Bills 43, Washington 21

Speculation has been rampant about a new stadium for the Bills. Although no formal or official negotiations between the team's owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, and state or local governments have taken place yet, the Pegulas have made some of their demands known to the public in considerable detail by way of what seem to be carefully orchestrated media leaks. The Bills play at the oldest stadium in the NFL which opened in 1973 and was known as Rich stadium for most of its existence. The new stadium is also expected to be in Orchard Park and an obvious site is the tract of land directly to the west of the current stadium, on the southwest corner of Abbott Road and Southwestern Boulevard.

The Buffalo News reported last week that the stadium financing plan will include the sale of Personal Seat Licences (PSLs). The paper spoke to Ron Raccuia, EVP of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, who explained that the the goal will to be to sell 50,000 PSLs which would likely start at $1,000 each and go up from there. PSLs have been associated with all new NFL stadiums built since 2009 and they can generate significant revenue to fund construction. The revenue from PSLs if often referred to as the "owner's contribution" but the funding really comes from the fans who decide to subscribe. The Pegulas are also looking for significant public funding - to cover at least half of the stadium's costs - and they will probably get it. After all, the Governor of New York State, Kathy Hochul, is a Buffalo native and she will want to be able to count on strong support from her home base in the western part of the state.

I've been thinking about my own situation with my seats at the 45 yard line 20 rows up from the field in the current stadium. The PSLs associated with seats in a similar location in a new stadium are surely to be among the most expensive there are (other than for the private suites). PSLs can be sold for a fixed term - like 10 years - or they can be sold as "perpetual" which really means for as long as the team plays in the venue. In the world of life insurance, it is sort of like the difference between term insurance and whole life. Raccuia said that any PSLs sold will be both perpetual and transferrable. The Bills will have played for 50 years in the current stadium by the time any new one is ready so if I were to buy a perpetual PSL, it would likely last longer than I do.  

The actual pricing for a PSL in the best seats in this yet-to-be-built stadium is obviously unknown. When the Dallas Cowboys built their new stadium a few years ago, the most expensive PSLs cost upwards of $150,000 each. The Buffalo market will command much lower pricing than that but my best guess is that I will be facing a cost of between at least $10,000 and $15,000 USD per seat - perhaps more. If the PSLs are perpetual, then they will have a value on the secondary market and could be a good long-term investment. The NFL is the most popular sports league in the US and should continue to be for some time. But, for how long? 20 more years? 50? I know my way around a net present value (NPV) calculation and the PSL analysis is is similar to stock valuation where the price of a share is just the NPV of all of the issuer's future profits. Leaving aside the fact that the purchase of PSLs will be required in order to buy Buffalo Bills tickets at the 45 yard line, would I want to add a couple of perpetual PSLs to my investment portfolio? Its hard to say right now but I find the question an interesting one to consider. Plus I could leave them to someone in my will.

On to the actual football from yesterday which saw Josh Allen return to his 2020 form. After giving up a couple of touchdowns in the second quarter, the Bills first drive of the second half set the tone for the win. Allen took the team 93 yards in 17 plays and chewed up more than eight minutes before he found Emmanuel "Larry" Sanders for his second touchdown of the game. The Bills cruised from there as Washington quarterback Taylor Heinicke struggled through his first road start. The Bills now have one of the best receiving corps in the NFL with Sanders, Diggs, Beasley and Davis as well as tight-end Dawson Knox who also made a great catch for a touchdown. 

Up next: the Houston Texans, who have managed to turn themselves into a near-disaster of a franchise, come to Orchard Park on Sunday. The Bills will need to avoid looking ahead to week five when they travel to Kansas City for a prime time re-do of last season's AFC Championship Game.  

    

Bills 35, Dolphins 0

The way that the NFL allocates broadcast rights to CBS and FOX for the early and late afternoon Sunday time slots is a bit of a mystery to me. Prior to a couple of years ago, CBS exclusively carried games between AFC teams while FOX had the NFC. For inter-conference games, the network which covered the visiting team got to carry the game. That's why a FOX broadcast team would come to Orchard Park twice (and only twice) each year - for the two Bills home games against NFC opponents. While the network allocations are still made mostly according to this formula, there are now "cross-over" games where some all-AFC match-ups, like yesterday's game in steamy south Florida, are carried by FOX. CBS also gets a few all-NFC games each year. I'm not sure why the league and the networks made this change but it means that some Bills games are broadcast by crews which Bills fans rarely, if ever, have seen or heard before. 

The NFL produces a "broadcast map" for both afternoon time slots each Sunday, showing the regions where each game is shown. Every NFL game is a "national network" game but some are carried by more network affiliates than others. Yesterday's game in Miami was shown only in south Florida and western New York (and eastern Pennsylvania) and, with a relatively small regional viewership, the broadcast crew which FOX assigned to the game was possibly the lowest one on their depth chart (with the team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman occupying its top spot). The play-by-play yesterday in Miami was handled by someone named Brandon Gaudin who was joined by the much better known former NFL linebacker and team executive Matt Millen.

