Doc
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Exactly where would he have a "new stadium" at a cost of "hundreds of millions of doallrs" built for him? And at exactly what point would he have made the move? Would he have snuck into Indy the day before the Colts vans? Would he have hijacked the Houston's new owner's arrangements with that city?
Again, every team moved because they couldn't get a new stadium. If they had gotten one they would have stayed. Ralph got one (and a subsequet renovation)--therefore, no reson to move. Saying "he could have moved....etc" is meaningless.
Sure Ralph could have moved to any place that ended up getting an NFL team within the past few decades. Wawrow even intimated that Ralph had a chance to moving to Houston.
But you see, Ralph never demanded a new stadium be built for him. Just that improvements be made to the old one. Do you see the point?
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The idea that the Colts tanked the whole season to get Manning (or quite frankly any first round pick is ludicrous. Are you really offering a conspiracy theory which:
A. Has to involve dozens (at least) of people conspiring together to try to lose without anyone finding out.
B. Is a conspiracy that needs more people involved to have much chance of success or if fewer people are in on it this means they are screwing even more people who are trying hard to win.
C. They launch this significant plot based on the idea of getting one player (or even two if you say either Manning or Leaf but the downside is in reality that you might have tanked a whole season to get Ryan Leaf.
D. Indy did not have the first pick overall that season and you have tanked the season and run the risk that someone trades above you and takes Manning.
E. Tanking a season clearly has implications beyond that one season as though Manning turned out to be great he led his 3-13 team that drafted him to a 3-13 record.
Tanking a season for one player is simply a stupid strategy which depends upon the silence and co-operation of too many people for a speculative benefit.
F. Even at that point the facts indicated against a first round QB choice delivering the team which drafted him an SB win as no first round choice since Aikman a decade earlier had led the team which drafted him to an SB win.
I've learned to never rule out any possibility. And if it wasn't a concerted effort to lose games, the Colts were "lucky" to be the worst team in the NFL in 1997 and be in position to draft Manning the following year.
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The entire reason Bill Polian was promoted was because of his shrewd negotiating tactics that involved signing Bruce Smith to his first contract while the current GM was recovering from a heart attack. Polian earned his promotion. It wasn't that he was retired at age 70 as a head scout and then hired out of retirement to a job he had never done before.
Bill Polian was a one of a kind find, RW was sorta like the proverbial blind squirrel finding an acorn. Polian was Buddy Nix's exact opposite in the GM role. He was fiery and feisty, I can recall a story on him that he got down in a 3 point stance in his office and told the person he was talking to, to try and tackle him. Nix OTOH went to sleep when free agency opened, I remember him stating that is what he was going to do. The result was RT Cornell Green, about the most worthless free agent ever.
Face it, Wilson was darn lucky to find Polian and smart enough to promote him and then galactic-ly stupid enough to fire him.
Imagine the buffalo Bills in the playoffs the last ten years with a QB like Payton Manning and a super bowl trophy. That's what the old fool lost when he fired perhaps the most brilliant GM the NFL has seen the last 40 years. Now he is just an old fool, hiring other old fools hoping to get lucky again.
Because if the Bills had kept Polian, they'd have ended-up with Manning.
Luck plays a huge role in life. I don't know whether he lucked into Manning or whether the Colts intentionally tanked the 1997 season in order to get him. But one spot later and they don't get him. And remember that Polian didn't draft Kelly and did draft (journeyman quality QB) Kerry Collins 5th overall.
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Yep, this is a political move to bump-up the approval rating. But hopefully it will crush the speculators as well.
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so it was one guy. a guy you deal with, and "we" in the media get all lumped in as a band of pot-stirrers.
Florio is well connected, thus can be regarded as someone having informed speculation.
what did Sully write that was off the wall? he wrote Bills fans should be concerned about these predators. how is that wrong. if i were someone wanting to keep the Bills in Buffalo, i would be concerned as well.
the Bills may leave. they may stay.
Sullivan is essentially saying that since we don't know Ralph's succession plan, there IS no succession plan. He also perpetuates the false notion that the team will be "auctioned-off to the highest bidder." Not to mention that the only way the Bills move to LA is if Ralph dies before the LA market is filled. I'm sure they want a team in LA soon and won't be waiting for Ralph's death to fill it. So is Sully saying we should be nervous that Ralph will die soon?
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The Bills are one of those "teams [who]are doing just fine financially, thanks to new stadiums largely funded by the taxpayers". By your own reasoning, there was therefore no reason for Ralph to move.
Almost every owner has received taxpayer contributions for his/her stadium, doc. I don't know why you (continue to) single Ralph out like he's the only one. The difference is The Ralph isn't new and didn't cost the taxpayers several hundreds of millions of dollars, followed by massive price hikes for tickets, parking, and concessions. And while he does fine in RWS, he could have done better elsewhere with a new stadium funded by significantly more money from the taxpayers with no risk on his part.
