I know what you’re thinking.
Another stadium piece, Joe? Really?
Why? Can’t you take a hint? The thing is built. The Bills are playing there. Not everything is a conspiracy theory!? Cue up @thebuffaloguy716 yelling at me in my DMs. Even the Bills stadium Twitter account is dunking on us fake-outrage stadium people at this point.
I tried to move on.
Then Kathy Hochul and Terry Pegula started talking.
Last week, with the new stadium getting ready for its first regular-season game, there was a lot of reminiscing about the Bills, the stadium, and how there was supposedly this very real possibility that the team could have left Buffalo if all of this didn’t come together.
Kathy Hochul went on WGR last week and casually dropped something that caught my attention.
Apparently, things were serious.
Not “the Bills need a new stadium or someday we could have a problem” serious. Hochul said there were “a lot of other cities” courting the Bills, that the team was frustrated with Albany and that, at one point, it was “not a given” they were staying in Buffalo.
Oh?
This is news to me.
Then Terry Pegula sat down for a rare interview, and what I assumed would basically be a ball-washing tour of the new stadium by him — the amenities, the booze, the clubs, the giant buffalo and everything else resembling one of those paid Disney resort infomercials you accidentally find on YouTube — turned into another conversation about saving the Buffalo Bills and not before he bought the team..but afterwards. Cleveland came up. Other cities came up. The ghosts of franchises that packed up and left their fans behind came up.
By the end of opening week, I wasn’t sure if we were celebrating a new football stadium or being told that Kathy Hochul, Terry Pegula, PSLs, and $850 million in public money had combined to save the Bills universe for the 200th different version of “We Saved the buffalo bills! [“back to the future” save the clock tower voice]
And that’s where I started having questions.
Listening to some of it made me wonder if I remembered the last 12 years completely differently than everybody else. It felt like a victory lap, and I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult to fans. As for politicians, some media and the NFL…I have questions.
The politicians got their victory lap, Terry Pegula got his, and Bills fans certainly got theirs, and I completely understand why people are emotional about it. If you grew up in Western New York, there absolutely was a time when losing the Bills felt possible, especially as Ralph Wilson got older and nobody knew what would happen after he died. And trust me, I wasn’t sitting there thinking the Bills were never going anywhere.
From 2010 through 2014, when I was running Buffalo Wins, I was scared shitless about it. I wrote about the Toronto experiment, relocation and how the organization, specifically Russ Brandon, seemed to treat those concerns like bullshit. I didn’t believe Jim Kelly had some mystery group of investors who were automatically going to save the team, and I didn’t assume some local billionaire would magically appear. Ralph Wilson wasn’t going to live forever, and I didn’t know what happened next.
Then Terry Pegula bought the Bills, and that’s where my memory gets different from the story we’re telling now, because once Pegula bought the team, I basically stopped worrying about relocation. Not worried a little less, not figured the odds had improved, I mean the thought pretty much left my brain. Pegula buying the Bills felt like the ending to that story. Maybe I was naive, or maybe conversations were happening behind the scenes that none of us knew about, but relocation just didn’t feel like the boogeyman anymore.
Even when the stadium conversation got serious in the early 2020s, most of what I remember was about the stadium itself. The Buffalo News was constantly reporting about the condition of the old stadium, and the debate was downtown or Orchard Park, renovate or build new, dome or no dome, how much would it cost and who was going to pay for it? There was also this random dude from Legends or whatever that stadium builder company was, who looked straight out of the Trump Administration of angry Stephen Miller school, who went on local TV stations to talk shit about wanting more public money, and Tim Graham mentioned how this guy was going about it in a very abrasive carpetbagger way and didn’t know the region, which we ended up never seeing this guy again. There was the Austin story, which got crapped on pretty heavily locally, but I don’t remember 2018 through 2023 feeling like Buffalo was constantly one bad meeting away from Terry Pegula packing up the Bills and leaving.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Ron Raccuia, who was negotiating on behalf of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, was directly asked in 2021 if the Bills had ever threatened to leave Buffalo. His answer was “None.” He said they hadn’t discussed anything with another market and were focused on getting a deal done in Buffalo. He also made it clear the Bills wouldn’t renew their existing lease without a new stadium agreement, so yes, there was pressure. But there’s a difference between pressure to get a stadium deal done and Terry Pegula seriously considering moving the Buffalo Bills.
