starts at home with the Jets (Nov. 19) then come consecutive games against the Super Bowl teams — at Philadelphia (Nov. 26) and at Kansas City (Dec. 10) — mercifully interrupted by the bye week. The streak ends with a home game against Dallas (Dec. 17).

Finally, the weekend of Jan. 6-7, the Bills conclude the regular season at Miami for a game that could be “flexed,” if there’s something at stake, into a permissible seventh prime-time game for Buffalo.

ONE THING the revelation of the schedule begins in earnest is speculation about the Bills record. When Buffalo’s opponents were locked in after the regular season ended last January, it was impossible to ignore the reality that the Bills were playing 10 games against 2022 playoff teams: Miami twice, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Jacksonville, the Chargers, Philadelphia, Dallas, Tampa Bay and the Giants, five of them (both Super Bowl teams — Chiefs and Eagles — Dolphins, Bengals and Chargers) on the road.

It’s a brutal lineup as verified by Pro Football Network which assigns Buffalo the third-toughest schedule in 2023 behind only the Giants and New England.

But that’s not all.

PFN also says the AFC East has the toughest collective schedule as it has the Patriots, Bills, Dolphins and Jets ranked two through five in schedule difficulty for the whole league.

There’s disagreement in Las Vegas on the Bills win total, some sites have the over/under at 11.5 victories, others at 10.5.

Once I saw who Buffalo was playing, and when, my prediction hasn’t changed. It’s still 10-7.

(Chuck Pollock, a Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)