Millen is a somewhat controversial figure in NFL circles. As a player, through 12 NFL seasons, he won four Superbowls with three different teams - two with the Raiders, one with the 49ers and one with Washington. As an executive, his record couldn't be more diametrically opposed. From 2001 to 2008, Millen was President and CEO of the Detroit Lions who posted a 31-84 record over that period. The 2008 Lions became the first NFL team to lose all 16 regular season games (a record later matched by the 2017 Browns) but Millen was fired in September of that year after an 0-3 start. He has been a broadcaster since 2009. I guess FOX encourages him to make "controversial" statements and yesterday, Gaudin, his partner in the booth, egged him on. I just found his commentary to be generally poor. After he described a particular player as "one of the best out there" for about the sixth time, I said "too bad Matt Millen isn't one of the best colour commentators out there". There is a reason why FOX has relegated him to the bottom of its NFL broadcast depth chart and I hope not to have to listen to him again any time soon.

The fact that the Bills cruised to an easy 35-0 win obviously gave me more time focus on the shortcomings of the broadcast crew. Although the Bills offence, and Josh Allen in particular, still haven't matched their quality of play from last season through two weeks in 2021, a few key plays were all they needed yesterday. Last season, the Bills pass rush was probably the area most in need of improvement and yesterday, first round pick and south Florida native Greg "Jean-Jacques" Rousseau and the rest of the Bills front seven had a strong game with six sacks including one by AJ Epenesa which bounced Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagavialoa from the game early in the first quarter. 

Although Devin Singletary had more rushing yards, gained mostly on a long touchdown run on the first possession, running back Zach Moss, another south Florida native, had a strong game after being a healthy scratch in week one. He scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter and earned another key first down with strong second and third efforts on each run. The Bills have now beaten the Dolphins six straight times. No wonder so many Bills fans travel to Miami every year.

Up next: Washington, the team that only dropped its offensive name after a threat from its major sponsor, FedEx, to either drop the name or lose their sponsorship, comes to Orchard Park on Sunday. 

In Canada, we apparently have a federal election today. Most voters cast their ballots by mail, voted in the advance polls last weekend or have lost interest entirely. Tonight, I'll mostly be watching the Blue Jays who open an important series in Tampa.  

    

Steelers 23, Bills 16

I had a conversation on Saturday with a cottage neighbour who lives in West Virginia. He said that the COVID situation there has worsened considerably in recent weeks (and he is headed back there shortly) so I looked up some of the numbers. With a population of 1.8 million, the state recorded 1,800 new cases on Saturday alone and 8,000 over the past week. That would be like Ontario, with a population of 14.5 million, seeing more than 65,000 new cases in a week. Republican Governor Jim Justice has refused calls for a new indoor mask mandate and is likely to join other GOP Governors in a court challenge of President Biden's recent vaccine mandate for businesses and organizations in the US with more than 100 employees.

There were more than 50,000 unmasked fans on hand at Milan Pusker Stadium in Morgantown for the Mountaineers 66-0 win on Saturday over the apparently toothless Long Island University Sharks. The Horseshoe in Columbus, Ohio and the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan both saw mostly unmasked crowds of more than 100,000 on Saturday - nothing out of the ordinary in non-pandemic times but I can't help but wonder if these football games will turn out to be "super-spreader" events.   

With US land border crossings still closed to Canadians travelling for "non-essential" purposes, the Bills have offered (and I have accepted) refunds for the first four home games of the season, obviously including yesterday's game against the Steelers. It's sort of a blessing in disguise as I'm not sure I would have been comfortable being in close quarters with 70,000 vaccine-status-unknown Bills fans whose pent-up desires for screaming have been building for nearly two years. So, the earliest game I'll attend is October 31st against the Dolphins but I'm not optimistic about the border opening by then anyway.

With all the pre-season hype about the Bills being legitimate Superbowl contenders (which I believe they still are), the scope of the letdown for Bills fans yesterday was massive. Although the boxscore reads as if  Buffalo was the better team - in terms of some key metrics like yards gained, first downs and time of possession - their play did not live up to what fans were expecting and the team posted its first opening game loss since the Nathan Peterman debacle in Baltimore in 2018. 

A couple of key plays made for the Bills undoing: A questionable 4th down play call which had quarterback Josh Allen fake the keeper then throw a backward pass to Matt Breida (who dressed in place of Zack Moss, a surprising healthy scratch yesterday) which resulted in a seven yard loss and a disastrous special teams play in the form of a blocked punt which the Steelers returned for a touchdown, giving them a 10 point lead with less than 10 minutes to go. 

One of the most disappointing areas for the Bills yesterday was the play of the offensive line. They were flagged for no less than six holding calls, four of then enforced. Dion Dawkins, who spent most of training camp rebuilding his strength after a serious case of COVID was responsible for three of the holding penalties. The Steelers rushed only four lineman most of the game and successfully thwarted the Bills passing game with tight coverage and some inaccurate passing by Josh Allen, fresh off the signing of a new $258 million contract extension. Looking more like he did in his rookie year than last season when he was in the running for league MVP, Allen also fumbled the ball twice, losing one of them. 

So, at 0-1, the Bills travel this week to the heat, humidity and COVID of South Florida to play the Dolphins who squeaked out a 17-16 win yesterday against the Patriots. I look for the Bills to be much better. I wonder if tight end Dawson Knox will wear his shiny red gloves in the Florida heat. I'd love to get me a pair of those. For washing dishes.