Buffalo Bills fans try to get a handle on the Toronto factor
Bills in Toronto stir conflicting emotions
TORONTO — Some fans are outraged over ticket prices they consider nothing short of gouging.
Others are just excited that the National Football League is finally here — for real.
And there’s sadness over the death of Ted Rogers, the Toronto communications mogul who brought the Buffalo Bills here for eight games in five years.
Lots of conflicting emotions will swirl around Rogers Centre today, where the football field will be only 100 yards long — not the Canadian 110 — with each team playing only 11 a side — not the Canadian 12.
Regular-season American football comes to Toronto for the first time, when the Bills “host” the Miami Dolphins in a 4:05 p.m. kickoff in Rogers Centre.
Looming over the gridiron battle, of course, is the larger question of whether the Bills-in-Toronto experiment will bring the Bills — or some other team — here on a permanent basis.
That question won’t be answered today. The only issue settled may be which team — the Bills or Dolphins — seems destined for the AFC East cellar.
The significance of today’s game goes far beyond the sidelines.
Toronto is one of North America’s great sports cities, a city with teams in three of the four major sports leagues but with no direct access to the NFL.
“Now they have it,” said Adrian Montgomery, Rogers Communication’s director of football operations.
“This is a milestone for the Canadian sports fan,” he added. “It’s the first in an unprecedented series of games with [the same] team playing in another country.”
There should be a huge pro-Bills crowd at today’s game.
“I would love to have an NFL franchise here, but I’m not going to the game to support a franchise in the future,” said Carl Condon, 29, a bank employee from Toronto shopping in the Eaton Centre on Saturday. “I’m just a big Bills fan. I’m going to support the Bills.”
The Toronto group hosting today’s game has paid the Bills $78 million to host eight games over five years, roughly double or triple the revenue the Bills may have generated for those games in Buffalo.
That hefty payout has led to very pricey seats. Most tickets sell for $55 to $295, with an average price of $183 (Canadian). That’s more than three times the average ticket price in Buffalo and doesn’t include what the Canadians consider VIP seats, between the 20-yard lines in the lower bowl, selling here for $350 and up.
Those prices initially left Buffalo-area fans aghast at the Toronto market, but even Toronto fans have objected to the prices.
“Everybody in town recognizes that fact, that it’s way overpriced,” said Jim Kelley, of Rogers Sportsnet and The FAN 590 sports-talk radio.
The euphoria the Toronto group expressed at a Feb. 6 news conference proved a tad optimistic.
“We’re going to charge high rates, and we’re going to have all the seats sold, standing room only, out to Queen Street,” Rogers said then.
Organizers of the Bills in Toronto series point out that Rogers, who died Tuesday at age 75, was an incurable optimist, a trait that helped him in his business successes. He was known to sign his letters with the tag line: “The best is yet to come.”
Tickets still were available all week, as organizers advertised extensively to create a sellout. The number of available tickets was about 3,500 at the beginning of last week, steadily dropping to about 1,000 by Thursday, before the game was declared a sellout; most of those unsold tickets were VIP seats.
Some Toronto residents, especially the media, almost bragged about the game not being a quick sellout.
“If anything, those of us in Toronto should be congratulated for not playing the part of rubes,” Toronto Sun columnist Steve Simmons wrote.
Simmons believes those high prices took some of the luster away from the event. More reasonable prices would have left Toronto fans “truly excited” about the game.
“But instead, they overpaid and overcharged and alienated a rabid, but not insane, NFL audience in Toronto,” he wrote.
In hindsight, were the ticket prices simply too high?
“I think the tickets were priced high. There’s no question about that,” replied Montgomery, from Rogers Communications. “The prices for these premium sports events tend to err on the high side.
“But you’re going to see a full stadium and a raucous crowd on Sunday, and that’s the proof in the pudding,” he added.
A 40-year-old Toronto attorney named Keith, who wouldn’t give his last name, explained why he paid $350 for his ticket to today’s game.
“We’re a little starved for the NFL,” he said in the Eaton Centre. “There’s a large following of NFL fans in Toronto. I think there’s a lot of excitement because we’re finally getting a game.”
But Kelley, the Fan 590 radio host and former Buffalo News hockey writer, said Friday he hadn’t received a single phone call about the game during the phone-in segments of his show last week.
“They’re not as excited as I thought they would be,” he said of Toronto fans.
Several factors may be responsible: the high ticket prices; the weakened economy and Canadian dollar; the backlash from the Feb. 6 news conference, when organizers seemed to boast about gouging the public; and the Bills’ on-field slide to a 6-6 record.
Having a few thousand unsold tickets a week before the game doesn’t mean Toronto can’t be a viable NFL market.
“The idea that Toronto was a slam-dunk for the NFL remains with one proviso: We may be naive and Leafs-centric, but we’re not crazy,” Simmons wrote. “We still want the NFL here. But everything has a price, and this price was wrong.”
Others, however, question the effect of two recent events: Rogers’ death and the declining Canadian dollar, which stood about par with the American dollar when the Bills in Toronto experiment was launched; the Canadian dollar is now worth about 79 cents U. S.
“Long-term hopes of pursuing an NFL team . . . likely departed with Rogers,” Dave Perkins, a Toronto Star columnist, wrote Wednesday.
Perkins, a known critic of the Bills series here, added that Rogers Communications “vastly overpaid” for the eight Bills games, set “ridiculously” high prices and suffered heavy losses on the August preseason game. As a result, he claimed the Rogers board has lost much of its enthusiasm for the NFL.
“Now factor in the rapid decline of the Canadian dollar and the expected cost of an NFL team — likely more than $1 billion in Canadian dollars — and there is almost zero chance the NFL will be pursued beyond the current deal with the Bills,” he wrote.
Organizers of the Bills in Toronto series won’t touch that issue.
“Our focus is this series of games. It always has been,” Montgomery said.
Organizers say there will be a tribute to Rogers today, as they recognize the person most responsible for the Toronto series.
And they suspect Rogers will be watching.
“No doubt, somehow or somewhere,” Montgomery said, “he’ll find some telecommunications device to let us know exactly what he thinks of our performance.”
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