"I'm usually an optimist when it comes to the Bills but I could see a horrendous season coming with poor ticket sales and an excuse to move to wherever."
The one thing that Western NY sports fans can breathe a little easier about, is the prospect of relocation of the Bills franchise. The Bills make a tidy profit and pack the house most games as things now stand. They'd have to find a better venue than the one that already puts them in the upper tier of profitability among NFL franchises as things now stand...or else a move would be positively nuts.
Where could they possibly go, that would give them extra profit over the boatloads of cash they already clear?
LA is out, they're probably a decade or more away from having a suitable stadium (the Coliseum and Rose Bowl have no luxury boxes to sell, Anaheim's too far away from the market center, too close to San Diego and reconfigured for baseball only since the Rams left a decade and a half ago). Toronto's Rogers Centre is 25,000 seats and 50 luxury boxes short of matching the Ralph for revenue potential, and both the exhibition game and the regular season Bills-Dolphins matchup weren't the draws they expected, so that's not looking like a very viable option any more. Any other Canadian city? They like the CFL but interest in the south-of-the-border product in Canada is about on a level with interest in the NHL in the Deep South...it's a secondary sport to them. San Antonio? The Alamo Dome's 30,000 seats short of the Ralph's capacity, really better suited to basketball (which it has) and baseball, and no new football-specific stadium's on the horizon there. Columbus, Ohio? Not that much bigger than Buffalo and the place is so college football-oriented a pro team would play second fiddle (and does Ohio State's stadium even have luxury boxes?). Mexico City? Good for an occasional exhibition game but could you generate a full-season audience? Doubtful.
All the other markets that could support a team already have one, the Bay Area and the greater New York area already have two.
The one place you could build a revenue base for another team, will never get one. It's the greater New York City area together with Long Island, where you could park a third team in Queens simply by opting not to demolish Shea Stadium (the former home of the Jets), which held a good 65,000+ for football back in the day, and retrofitting a few more skyboxes in the place. But the Giants and the Jets will never permit a third team in the tri-state area, so forget that idea.
The NFL is really at maximum capacity now, with no place to accept an expansion team or a relocated team without a $500 million to $1 billion stadium project which will take the better part of a decade to take shape even in an economy much better than this one. And it's going to be a few years before the economy is strong enough to start having that kind of conversation again anyway.
So people who think the Bills will be on the move should ask themselves first, where the hell could they possibly go that would even be as good a market as the one where they now play, let alone a better and more lucrative one?
The answer is, noplace.
I think the radio stations know that (although they won't say it because they need an issue to chew on in the off-season). Can't understand why they spend so much airtime talking about it, instead of analyzing the facts and telling people to relax. Guess it's just a lack of other things to talk about...
