Bills Lose, But No Matter, Big Bucks Still Roll In

No matter how big an embarrassment the franchise has become, the Buffalo Bills continue to reel in the big bucks for a team that will now have gone 13 straight years without making the playoffs after they were officially eliminated on Sunday in Toronto, 50 -17, before a sparse and uninspired allegedly “home” crowd.

But the score didn’t matter as it almost never does to Ralph Wilson’s pocketbook. It was the last Toronto game of the five-year deal the Bills signed with Rogers Communications for eight games, including five regular season contests, that was worth nearly $80 million to the bean counters in Orchard Park.

That translates to about $9.75 million a game for the Bills (about twice as much as Orchard Park generates for them) no matter how bad they are, and they are plenty bad.

Toronto sports fans have shown little interest in their under-achieving guests from Buffalo, and while the announced paid crowd for Sunday’s game against Seattle was 40,770, the actual attendance was maybe about 35,000. And a lot of them were cheering for the Seahawks by game’s end. That doesn’t seem to matter, either, as the Bills are likely to sign a new and more lucrative deal shortly for another round of games up north.

Meanwhile, that clamor abut a new lease for the Bills in Orchard Park is now a distant memory, much like all the pre-season hype about “this was the year” the playoff drought would end. Ralph had finally spent a few bucks on a couple of players and you would have thought a Super Bowl was just around the corner. It’s not and never will be under this ownership. The whole package must go for the Bills to become a legitimate NFL franchise and, frankly, that won’t happen under the reign of the 94-year-old Wilson who has announced the team will be sold after his passing.

Despite all the anguish from the Wilson crowd about how hard it is to make a living in Western New York, they have managed to do very nicely all these years despite the awful product that has been on display for most of those years.

The Wilson crowd will have a new lease with Erie County and New York State shortly when everyone gets around to announcing it. And as I reported at the end of October, the lease is pretty much done but nobody seems in a hurry to announce where all the pain is going to come from (see taxpayers) to give the Bills the $220 million they want to upgrade Ralph Wilson Stadium to keep it going for a few more years. And that’s on top of the $7 million a year the team gets in county subsidies, an amount that is expected to increase under the new deal.

And what happens after Wilson passes? Who will buy the team and will they keep it here, stay in the stadium for a while longer, or buy their way out of the agreement and move elsewhere, either locally or to parts west, like Los Angeles? No one really knows the answer and we wrote a while back that there had been some secret talks involving millionaire real estate titan and Cuomo pal Howard Milstein about possibly become a player in a new ownership group and moving the team to Niagara Falls and putting it on his undeveloped downtown property which his currently under title to his Niagara Falls Redevelopment agency.

No one will speak publicly about that possibility but NFR Chief Executive Officer Anthony Bergamo seems to be leaving the door open about something maybe happening. Witness this comment he made to this newspaper over the weekend: “We would be very happy to cooperate with and support, a government initiative to explore the possibility of an enclosed stadium, not only for football, but for concerts, specialty events and for use as a trade show and convention facility.”

Asked if there were any current negotiations with the governor, Bergamo declined to comment.

Make of it what you will, but the bottom line seems to be despite the team’s terrible season and its losing legacy, it is still worth close to $900 million and will attract a buyer and maybe under new ownership it will become competitive. But for now, no one is sure where they will end up and talk of Niagara Falls and the Buffalo waterfront is all just talk, for now. And understandably, at least at this point, no one wants to bring up the lease or anything else connected with this team until the pain of the current season ends and the public forgets how bad they are and will agree to fork over the big bucks to keep them here for at least as long as Wilson is around.

As I said in October, the basics of the lease are pretty much done but you can hardly blame any of the public parties who are on the hook for the lease for not wanting to trumpet a costly taxpayer investment in the wake of the hurricane disaster and in the wake of another dismal season by quite probably the worst franchise in the league.

In short, the Bills are a national embarrassment for this region and the beat goes on and on with no end in sight. How much pain are taxpayers willing to suffer to subsidize the bean counters that won’t even lift the blackout policy to save a few bucks for Mr. Wilson? Maybe they are doing the fans a favor when they black out the games they can’t sell out because it looks even worse than the score when you see it. They would have no trouble selling out games in Orchard Park if they had a decent team.
Unfortunately, they don’t.