Give Buffalo fans the slightest reason for hope and they’ll allow you to lead them by the hand.
Bills’ backers see better days on the horizon
Jerry Sullivan
Updated: 05/11/08 6:46 AM
What is it with you Buffalo people, anyway? The Bills haven’t made the playoffs since the 1999 season. They’ve teased you and tormented you. They’ve promised you the moon and lassoed misery instead. You have every reason to be wary and skeptical. So the question is, why?
Why would the Bills be on the verge of selling 50,000 season tickets for the first time since the last of the four Super Bowl years in 1993? How come, in the midst of persistent mediocrity and unrealized expectations, would interest in this team be at the highest point in a generation?
Everyone has a theory: People are afraid of losing the franchise. Marginal Sabres fans are turning back to the Bills. The Toronto deal is creating a surge in Canadian sales (it’s there, but minimal). There’s a rising population of goofballs who want to drink and misbehave on Sundays in the fall.
“I think it’s a combination of many factors,” said Bills chief operating officer Russ Brandon. “But it always comes back to the passion this region has for the Bills.”
Brandon deserves to take a bow for this, too. The season-ticket base didn’t grow overnight. It’s the result of a calculated, 10-year plan that began around the time Brandon arrived in 1998, when season-ticket sales were in the 31,000 range and the organization was trying to push suites and club seats.
Doug Flutie certainly sparked interest in the short term. But it was the moves to regionalize the franchise in Rochester and be more creative with group sales that helped revive the ticket base. The rise has actually been fairly steady, through the disappointing Donahoe years until the present.
But as Brandon points out, it wouldn’t be possible without the abiding passion of Bills fans, who have continued to support the team despite years of bumbling coaches, underachieving players and Ralph Wilson’s insistence on reminding us that Buffalo is an economic sinkhole.
The fact is, people believe in this team. Give Buffalo fans the slightest reason for hope and they’ll allow you to lead them by the hand. There’s a general perception that the Bills are building toward something. It’s a stretch, but there are parallels to the 1988 team of 20 years ago.
There’s a fresh quality to the roster. Many of the key players — Donte Whitner, Trent Edwards, Marshawn Lynch, to name three — are well short of their prime and haven’t had time to be perceived as disappointments. So there’s a great sense of possibility, of promise unfulfilled.
It’s a far cry from the teams of 2004-05, which were dominated by fading veterans who created the false sense that the Bills were on the verge of something special. They weren’t. In retrospect, they were a bunch of former stars playing out the string.
There’s an innocence about the 2008 Bills. They’re like the 2005-06 Sabres, who took the town by storm. But little was expected of that team. It came out of nowhere. There’s a mounting expectation about the Bills under third-year coach Dick Jauron. They’re supposed to be a playoff team.
“Everyone you talk to, whether it’s in the business community or fans, is very upbeat about the team and the young, emerging talent,” Brandon said. “They feel we’re on the cusp of something special here.”
For now, I imagine, most fans will simply enjoy the team and submerge any fears about what might happen when Wilson is gone. They’re content to embrace a young, likable team and hope for a playoff run — to live in the present.
Buffalo fans have been disappointed time and again. But it has given them an infinite capacity for hope, a firewall of belief. In the end, that’s what matters most. The ability to keep faith is what sustains us. I guess that’s what we like to call the human spirit.
Locally, we’re a hockey town to the core. But in the bigger world, it’s the Bills who define us. The NFL is the most popular sport in the world. For better or worse, the Bills are our global identity. Ask anyone who has left the city. They’ll tell you it’s the Bills who reflect our character, our talent for bouncing back from crushing, magnificent defeat.
People are buying tickets because they believe their team is on the way back, and that the Bills are going to matter in a big way again. And of course, it’s their way of reminding the world that Buffalo still matters, too.
Bills fans love to puff out their chests and say, “Take another shot at us. We’ve been there. We can take it. You can take our jobs and maybe take our team some day, but you cannot take away our spirit.” Call it small-time thinking, but this town has a pathological will to believe.
The Bills’ future might not seem so rosy in Buffalo. But the fans are digging in for the fight. They like their team. They’ll worry about the rest later. However things turn out, no one is going to accuse Bills fans of not standing tall, right to the end.