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The Buffalo Bills are one of those teams, doc. Hence, Ralph is like Modell, Irsay, Davis, Frontiere--except his local government gave him what he wanted. Pretty simple.
Also, I assume you're joking when you say Polian "couldn't craft a SB winner in Buffalo". Those were some of the most stacked teams ever on both side of the ball, with something like 18 Pro Bowlers and a handful of HOFers. What piece was missing?? Oh, that's right--a coach who could win at least one SB out of 4 with all that talent.
The Buffalo Bills are one of those teams...how? Because a game moved north of the border? Because Ralph, instead of asking for "welfare" from the owners after that bad 2006 CBA, went out on his own and generated more reveue? I'd take splitting home games with Toronto over seeing the team up and move, because if it does, it ain't coming back.
I agree that a different HC may have made a difference but hiring the right HC is part of crafting a team and that was Polian's job, too.
Bingo.
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The Browns moving kills your whole point. The Bills have a way better modern history of success than the Browns, yet Cleveland always filled their stands.
Buffalo has been on a negative population growth for the last 50 years! If anything, Ralph is crazy for keeping the team here for as long as he has.
Fact: no city with a population the size of Buffalo will ever be given a pro sports team again. It would make no sense.
Bingo. And the teams who relocated and their replacement teams are doing just fine financially, thanks to new stadiums largely funded by the taxpayers.
BTW, how long did people think Polian would stick around? The team had just lost their 3rd SB when he was fired, was on their way to losing their 4th, and then missed the playoffs the following year. That along with his abrasive personality spelled goner sooner rather than later. The shame is that he couldn't craft a SB winner in Buffalo.
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How many more crappy teams does the NFL need in California?
Looks like they're looking to add 2 more. And considering the names mentioned include Minnesota, Jax, STL, and Buffalo, it's possible that Cali ends up with 5 crappy teams.
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Without the first sentence, the rest all melts away. Which leads to the question: would you rather Buffalo had no team, or the Bills as they stand today?
That is a really tough question. Of course we want the Bills in Buffalo, but think of it this way. Would you rather have a nice sports car in your driveway, that you dump tons of money into it, but it hardly if ever runs or would you just rather not have a car at all?
Actually the better questions are would you rather:
a) your father gave you a car that at times is an embarrassment because it sputters and smokes and you don't get a lot of hot dates, but it's cheap to maintain and does the job
b) have an expensive car that will cost you a lot of money to buy (dad wants you to pay for half of it) and maintain, money that you don't really have/can't afford to spend
c) not have a car at all?
Now I see the misunderstanding between us. "Lesser cities" refered to cities that may not be as lucrative for an NFL team as the majority of earlier choices, based on a combination of factors, including population, local support for the NFL from fans and corporations, etc. It did not compare these locations to Buffalo. The point being that the best football towns have been taken. Making it riskier for a new (or moved) team to be sure that it will succeed financially in what was available more recently.
The relevance of Wilson's financial conservatism in his later years is that he has probably not seriously considered moving the team because it would be financially risky. This is not to say that his financial strategy has been right or wrong. Merely that his track record has shown that he has played it close to the vest for several years.
The combination of these two points of factual evidence implies that it was not loyalty to a community that kept the Bills in Buffalo. You can believe the opposite if you wish, but since Wilson has directly or indirectly implied multiple times over the years that unless he gets the financial support of the fans and local government that he may have to consider moving the team, that's questionable. (Of course, he and his staff may have just been pressuring people to build a stadium and fill it, which has happened in many NFL towns, but that certainly doesn't sound like loyalty to Buffalo fans either.) In fact, I am unaware of any real evidence that he has this perceived loyalty. Perhaps you can provide some.
Finally, if you need some evidence about the risk I mentioned, check out Jacksonville, an expansion city. Yes it's far greater than Buffalo if you are speaking of population, but it has failed as an NFL franchise. The fact that the stadium could not be filled for a majority of games over several years has been such an embarrassment that the owner had whole sections of seats permanently covered a few years ago so that the small crowds wouldn't be so obvious when games were televised. This financial inadequacy is why Jacksonville is a candidate to move to Los Angeles.
I've gone over this numerous times. Again, teams have moved to new cities and old cities have been given expansion teams. Ralph could have moved his team to any of those locations during the previous decades with virtually no financial risk (Jax is a lone exception) on his part. And again, voting "no" to relocations, when it would be far easier to vote "yes," is an example of actions speaking louder than words.
As for demanding support, Ralph, like any owner, isn't running a charity. If people don't support the team, he's not going to lose money to keep it there. This seems obvious.
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Maybe, maybe not. But expanding into LA would make far more sense than trying to relocate teams.
