Bills-Bears game Sunday is tough sell in Toronto

The Bills in Toronto series Web site has a countdown clock, listing the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the Bills host the Chicago Bears on Sunday in the Rogers Centre.

Read More: [URL]http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article238927.ece

But it’s not as if most fans in Southern Ontario are counting down the minutes until Sunday’s game — or storming the Rogers Centre box office for tickets.

With the Bills limping into Toronto at 0-7, good seats are available in all price ranges, both through the Bills in Toronto Web site and in reasonable prices on the secondary ticket market.

Once again, Rogers Communications has had a tough sell on its hands, attempting to avoid the embarrassment of a non-sellout that could have blacked out the game in Southern Ontario — and Buffalo — or left the stadium blanketed with empty seats.

Several sources, though, said Monday that Rogers Communications officials are expected to announce a sellout, sometime before the 1 p.m. Thursday deadline to avoid a television blackout.

“I’ve been told by Fox that the game will be on my TV channel,” said Nick Magnini, general manager of WUTV Channel 29. “So far as I’m concerned, the game is a go.”
The Bills-Bears game is on Fox, not CBS, because the visiting Bears are in the National Football Conference.

Silvio D’Addario, vice president for events at the Rogers Centre, said that company officials never comment on ticket sales prior to an event.

“For this week’s game, we’re really, really happy with where ticket sales are right now,” he said. “We’re awfully close, and we’re pushing real hard.”

Last year’s Bills game in Toronto, a Dec. 3 date with the New York Jets, was announced as a sellout, even while tickets still were available on the Bills in Toronto Web site. Rogers Communications officials later announced a crowd of 51,567 in the approximately 54,000-seat stadium. The NFL has specific rules about selling out a game in time to lift a television blackout. It’s not clear whether Rogers Communications may have the right to announce a sellout whenever it wants, since the Bills already have “sold” Rogers all the tickets.

The company is paying the Bills $78 million, or $9.75 million per game, to stage five regular-season and three preseason games in Toronto from 2008 through 2012.

The first year, the communications giant was selling the lure of the National Football League in Toronto and the possibility of that city eventually landing its own franchise.
Last year, the sales pitch centered on the Bills’ quote machine, wide receiver Terrell Owens, leading to the marketing slogan “T.O. is in TO.”
This year, the sales pitch is tougher, with no T.O. and a winless team.

This executive described the three phases of the media and public reaction to the five-year Bills in Toronto experiment:

[LIST]
[*]First came optimism, a huge interest in what this series could mean for the chances of Toronto landing the Bills or another NFL team.
[*]After the prices were announced, the mood turned skeptical and later negative, with Toronto newspaper columnists almost trying to outdo each other in ridiculing the series.
[*]That led to the current third phase.
[/LIST]
“I’d say now it’s closer to apathy,” the executive said. “There’s very little written about it, good or bad. I haven’t even seen one piece about ticket sales [as of Monday].”
Everyone agrees the series has been hurt by high ticket prices, the tough economy and the Bills’ poor records.

One Toronto media member, who asked not to be named, has been struck by another phenomenon.

“I thought Toronto fans would buy into the idea of Buffalo being their team,” he said. “But they haven’t. There is no sense that this is Toronto’s team.”