Bills won’t export themselves (any further) (for now)

By Anthony Bialy  |   Monday, June 29, 2009  |  Comments( 49 )

Buffalo Bills
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Buffalo Bills fans don’t have to worry about losing another alleged home game to Ontario, at least not yet. Um, yay? Owner Ralph Wilson claimed in an Associated Press interview that he’s pleased with the Treaty of Toronto’s current terms, and won’t reconsider them for “two or three years.” If accurate, that means the Bills get to be the Bills, at least for most of the season; they're rightly defined by their birthplace.

He additionally offered hope for those who feel the team is only itself when it’s kicking around its true household. Importantly, Wilson also told the AP that “We’re doing this to keep the team (in Buffalo)” in regards to the Canada scheme. That’s good news for fans understandably paranoid about every development regarding the team’s future locale. That said, it would also be nice if Wilson provided a concrete plan regarding who will be the team’s second owner.

Of course, such a scenario involves Wilson no longer existing on the same corporal plane as both the rest of us and the team. He’s understandably unwilling to discuss any future beyond his own, but that’s not reassuring to the customers who made his business what it is. It’s especially so for a club inherently mutually linked to Western New York.

Part of the Bills’ appeal is precisely their native environment. Home contest attendees sickly consider Arctic conditions to be a bonus in discouraging foes, and they pride themselves on exacerbating the harshness with high decibels. If they didn’t invent tailgating, they perfected it; on top of that, they’ve lionized players whose names would be meaningless to any potential new base city. Steve Tasker, Elbert Dubenion, Fred Smerlas, and a couple dozen other Bills alumni have standing invitations to run for, and win, Buffalo’s mayorship.

On the other hand, the initial Rogers Centre game was so boringly stuffy that it felt as if it were directed by the late Stanley Kubrick. No one new to football who stayed awake through that abyss of an event would have been persuaded to give the sport another shot, much less the alleged host team.

But that should have been unsurprising. By placing fixtures in a foreign city, this team’s decision-makers have already partially taken away what makes them the Bills. Neither the unique passion nor conditions can be transported along with the roster.

The team already loses 12.5 percent of its home-field advantage every season through at least 2012. The only other squads enduring a similar indignity are those forced to play in London, Mexico City, Gdansk, Phnom Penh, or whatever other exotic destination the league feels contains latent American football fans. But those are one-shot deals: No other franchise annually loses its indigenous fans and regular building. It should be the franchise's utmost goal to avoid shifting any more games to the former SkyDome, which is so uncool that they lost their Hard Rock Café. Multiple games per season in the concrete hangar will dilute the squad's value instead of inflating it.

In the meantime, those on Toronto’s end might try to remove the lame aspects from last year’s hideously impersonal contest. But the troubles can’t be completely fixed. The surgical atmosphere at the first Great White Northern try wasn’t merely a bad start; instead, it was a preview of what games would be like without the fans who played an immeasurable role in establishing the franchise’s personality.

Everyone, including both the Bills’ current and potential future owners, should know that this team is largely what it is because of where it is. Remove Western New York from the equation, and the team becomes nothing more than a conglomerate of soulless transients. They’ll compete in a faceless new stadium without ever truly joining the community.

Backers have been rabidly supportive despite often being presented with an inferior product over this decade; no owner current or future will find that elsewhere. That’s true either permanently or merely for a second third-party game per season.
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