If the Bills play in Toronto, will the Jays and Raptors play in Buffalo?
Immediately after news spread this week of the Buffalo Bills' intent to tap into the Toronto market by playing a pre-season game there in 2008 and at least one regular-season game thee in 2009, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a source more than a year ago.
Actually, the conversation was one of many I had with this individual, who claimed to have some insight into the Bills' thinking and the plans of Paul Godfrey, the president of the Toronto Blue Jays and the mastermind behind the plan to place a National Football League team full-time in Toronto.
Godfrey has been at it for some 30 years and some people think he's daft, that it will never happen - or at least not in the foreseeable future. Then again, over the course of time, Godfrey has recruited some strong financial artillery, including Ted Rogers, chairman of Rogers Communications and the owner of the Blue Jays, and Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. and one of the most powerful businessmen/sportsmen in Canada.
My source told me the Buffalo Bills want a domed stadium and that the matter will be discussed by politicians some time next year. If the matter gets the green light, the Bills will be relocated while a new stadium is built on the same grounds of the current stadium in Orchard Park, New York. The place the Bills will be relocated to is - drum roll please - Toronto and will play at the Rogers Centre.
Because the Rogers Centre does not have the requisite 65,000 seats for an NFL stadium, it will be retrofitted to meet that number. The Rogers Centre has a maximum of 53,000 for football. It would likely not take that long to add the extra seats.
Once the Bills' newly-built stadium is ready, the team will move back to Buffalo and the NFL will award the city the Super Bowl, perhaps in 2012, to recoup money the franchise lost while relocating. Hey, a Super Bowl in chilly Buffalo ain't pretty, but the NFL did play the big game in Detroit in 2006.
And Toronto would almost certainly be awarded an expansion franchise, along with Los Angeles. A possible name for the Toronto franchise? The Phantoms. That was the name of the Arena League football team that played at the Air Canada Centre in 2001-2002 before the plug was pulled by the ownership that included Rogers Communications and some Toronto businessmen. The team was run by Godfrey's son Rob.
There is one more sidebar to all this. MLSE and Rogers would play some games involving their collective sports franchises in Buffalo. For example, the Rogers-owned Blue Jays would play some games at the home of the Triple A Buffalo Bisons. The stadium only fits 19,500, but it would almost certainly be sold out for a Major League Baseball game. The Toronto Raptors, who are owned by MLSE, would play some games in Buffalo at the HSBC Arena.
Now there's another element to the story, specifically the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. There has long been the fear that any full-time encroachment on the Toronto landscape of an NFL franchise would kill the Argos, impact on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and, in the process, threaten the existence of the CFL as an eight- or nine-team loop. There has long been a belief, too, that the CFL or a variation of it could exist in Western Canada.
Playing in an expanded Rogers Centre is already too big for the Argos, although the team has managed to annually increase its attendance since new ownership came in at the end of the 2003 season. If the Rogers Centre was expanded for NFL usage, the alternative site for the Argos would be BMO Stadium, which has a seating capacity of some 25,000 and was not built to accommodate a CFL-sized football field. As a gesture of goodwill, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which runs the stadium for the City of Toronto, would pay for the cost expanding the field. Whether the Godfrey group would buy the Argos at that point is another story. Right now the current Argo ownership group of David Cynamon and Howard Sokolowski have no desire to sell the team, but at the same time are trying to round up support from their fellow CFL franchise owners to buy an NFL team if one becomes available to stop the Godfrey group. One would assume that when push comes to shove, the Godfrey group and the current Argo ownership group would reach some kind of agreement.
There are so many variables to this entire scenario, and that doesn't even take into account that the Godfrey group will take a serious run at buying the Bills once it hits the open market following the death of team owner Ralph Wilson, who is 89. Wilson has no plans to turn the team over to his offspring because of the inheritance tax, but who knows when he'll be sitting in the great owners box in the sky?
One thing is for sure: The National Football League is closer than ever to being in play in Toronto - if only for a taste - and the Godfrey group has a variety of plans to try and make it happen full-time.
So my source says.
