It won’t happen overnight. Hell, it can’t happen overnight. Well, it theoretically can, just as it did when the Colts left Baltimore, but not any time soon. It won’t come out of nowhere, and it won’t surprise anyone.
Regardless, it will happen. Sadly, the Bills will leave Buffalo. Now that owner Ralph Wilson has passed, it’s only a matter of when, not if.
Because Wilson isn’t keeping the franchise in the family, a trust now has control of the team. The good news is that trust can keep operating the organization in the same fashion for years to come, and the better news is that the team has an ironclad stadium lease with the county and the state that will keep it in Western New York through at least the 2019 season, according to Sun Media’s John Kryk.
But between now and then, offers will be made. And at some point, one will be accepted. The odds heavily favor outside money winning that battle, since — let’s face it — there just isn’t much money to be found in Buffalo, at least compared to Toronto and Los Angeles.
I suppose it’s possible Wilson’s estate could accept a lower offer from a buyer who plans to keep the team in Buffalo, thereby biting a bigger bullet on impending estate taxes owed to the U.S. government, but Mark Gaughn of the Buffalo News reports that it will “have the fiduciary responsibility to take roughly the best offer it can get for the franchise.”
It is extremely unlikely that those stars align, simply because Toronto and L.A. have clearly become more lucrative alternatives.
I know, commissioner Roger Goodell is a Western New Yorker by birth. He wants to keep the team where it is and 24 of the league’s 32 teams would have to approve any sale. But money talks way too loudly in this league. The Fortune 500 presence in L.A. and Toronto — the third- and fourth-most populated cities in North America — is impossible to ignore. Stadiums are the only obstacle, but there’s plenty of time for that and plenty of sponsors ready to partially finance said venues in exchange for naming rights.
The reality is that as soon as there’s an out in that lease in 2020, whoever owns the team will have already built a stadium in a new city, and a move will be made in methodical, undramatic fashion. That’s what Bills fans should prepare for, even if nothing will be official until 2016, 2017 or even 2018.
For six more years, this is Buffalo’s team. Beyond that, it’ll very likely belong to someone else.
