No love for losing Bills

Rogers’ money not enough to keep games

Governments have a habit of releasing bad news late in the day at the end of the week, in the hopes that everyone is nosedeep in their third cocktail and unlikely to notice what is known as the Friday trash dump.

The sports world works late anyway, though, so if an organization wanted to drop a pebble of sporting news at a point when the ripples wouldn’t get much attention, it would need to pick some other time of day. And if the news were of particular relevance to Toronto and Buffalo, there would be no better time to deliver it than during the full-on media circus known as NHL trade deadline day.

So it was that, at 8:26 on Wednesday morning, Rogers and the Buffalo Bills let it slip that the Bills in Toronto series has been halted after nine remarkably unsuccessful dates. There may not be a 10th.

Officially, the presidents of the Bills and Rogers Media described the development as a mere postponement, with a joint statement that said the partners “will use this time to collectively evaluate opportunities to enhance future games.”

Judging by what was said by Bills president Russ Brandon l at er t hat morning, and by the reports from Buffalo media, it is clear why news was delivered right before the trade-deadline tsunami overtook it — and Brandon was helped in this regard by a particularly active day from Sabres general manager Tim Murray. The postponement was an admission that the Toronto series has been an utter failure.

While the joint statement said Rogers and the Bills were “committed to continuing their partnership,” Brandon was more straightforward in front of a hometown audience.

“We’re going to look at every aspect that if we do come back, we have a more robust fan experience and try to create more of a home-field advantage for us,” Brandon told The Buffalo News. “Right now that was not the situation, and that was one of the reasons we want to get into a lot of detail with our partners up there and see if that’s viable moving forward.”

Those are not the words of man itching to return to Toronto, and why would he? The three exhibition games played at the Rogers Centre have been, understandably, non-events, but even for the games that count, Brandon is quite right when he says that there is no home-field advantage for the Bills in Toronto. Only once in the history of the series has the Rogers crowd even seemed

There is no home-field advantage for the Bills in Toronto

mostly inclined to cheer for the “home” team, which was the 2011 edition against Washington, which also happens to be the only one of six regularseason Toronto games the Bills have won.

Any momentum that might have been generated from that was doused the following year, when another out-of-the-running Bills team was walloped 50-17 by Seattle. Not even the Bills fans could cheer for that one. Somewhat remarkably, the Bills and Rogers re-upped their five-year partnership at the end of the 2012 season — although for undisclosed terms that were said to be dramatically less than the $78-million Rogers put up the first time around — which led to last year’s December clash between Buffalo and Atlanta, a tragic wheeze of a game that, apparently, was about all that Brandon could take.

The announced crowd of about 38,000 was some 16,000 seats short of a sellout, the atmosphere only managed to get a couple notches above tepid, even though the game went to overtime. The buzz in the city was such that, for pre-game entertainment, the field was turned over to The Beach Boys, one of the hottest bands of 50 years ago.

Tim Graham of The Buffalo News reported this week that before last season was finished, Brandon “privately told people the Bills in Toronto series would continue over his dead body,” but that it took the president some time to convince other executives to take a pass on the Rogers bounty.

Where the series goes from here is unclear. He has a year to show his executive counterparts that the Bills can get by on whatever they bring in that does not include money from Rogers. If the team finally turns around its on-field fortunes then maybe a playoff-bound Bills team will prove they can stand on their own.

Ironically, a better Bills team would be about the only thing that could improve the atmosphere in Toronto, too. For all of the many ways in which Rogers Centre is not Ralph Wilson Stadium, beginning with its size and the fact that you can’t stand around all morning in the parking lot and become soused, the Toronto series has been crippled from the start by the Bills’ chronic inability to not suck.

They haven’t made the playoffs since 1999, the longest streak in the NFL, and over the six years since they started playing in Toronto, the Bills have a cumulative record of 35-61. The high point was a 7-9 record in 2008. That’s some good sucking.

Would Toronto have embraced this team of interlopers if the last six seasons they had resembled the New England Patriots, instead of their doormats? Would the vision that the late Ted Rogers touted in 2008, with jacked-up ticket prices, constant sellouts, and “standing-room only out to Queen Street,” have come to pass if any of the Bills games had actual playoff relevance? Probably not, but it would have helped.

As it stands, though, the one saving grace of this series, from the perspective of a Bills fan, is that none of the games have mattered anyway. They may have forfeited home-field advantage in return for media-conglomerate lucre, but their fans can’t point to any antiseptic Toronto game and say that it cost them a playoff spot. They can point to Dick Jauron and Ryan Fitzpatrick and Buddy Nix. But if things proceed as Brandon hopes this year, and E.J. Manuel pans out and the Bills enter 2015 with a realistic shot at contention, it would be madness to return here. This partnership had six years to make Toronto care about the Bills, and it didn’t take. The NFL doesn’t often fail, but, under these awkward circumstances, it did so here. That’s the legacy of this experiment, postponed.