If the second thing happened, tell us.
Were there proposals, meetings or legitimate offers?
What cities were involved?
How far did it get?
Did the NFL get involved?
Now Graham did have a piece last year that indicated through sources that moving was talked about.
At this point, you might be thinking I should just scrap this breaking take and go back to Jim Harbaugh vs Jim Kelly fights, but this isn’t about which politician gets credit for saving the Bills. It’s about figuring out what actually happened during the process of trying to get a stadium done before shovels hit the ground , what fans were told while it was happening, and what we’re being told now that everything worked out.
It reminds me of the Russ Brandon era. Back then, reporters asking what would happen after Ralph Wilson were sometimes treated like they were stirring up unnecessary panic. Everything was fine, stop worrying, stop asking. Then after the Pegulas bought the team, Brandon went on WGR and essentially said thank God for Terry and Kim Pegula because he didn’t know where the Bills would be without them. So if there was another serious relocation threat during the stadium negotiations, give us the middle of the story too, not just the ending where Buffalo was saved.
And that brings me to Terry Pegula. Terry actually talked extensively recently, which happens about as often as Halley’s Comet, and I enjoyed Tyler Dunne’s piece and thought he got some interesting stuff out of Pegula about the stadium and organization.
But there’s still one question I wish Terry would answer himself: Why did Bills fans have to pay PSLs?
I know what a PSL is, and I know other NFL teams use them. I want Terry Pegula to explain why he believed they were necessary in Buffalo. This is a stadium that received an enormous public investment, owned by a billionaire whose franchise has increased tremendously in value, and some season-ticket holders were then asked to spend thousands of dollars for the right to continue spending money on their tickets. That’s a significant ask, and I think it’s reasonable to want the owner to explain it.
Not Pete Guelli, not somebody from the ticket office and not a carefully worded FAQ. Terry. How much of the private financing depended on PSL revenue? What would the alternative have been? Was building the stadium without PSLs seriously considered?
Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable answer. My point isn’t that PSLs automatically make Terry Pegula some evil billionaire counting everybody’s money. My point is that Bills fans deserve something more substantial than, “Well, that’s what everybody does.”
The new stadium is here, the Bills have long-term stability in Western New York, and that’s worth celebrating even though I feel we’ve done that for over a decade. But celebrating the stadium doesn’t mean we have to rewrite how things felt after Pegula bought the team, and celebrating the fact that the Bills stayed doesn’t mean we have to stop asking stadium questions.
Maybe the Bills really were closer to leaving than I ever realized, and if they were, someone tell us the whole story. When Ralph died, there were vetted out stories every week in BN, AP, and local stations about what was happening. It was cutthroat by all parties involved for leaks and it eventually settled down when Terry bought the team.
The timing from 2018-2026 just felt like press releases, renderings, and debate on the size of the Buffaloes. Maybe if there had been more reporting at the time about the actual danger of the Bills leaving for Texas, instead of the usual day-to-day Bills chatter from some of the same media members now telling us how close the team came to leaving, I’d remember this differently. But I don’t, and that’s kind of my point.
And maybe PSLs really were absolutely necessary to make this whole thing work. If they were, tell us that story too…preferably from Terry Pegula.
Because after the victory laps are finished, after the politicians take their bows and after the Bills finally play a real football game in this building, the fans who helped pay for the thing deserve to know exactly how we got here.
Were we really that close to losing the Bills and simply kept in the dark about how serious things had become, or is some of what we’re hearing now political theater, with everyone taking credit for saving something that, at least publicly, we weren’t being told was actually on the verge of disappearing? If it was the first one, tell us the story, because if it was the second, that’s a very different kind of victory lap.
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