krazykat

Yep. Money! It's all about the Benjamins.

LMAO Good post. I would say though that the Buff News and D&C et al both have online presences. So it's not entirely print media. I know their money comes from print ads and subscriptions though, and those are dropping like flies in the era of the new media. Everyone makes far too much of the preseason. It would do the players and fans much good to either eliminate it or reduce it to one or two games.

Sullivan is good. And when I mean good I mean relatively fair and accurate. DiCesare is a talking head as is Gleason. Gaughan is decent although irregular. Bob Matthews in Rochester for the D&C tries to be fair but has also been way off in past seasons. The problem Tim with asking in places like this is you draw from people that largely only want to hear positives and little else. The truth is that it's been pretty obvious that these guys are just filling print media with opinions that at the end of the season are rarely validated. Sure, they can change their positions as the season rolls on, but who needs to be told after the fact what happened when we can all see that for ourselves. Occasionally the odd interesting bit comes out, but that's about it. Who wants to read much from people that are so wrong so often. We have been told for years how this team was turning things around and haven't seen any of it come to pass. The media fawned over Donahoe and all of his hirees. They fawned over Levy, Jauron, Fairchild even. At some point you just say who cares what they think. I know that doesn't address your question Tim as to why they don't write more, but it could very well be that no one cares what they think anymore. You get much better commentary from the small handful of people in places like this that actually know something about football here. Unfortunately their opinions are often and usually drowned out by childish like tantrums making reading interesting threads more work than fun. Generally speaking the traditional print media is dying out. Even the major papers in the country's biggest cities are laying off people in droves in all departments. That should come as no surprise to you. But perhaps more directly relevant to your question, how many different takes on a game played by backups does a paper want to put out? There will be plenty of articles during the regular season. Otherwise, it could be because interest in the Bills is waning as Wilson prepares to celebrate his 90th while leaving the fans in the lurch and with the big "T" now in the picture. Fans are in a state of flux regarding the disposition of this team. Few will follow it to Toronto regarding purchasing tickets nor will Toronto need it. I would use the first couple of weeks of the season as the gage, not the preseason.

We'll find out.

How can Buffalo even support a team. They can't even fill the seats with the tickets that they've sold.

Good point. He can probably cover all of the fines with one paycheck.

They had no sacks, Roethlisburger was rarely under any initial pressure and what pressure he was under usually was 6 or 7 seconds into the play. The Steelers had little difficulty moving the ball. Except for that INT that bounced right into Whitner's hands say what you want about the D, but if you think that Edwards had a good game, Roethlisburger had more yards and a comparable game otherwise. The secondary played much better than the front seven. If that stays that way it's not gonna be good. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but there's far too much focus here on how things looked contrasted with what the results were.

LOL Bus wheels, Mr. Fairchild.

The Bills also do a disservice to the fans by overpaying all the players we've overpaid too. Does that bother you?

Is that why he likes Edwards better even though the offense has proven to score fewer points led by Edwards? Is Jauron now some kind of expert with his 50-67 career record. Hey, is this Ralph Wilson?

It's mostly sold out for the regular season. They have like 10K tickets remaining and that is presumably 10K for each game. What's the capacity at Roger's? 46K or something.

Fine, then judge by regular season games. Even Americans won't pay what they're charging up there for preseason games. You missed my point entirely. I mean what if the prices were $1K per ticket and they then said, "see, no one wants a team in Toronto." Well this just in, but if the prices here were half of that our boat would be half (or less) full each and every week and it would have absolutely nothing to do with a shortage of fans. How long a team has been around and the accompanying waiting list is an even more serious demand builder than available ticktes at three bills plus. I mean if you want to use a preseason game as a gage, feel free. I think it's meaningless and at the prices they're charging, to be over 80% sold out for the regular season games for the next three years, is impressive to me. That's probably the equivalent revenue from over a third of our home schedule in any given year per year.

Spot on!

Ralph got where he is by being lucky. All he did was sink $25K into a team fortysome years ago. If he were that bright he would have found a way to prevent Polian from being fired. Oops, that's right, he fired him. ; ) Same for AJ Smith both of whom have excelled since leaving. He has done very little for the league since and has recently made a name for himself as a cranky old whiner. He was flat out dumb to insist on keeping the Miami rivalry above everything else when they did the divisional realignment. He has never hired a great GM for this team besides Polian who was a rush decision due to a death of then Terry Bledsoe or whatever his name was. When he meddles in his team's affairs we as fans usually come out on the short end of the stick just like Snyder in Washington and Davis in Oakland. But my point was that if Toronto had a season ticket base like all other teams, besides ours, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. If the Jets, Redskins, Giants, or Pats charged $350 per ticket and made every ticket available to a preseason game of theirs, I doubt that they would have more than ten or twenty thousand people attend either. As it is, most people with preseason tickets try to unload them or they go unused. Will the Ralph be full for the Detroit preseason game, no. So why do we hold a vastly different standard for a preseason game in Toronto? Now if the Miami game fails to sell and we're playing well, then we can start talking. But that will sell out. Actually, aren't they just a few thousand tickets short of selling out the regular season home games there for the next three seasons. I think so. Once the season gets going the rest will sell too. Either way, the cheap (around $200) tickets sold out and it was just the expensive ones that didn't. And if they lowered the prices to what we pay in Buffalo they would have sold out instantly. You have to compare apples to apples here.