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Wouldn't it make more financial sense for the owners to add 2 expansion teams in LA? That way they get $2B or so in franchise fees, versus the several hundred million in relocation fees. Also it only adds LA to the TV market mix, instead of being at the expense of 2 previous TV markets.
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What is the most recent move you remember? And how is my statement about new franchises going to lesser cities incorrect? State your proof.
What financial moves has Ralph made in the last 30 years? He has not sold, bought or reorganized any of his major investments in that time according to my research.
However, I agree with your last statement. If Buffalo loses trhe Bills, it is unlikely that they would get another NFL team.
Not sure what you're asking, but again, there have been several (not lesser, greater) cities than Buffalo that have received expansion/relocation teams that Ralph could have moved the team to, but hasn't. And again, he's voted "no" to every relocation. So he has shown loyalty to WNY. As for financial moves, I don't know what moves he's made, or what relevance it has to the discussion.
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Current owner has repeatedly stated he's not moving the team to LA.
Talk is cheap. I'm betting it's the Jags and Raiders that move to LA, assuming they do decide to put 2 teams there. Al Davis has been looking to leave Oakland for years and go back to LA, while the Jags can't even sell-out a stadium with 20K seats tarped-up and making the playoffs every other year.
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The Bills have been in the top-20 of total payroll for most the past decade, save for 2006 (right after the new CBA was signed) and for the first couple years of the decade, as TD tried to fix the cap mess left by Butler. IOW, there are a lot of other teams who will (also) have a problem with the 90% cap floor.
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"Thank You" Ralph for keeping the team in Buffalo.
"Thank You" for not knowing how to field a winning team, after 50+ years of being in the business.
"Thank You" for making the bottom-line a priority over winning.
"Thank You" for not seeing to it that the Bills will stay in Buffalo after you try to take the team to the grave with you.
You're Welcome that we (generations of struggling Buffalonians) helped turn your $25,000 investment into a Billion Dollar asset, and future payout to your family.
Without the first sentence, the rest all melts away. Which leads to the question: would you rather Buffalo had no team, or the Bills as they stand today?
Ralph Wilson is not the devil. Nor is he devoted to the fans in Buffalo.
He is simply a guy who plunked down 25 grand in a wise investment. Buffalo wasn't his first choice, and he probably wouldn't have taken it second if he knew that it would be a declining population with less industry over the next five decades. So forget about claiming he has any loyalty to western New York.
The reality is that he may not have moved the team away because there was no juicy morsel out there just waiting to be picked off the vine. Indianapolis was a good move for the Baltimore Colts. Model then took the leftovers in Baltimore because he was fed up with trying (unsuccessfully) to fleece the Cleveland politicians.
So what football paradise was out there in recent years? Certainly not Los Angeles. Back when the Raiders ownership moved there (after the Rams bolted), they learned the hard way that a big population doesn't necessarily mean a huge pricey stadium with filled seats and an adoring local government. It wasn't cheap to move back to Oakland. Want evidence? Since then, the expansion teams were placed in "lesser" cities. Yes, the NFL wants a team in L.A., but they can't seem to lure a sucker to fund it. Toronto is the same as L.A., in that it is not a city filled with passionate NFL fans.
So it is questionable that any NFL team would seriously consider the financial risk of moving in recent years. And none have. Wilson is a rich man who made good decisions in his 40s and has been conservatively tending his investments ever since. He has not been a risk-taker for quite a while. That's the real reason why the Bills are still in Buffalo.
It's not like he could have only chose one place to put the team. Several teams have moved from better markets than Buffalo in the past 30 years and Ralph had a crack at any of them, and the population and economy has been declining for at least that long. He's also voted "no" on every team relocation. And if Buffalo were to have lost the Bills, you can bet the NFL wouldn't have granted them an expansion team.
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I agree, if Ralph gave a rat's ass about the fans in Buffalo, he would sell now or at least publish a succession plan, so the best fans in the NFL knew what to look forward to. Just another knife in the back of the Bills fans by Ralph, who like someone else said, has held Western New York hostage for a couple decades now. You kinda get the sense that his thinking is, "who gives a crap what happens to the fans of the Buffalo Bills after I am gone, I won't be here to listen to them whine."
"Held hostage."
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I think they mean that if the Bills only had to go 80 yards they might score a little more. If you have a little bit of a sense of humor and face reality it is kinda funny.
It's stupid no matter how you look at it. Oh and Ralph is cheap.
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The reasons they persued it are nicely summarized in that article, as you see. The individuals quoted disagree that such reasons "had no basis in reality". Go figure. "Wasted everyone's (government workers)time" is a good one, though. The overtime the justices must have racked up mulling over this one must have cost a "billion +". The People should not bother SCOTUS with their trivial grievances.
