Buffalo Bills begin looking into new stadium prospects
Being an NFL owner is like playing in a 32-hand poker game. You can kick back and enjoy the camaraderie, but every so often, you’re going to have to ante up big. The ante? A sweet new stadium, of course.
With new stadiums built or in development in Minnesota, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, the Buffalo Bills now find themselves square in the sights of the NFL’s ruling elite. At the spring meetings, the Bills learned that commissioner Roger Goodell and the other 31 owners believed it was “imperative” for Buffalo to get a new stadium. More recently, Goodell dropped a not-particularly-subtle hint that it was time for the Bills to locate their wallet … or someone else might locate theirs.
“Stadiums are important, just to make sure the team here can continue to compete, not only in the NFL, but also to compete in this environment,” Goodell said earlier this month while at Jim Kelly’s celebrity golf tournament. “You’ve got great facilities (around the league), and the Bills have to stay up with that.”
“I don’t think it’s urgent like it has to happen tomorrow,” Giants owner John Mara said in March. “But I think, for the long-term best interests of that franchise, they need to be in a new building. Listen, we’ve been in much worse stadiums, believe me. And they still have great fan support. But there’s a growing disparity in income between the top quartile teams and the bottom quartile teams, and that’s something we have to be conscious of. And a new stadium would help them a great deal.” Left unsaid is the fact that a new stadium would help all the other owners a great deal too, what with a rising tide of cash filling all coffers.
The Bills are taking the threat seriously, and with good reason. Ralph Wilson Stadium doesn’t just have the worst nickname in all of sports (“The Ralph”? Really?), it’s a four-decade-old concrete block built more for function than aesthetics. The facility has undergone considerable renovation, most recently a $130 million upgrade several years ago, but NFL owners have reportedly criticized the team for continuing to pour money into an old stadium rather than building a new one.
Bills owners Kim and Terry Pegula aren’t quite ready to commit to a new facility, however. “We’re in the fact-finding mode,” Kim Pegula said. “We want to make sure we have all the information that is relative to our community, to our fan base. We’re not Atlanta, so it’s hard for us to say we’re going to build a stadium like Atlanta. We can’t. It’s not just a yes or no, it’s a lot more involved than that. We don’t talk about it now because we don’t have all the answers and we don’t want to get misconstrued because things change.”
Worth noting: Buffalo is the second-smallest market in the NFL, ahead of only Green Bay, and Bills fans have the lowest gameday experience prices (tickets, concessions, etc.) in the game. Those are two factors that don’t bode well for a team to build a gargantuan new football palace; something has to give. Whether it’s local governments ponying up more cash, fans paying more in tickets and Personal Seat Licenses for their beloved Bills, the Pegulas dipping into their own resources, or the Bills looking elsewhere, the current state of affairs can’t exist forever in Buffalo. Change is coming.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