That's pretty good. You could also say that fans don't just make excuses for poor play and underperforming parts of the team whether they are players or coaches or office types. As you say, they want their team to not suck, which is sometimes more than you can say for some of those in management based on what they do. They get paid and have conflicting interests. Fans are fans for free so to speak. We even pay to be fans from tickets to merchandise.

Some great points in there. You can also add that if our OL were that great then Lynch would have run for more yards too. Jamal Lewis may be OK but he's not a great RB and he lit us up.

Well, we can agree that they're in a world of hurt if Brady goes out. And while I do not wish injury on players, a minor nagging one keeping Brady out for the season would be refreshing to see since my Pats fan friends think that they would be great without him too. Otherwise many of the players you mention may not even be on their roster and many of those aged ones will be depth players. I haven't read anything about Lynch starting for example. I agree their secondary will be weaker than it's been, but so was ours back in the day, Kelly era. A good Front 7 makes a secondary appear much better than it is.

Take Brady out and they become very beatable. He makes their OL look much better than it is. The thing that really got me last year was how BB would constantly continue to beat teams that they had clearly beaten into the ground all seemingly for purposes of getting records. It was classless and unsportsmanlike. Put teams away, fine. But don't have your starters in the game throwing the ball well into the fourth quarter when there's no conceivable way for the opponent to even pull within three or four TDs much less win. I know it happened to us more than any other team, but bias aside, that was horseshit. If every coach and team behaved like that every season then those records probably would have been much harder to beat.

I won't disagree. I will say though that you don't go from being as badly managed and run as we have been for years to playing the way we did in the first two series in that Pitt game overnight and with the same management primarily as appears to have occurred. The team knows what it has to do and they're either going to get it done or not. I just hope that if they don't then someone at the top has the wherewithall to pull the trigger and make some relevant changes for once. I'm not holding my breath on that either, but as long as we're all hoping for something, if our hopes in a decent season are dashed oncea again, why not hope for the equally unlikely in hindsight.

Some good points. Also keep ion mind that they disallow tailgating in Toronto, or maybe Canada altogether. Who in their right mind is going to lay out $350 plus parking plus concessions/dinner, etc. for a preseason game in which a bunch of guys that are going to be washing pots and pans in four weeks play a half of football, especially when they can't tailgate.

I think that if teams didn't force fans to buy preseason tickets along with their season tickets then just about every team would have 17,000 tickets to get rid of prior to every preseason game with the exception of teams in the largest cities. I think and hope we can agree that charging $350 to a preseason game isn't going to sell tickets. If the Bills charged half of that and didn't force fans to buy them they'd have 70,000 extra tickets for every preseason game. I also think you should find the exact broadcast of that supposed statement. Sounds very unprofessional for Goodell to go on the air and say something like that. And what was Goodell doing in Minnesota? Not saying he wasn't there, but this reeks of fish more than the best fish story.

And tickets for all the other preseason games were going for twice face value around the league? Come on, it's August in Toronto. I guarantee you that you could buy tickets to pretty much any preseason game around the country for 10-25 bucks apiece until the regular season. You also talk as if they're hot items at the Ralph. For the Detroit game I promise you you will be able to get them for five or ten bucks apiece an hour before kickoff. A lot of people give them away. Does that mean that Buffalo can't support a football team when it does. This whole thing about Toronto not being able to support an NFL team based on lame notions that people there aren't snapping at the opportunity to buy preseason tickets for outrageous prices is dumb. I posted two links to Jets Redskin tickets in pairs for $100 and Favre was playing his first game making that at least somewhat of a draw otherwise. One of the two links included a parking pass. At least one of those was 200 level seats. During the season you will be lucky to get one Jets ticket in the upper decks for $100.

I agree, and applying that line of thinking we're not a playoff team then. But for us to do well this year will involve the coaching staff doing that on a near weekly basis. Many teams make the playoffs over the years that aren't playoff teams. The NFC has been so weak that it has typically fielded two or even three teams that often wouldn't have made it in the AFC.

LOL I'm not hard on JP because he didn't have this line or Lynch. But he clearly hasn't demonstrated a command of the short game either and that's where all QBs bread is buttered. So his value for the future is severely limited. You can succeed without a deep game ala Pennington but you cannot possibly succeed without a short game or at least a good one. Neither has proven that short game and honestly, even Edwards hasn't proven much beyond Pennington's capability in the deep game in spite of last Thursday's performance. I'm still gonna blast Trent though because I still don't believe he's going to amount to much. JMO When I'm wrong it'll be obvious just as it will when I'm right.

What has Ralph done for us as fans during his ownership besides name the stadium after himself pissing off all the other owners? His decision to hire Donahoe has prompted the entire modern era debacle that is the Bills currently until further notice. You should start now using his door mat.