So the lockout insurance cost them not $500 million ("splitting the difference"), but a billion plus. Again, link me to the site that says how much more they would have gotten without the insurance (in '13-'14, no less).
By all apperances, Upshaw did have the final say (reread the article). Having no salary floor has little impact in 2007--you can't rewrite 53 contracts to bring down your costs in a year. But you can sign FA's for as much as you are willing to pay, as there would be no cap.
Yes it's obvious why they pursued it: they wanted to be able to have almost complete and unprecedented control over the players. Again they were never going to get it and as such, pursuing it was a waste of time and money.
Doing the math, $500M/year for the 3 years from tacked-on years of 2012-2014 is...$1.5B. Again I'm using the contracts from 1998-2005 compared to 2006-2011 and the well-known fact that the NFL gave up money in order to get the "lockout insurance," hence the reason why Doty ruled against the owners seeing that money. Hell, even if it were $200M/year, that's still $600M they lost. But no doubt, I'm sure you'll say it was worth giving that up, in order to get the lockout insurance.
Forget players already under contract, doc. Less money available in FA in 2006 because of a $7.5M lower salary cap means less money for the players who were scheduled to be UFA's. The following year 200+ players who otherwise would have be eligible for UFA would instead have been RFA's, and teams wouldn't have had to spend a minimum amount, again meaning less money for the players. Then they lockout the players during the 2008 off-season, if need be.
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Some sports writer made the claim that Wilson said that. It was never corroborated. Looks like the writer of that article used it. Because again, it's not as simple as "selling it to the highest bidder."
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I was surprised that more people didn't like it...glad to know there are a few of us out there who were affected by it though...I thought it was really well doneCruise didn't add much, the older son finding his way safely to his mom was hokey, the basement scene was too long, and I still don't like the ending, but otherwise it was a well done movie.
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"What? She turned the sky red? I sat through twelve episodes of boring-ass story and Morena Baccarin with an ugly-ass haircut for this monkey-ass bull **** ending?"
Just curious...was that your reaction to the season "finale", too?
It's like the producers said "Hey, that's a great idea...let's build suspense by introducing absolutely no meaningful storyline or dramatic tension, then viewers will keep coming back just to see if anything's ever going to happen! It worked for Lost, didn't it?" How V got picked up for another season absolutely confounds me.I'm half-hoping it turns out that the aliens in "Falling Skies" are coming to Earth with the simple mission of hunting down and killing everyone involved with the production of "V" (except for Baccarin's hair stylist, who should be hunted down and tortured for a very, very long time - perhaps by watching "V" reruns).
I'll tell you how: Morena Baccarin (even with the ugly-ass haircut), ELizabeth Mitchell, and Laura Vandervoort.
But a 3rd season is looking like a longshot unless the storyline improves.
LMAO....how much more you got in there? What about Cloverfield? Exorcise those demons, dude!!!
Actually, I tell you what, War of the Worlds was one of the top ten most intense experiences I've ever had in my home theater. The sound effects in that film scared the BEJEEEEEEZURS outta me. I know a lot of people didn't care for it, but I geeked out to it big time...same with Cloverfield. If you have the chance to watch either of those in a home theater with a big, bad subwoofer and a projector, it's tough to beat. Grab a beer, kick off your shoes, and crank up the volume....good times!
Tom mentioned District 9 earlier in the thread...that film is easily one of my favorites of all time. I'm really looking forward to seeing it for the third time in the near future. I heard there was talk about making a sequel to it, so if they do then I hope Peter Jackson is on board....if not, it may be crap.
I loved the WotW remake. That they were grinding-up humans and using them as fertilizer was eerie.
It offends modern sensibilities to think aliens would travel light years and overlook bacterial infections.
Wells was a visionary. In the 2005 movie, Speilberg needed to change the ending. Maybe a weak spot in the mothership?
Cloverfield was great as was District 9.
Wells was a visionary, but he couldn't envision antibiotics. Then again, who knows if bacteria would harm aliens +/- whether they have antibiotics to fight them?
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We all hope for the Bills will stay but after hearing the highest bidder speech from Ralph with nothing further having been said since, I think caution is in order about dreaming something different. Ralph is a businessman first & this was an investment, so I would expect that will not change after all this time.
Give us a link to this alleged speech please.
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It means anyone can be a "sports writer" these days.
New LA Team could come Thru Buffalo
in The Stadium Wall Archives
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I got your "a QB like Manning" covered with Polian's inability to draft a QB without having the first overall pick. And as for "talking Kelly into playing for the Bills," Kelly had no choice since the Bills owned his rights for several years.
I got a laugh out of "winning SB's." His teams are 1-5 in the big game, and the one won was thanks to playing a joke of a team in the Bears who lost their best player (Harris). Maybe if he wasn't giving out huge deals to stars like Kelso and Wright, the Bills could have won at least 1 of those 4 SB's.