Thieves Never Sleep

Early this week, the AP broke a story about a $1.4 billion stadium the NFL Buffalo Bills are planning. If I were the Bills, the less said about it the better. For openers, it tells rank-and-file fans what the team thinks of them, which isn’t much. The Bills currently play in Highmark Stadium, with a seating capacity of just under 72,000. The new stadium would seat 60,000. Who knows, maybe the owners don’t even like fat-cat fans too much either, given how they want to go from 121 suites down to sixty. Last month, the team senior vice president released a statement noting that owners Terry and Kim Pegula “have always known that, like virtually all NFL stadiums, this will ultimately be some form of public/private partnership,” partnership in a “Heads I win, tails you lose” sort of way. What, exactly do those public partners get when the Pegulas sell the team, the worth of which no doubt substantially increased by that subsidized stadium? I’ll bet they get not a penny. The irony here is that this stadium would have the smallest capacity in all the NFL, beating out the Bears at Soldier Field with its 61,500 seats (and 133 suites). The Bears are always saying how they’d like to host a Super Bowl. But the NFL will only look at venues seating at least 70,000 people. So, the Bills don’t even want to go through the motions of saying they want to help bring a Super Bowl to Buffalo? And Commissioner Roger Goodell, what’s he got to say, if it’s not too much of a bother?