The Buffalo Bills announced today their lone Toronto pre-season game, scheduled originally to be played at SkyDome (fine, Rogers Centre) will be moved back to Ralph Wilson Stadium, the Bills permanent home. Bills CEO Russ Brandon cited a scheduling conflict with SkyDome as the reason for the decision.
In 2008 the Buffalo Bills and SkyDome owners Rogers Communications, struck a deal seeing the Canadian cable giant pay $78 million to the National Football League team in exchange for playing one regular season game annually and three exhibition games every other year over a five year period in Canada’s largest city. Rogers wanted to showcase Toronto as a possible NFL destination and the Bills aimed to strengthen their footing in Buffalo by expanding into the neighbouring Canadian market, which boasts 6 million people. By playing games in Toronto, the Buffalo Bills have now expanded their territory and can now seek an indemity fee if the “Big Smoke” ever (But it will never happen. A topic for another article) lands an NFL team.
It has been well documented this so-called Bills in Toronto Series has been an utter disaster. Initially people had to purchase tickets to all eight Toronto games upfront and the cheapest ticket was $180. Single game tickets were eventually released and ticket prices were lowered, with the cheapest being $100, because tickets were not moving. Bills fans in Western New York were upset one home game was moved from Buffalo to Toronto. NFL fans in Toronto were upset with the high ticket prices, the lack of tailgating atmosphere in Toronto compared to what exists in Buffalo, the poor football product on the field and many Torontonians do not consider the Bills their NFL team.
Although the Bills games in Toronto have been announced as sellouts. They have not been. The last two preseason games had more then 10,000 seats available at each of them. Rogers has had to paper the house and give many of the 54,000 available tickets at each game in-order to avoid embarrassment and have this so-called premier event blacked out on local television. On the field, the Bills have won only one of four regular season games they have played at SkyDome in this series.
So Brandon announcing the exhibition game has been moved back to Buffalo did not surprise me. What was shocking was the poor reason he gave as to why this was happening. I checked SkyDome’s primary tenant’s, the Toronto Blue Jays August 2012 schedule and yes they have two long home stands. However 3 out of 5 Thursdays are available in August to stage this exhibition game, which has been staged on the 5th day of the week before. So they could have picked Thursday again. The Bills did not want to say it publicly and Rogers Communications have stated they want to extend the series, but I feel this is the beginning of the end for it. We examined that it has been a failure and why that is the case. Brandon used the “scheduling conflict” lame excuse to avoid embarrassingly stating the game was moved due to lack of interest for the game or series in Toronto. Since this series has failed miserably, I feel it will not and should not be extended beyond the 2012 NFL season. I feel the Buffalo Bills should focus on putting a successful product on the football field. This is a team that hasn’t made the playoffs since 1999. A winning product I feel will help the Bills expand their product in both the United States and Canada, and make the team more viable right in their home of Buffalo.
What do you think?
…and that is the last word.
