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It's all about potential for revenue. The Bills fall behind because they only charge so much, as we all know Bills tickets remain among the cheapest in the league The "answer" gets murkier when we widdle down, a) who and how will this be paid for, b) what kind of stadium do we (meaning Buffalo taxpayers) want vs what the NFL wants, and c) location, infrastructure and mixed use capabilities. The league wants Buffalo to get a new stadium so they can charge more money and make more money for themselves, and thus increase Buffalo's valuation and the overall league as well. This is monetarily impossible with the current stadium. Its as renovated as it can be barring a complete retrofit/overall that would take years, and that possibility raises further logistical issues, namely, where does Buffalo play while under construction. So there remains a disconnect between local public opinion, spending money, and what the NFL fully expects Bills ownership to accomplish in the next 5-10 years. Buffalo will get a new stadium folks, it's just a matter of when. This will test and strain the market's ability to support the team like never before. I fully expect the overall gameday experience to change for what most Bills game attendees would consider for the worst. If you want a team, how much are you willing to pay for it? This is by no means me arguing that taxpayer funded stadia is a good thing. It's just unfortunately the price of doing business in the 21st century NFL.

Anyone have a quick-hits version of the article? Highlights/notable quotes, etc?

MAGA, bro. Also, I too am a Bills fan and can post whenever I want to. I said your argument is ridiculous, the non-gender specific identifier "this", not "you" are ridiculous. So no, I didn't resort to name calling. I simply pointed out how completely ridiculous claiming you can no longer be a fan of your team if one preferred they select one player over another. To be fair, you still haven't addressed my original criticism. I am a Bills fan, and preferred Josh Rosen. According to "tumaro02" that means I can or cannot root for their success, or not?

This is ridiculous. Criticizing a media member for being honest about his reservations is not "derangement disorder". It's being honest. You can support a team and still be objective and disagree with their decisions or opinions. I'm a Rosen supporter. Sorry, uh, "Rosen" supporter. I'm not expecting Allen to fail, but I'm not very confident he will. But does that mean I can't root for my team now that Allen is their QB?

This is essentially correct. All of the research backs the conclusion that taxpayer funded stadia rarely results in a boon to taxpayers. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sports-jobs-taxes-are-new-stadiums-worth-the-cost/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/how-the-nfl-fleeces-taxpayers/309448/ Buffalo is in a tough spot. They have stable, well-funded ownership that's committed to infrastructural, societal, and cultural improvements of the western New York market. However, the profit margins are very slim on a market with limited corporate resources, and an exhausted pool of "regional" fans in Southern Ontario, Rochester, et cetera. This writer works in media, almost exclusively funded via advertising sales. Trust me when I say this, every single possible client that would have any money to spend, already does. There are only so many $100,000 Cellino & Barnes accounts to go around. Effectively Buffalo has tapped out whatever advertising/sponsorship that they possibly can. There's no money left. And of course we always hear that Buffalo's tickets are among the cheapest consistently in the NFL. It is ironic that the NFL has grown to be the most popular sport among the "big 4" North American sports using socialism - taxing the "rich" to give to the "poor"- ie - revenue sharing benefits from the big markets giving to the small markets. That the most profitable sport in the country can use tactics reviled by the political right is a dark and sad reality that rich, old, white men who don't want to pay any taxes have become older, richer, and whiter, via policies that are consistently touted as dangerous by hardcore conservative wonks. The NFL wants Buffalo to build a new stadium so it can increase its profits, and ensure more money in the pool for all the teams. Football is based on a completely unsustainable business model. "Enough is never enough". They must always make more revenue than the season previous. At some point, supply will exceed demand. It's only a matter of time before sports fails just like the big banks. Give it another 15 years or so. We've already seen about a 10% decline in youth football enrollment. Once that generation of players comes of age, and we realize there just aren't enough talented players to sustain the product at its current entertainment price (billions a year for nearly every TV broadcaster), sports is done. What does all this mean? I think eventually political leadership in NYS will cave and give the Pegulas (multi-billiionaires), their fancy new stadium, likely 80% give or take publicly funded. It'll be touted as an economic "win" for Buffalo. Another notch in the massively over-hyped "Buffalo resurgence". Yet the results will be the same. It'll be a waste of government spending at the highest level. If NYS spent $1 billion on a community center on the east side of the city that ended up being used 10 times a year, that would be an outrage at the highest level. Angry old white guy would cry from the highest mountain, or more appropriately, a microphone on WBEN, about how government only knows how to waste your money. Yet when a football team wastes your money on billionaires who can afford it, we're all ok with it, because we love the Bills for some stupid reason. This is all very long and stupid. Ultimately, we all want our team, and we're gonna do whatever we can to keep them here. Give it 3 years and Pegula will start crying about "competitive balances", "market size", "profitability", "viability" and any stupid !@#$ing buzzword Russ Brandon kept touting before he finally got the boot.

