Follow the money and find the truth.
The Buffalo Bills expect to earn $78-million for the eight games they'll play at the Rogers Centre in Toronto over the next five years. That's about $4-million a game more than they bring in at Ralph Wilson Stadium, which holds about 20,000 more spectators.
A couple of things can be safely extrapolated from those numbers.
The average ticket price for the games in Toronto will be in the vicinity of $200 - 50,000 seats equals a $10-million gate - a subject much speculated on in the local press since the series was announced. (Expect to hear something definitive on pricing later this week.)
Print Edition - Section Front
More Stories
And barring unforeseen circumstances, the Bills will be in Toronto, in part or in whole, for a long, long time.
The Canadian invasion will be a bonanza for Bills owner Ralph Wilson during his remaining time on this good green Earth and would be a bonanza for any owner of the franchise who follows in his wake. The new economics of the NFL - as Wilson has been happy to explain - are much different than the happy socialism borne of equally shared network television revenue.
They still divvy up the TV pot, but it's the money made above and beyond television that now separates the NFL's haves from its have-nots. Owners get to keep that for themselves or to spend it on football operations outside the player salary cap. (That's the reason, for instance, that Jerry Jones is building that great, gaudy cash cow of a stadium for his Dallas Cowboys.)
In Buffalo, a blue-collar town in decline, the Bills have the smallest average ticket price in the league and, according to Wilson, are at a competitive disadvantage. The Toronto games represent found money - and having stumbled onto that new source of income, it's hard to believe they won't come back for more, that one regular-season game won't eventually morph into two, or three or four. (The old Green Bay-Milwaukee formula.)
What could happen to change that?
Well, the Canadian dollar could collapse against the U.S. dollar, which would seriously alter the balance sheet. The federal government could intervene after the fact (as if). Or Toronto consumers could decline to fill the stadium.
Here, the topic of ticket prices arises, a red herring if there ever was one.
Yep, they're going to be expensive. And, yep, Toronto is a great big city where all kinds of things are expensive. Mass affordability isn't the issue - it's whether there are 50,000 people willing to pay what Rogers Communications chief executive officer Ted Rogers is asking.
If there are, it doesn't really matter who can't pay the piper, and if there aren't, the organizers will have seriously misread the market - which, frankly, is hard to imagine.
Permanent franchise relocation is a whole other issue, which has already been much discussed. (Wilson, who is 89, has said he won't sell the club before his death, and his estate would be bound to sell it to the highest bidder, which, given the economics, is less likely to be someone committed to keeping the Bills in Buffalo than someone intent on moving them to wealthier climes.)
There would be significant political hurdles to be overcome in any permanent move from Orchard Park (to Toronto or elsewhere), most notably in the form of Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, and his colleague, the junior senator and Democratic presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton (who having already revealed she dodged bullets in Bosnia and learned how to shoot varmints out back of the family cabin, will no doubt confess at any moment to having grown up worshipping Walt Patulski).
But since the Bills will already be here, in part, and since the Toronto money would be helping them stay alive, no one is going to force them to end their Canadian enterprise. When the time comes not too far down the road for a new stadium to be built, U.S. politicians would be forced into a very expensive game of put up or shut up.
And understand something else.
The NFL wants to be in Toronto. A few years back, a person of considerable means who was hoping to persuade Wilson to sell him the team was encouraged by the league to explore options here.
At the NFL's head office in New York, they can do the math, too. They can see what's happening in Buffalo and want a piece of the largest market in North America outside Los Angeles without an NFL franchise.
Now that they've got it, you can bet they're not about to give it up.
1