What really frustrated me about the Bills offense, for the better part of the drought, but especially under Taylor was a lack of command and control. If Bills fans were honest with themselves (a rarity), did you ever feel confident down 4 points with the ball under 2 minutes the Bills would go ahead? I recall the '16 Miami game clearly, as the only situation where this was the case, and the Bills still failed to score in OT with 2 possessions to win! He has maybe 2 impressive performances in 3 years starting, both losses. @ Sea, vs Miami in 16. We're all so warped from years of tragic, heartbreaking defeats we all lose sight in the fact Taylor had plenty of opportunities to be the hero and failed almost always. Here's to improving on the 31st passing offense, 181 yards/game. Laughable in NFL.

Points for nuance and creativity. Some definite truths of the state of the media consumption business here. As an employee of a corporate media company, I too am gravely concerned for the long term viability of "old media." While social media is going nowhere, it was and will never be "free". We sell our data to the lowest bidder every time we click "agree to the terms and conditions". Sometimes, paying for a product has merit too, and too few see the merit in "yesterday's news". At its core, we are seeing the death of strong writing. Writing is a skill. A challenging one that requires effort, time and a knowledge of accepted rules. Does The Stadium Wall need to follow the AP Style Guide 2018? No. Do we all need a Columbia or Missouri J school degree to post about or football team? No. But it'd sure read better. I think the ability to convey information, emotion, or opinion via poetry and prose is both a difficult and dying artform, with a very lax acceptable standard at very high levels of media production. There ought be at least proper sentence structure in everyday written English. Apparently none of us want to read it though. Bear in mind, this is just sports department cuts. More is coming from more important floors of that newsroom. Feel free to rip on Sully, Vogl, Gleason all you want. It's just sports. I'm concerned about the future of a free press if this continues in news and political coverage. The lack of an informed electorate is dangerous for a democracy. Too many people think angels are real already.

I don't get this, there's no mention of hosting any NFL product of any kind in this article. Is there even any interest in 'Cuse hosting an NFL game, regardless of team?

We're all aware the NFL Offseason program is strict in terms of how much actual physical practice time the players get in football drills. For a complete list of rules, click here. Since Josh Allen himself continues to talk about how much work he has to do on his footwork and mechanics, how much can he really get from the team before we're in Training Camp? Once OTA's/Minicamp end, is Josh Allen PROHIBITED from doing footwork drills / passing drills on his own time? Can he work on these things in addition to strength and cardio training he's surely already doing everyday anyway? How can the Bills maximize the time they have to train a raw prospect before preseason opens if the offseason workout regimen is so prohibitive? Is this making fundamental football worse? This may be a completely separate topic, but it seems like so many talented, but raw, football players enter pro ball with such few technical abilities, like solo tackling, catching, holding onto the football with two hands, etc, that they never seem to correct these issues before it catches up to them in game action. Since there's no formal prospect development system in football, guys like Allen, who COULD be really good, tend to flame out on bad teams because they simply don't have enough time to teach them the position. I recognize the rationale for limited practices. Somebody VERY important will blow his knee out on the first day of OTA's, and the lead column on ESPN/ProFootballTalk will be "Why OTA's need to end, now.." This is a nuanced argument. I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm very concerned there just isn't enough practice time in the offseason schedule to get a rookie QB ready. How does he really learn the game? Live reps. He makes mistakes, the team struggles, and fans get antsy for change. Coaches get fired. New systems, new terminology, new players and the process repeats itself. We could be onto the 3rd OC in 3 seasons under McBeane should Allen predictably show flashes, but struggle with an NFL passing offense.

I don't disagree, but I don't think the coach wants any extra attention on his players and staff. It's fair to say McDermott would practice at 5 am everyday for 2 weeks straight with no fan attendance, no evening practices, and no media in attendance, if he could. They worked out, what, 13 times in Rochester last year? I think it was the shortest Training Camp at Fisher since the agreement began. It's a small, private, affluent suburban college that does very little (read, literally nothing) to accommodate crowds, walk-up traffic, parking. The college doesn't want people there, and the team doesn't really want people there either. If this were at UB, as example, there'd be more than enough room for access, infrastructure, parking, amenities, activities, etc. It's actually a way better idea, but the Bills would never do it. I think if you're reading the tea leaves correctly, should Beane and McDermott last here beyond 2020, training camp in Rochester is not gonna last much longer. I give it to the end of their agreement, which I think is 3 more years, including this one.

Yes, it is super risky to pay assets to trade up for a QB that history shows is likely a bust anyway. But if Bills wait, and play it "smart", they may be out of QB options by 12, and then all the fans and writers and media KILL them for that. So doing it "right" gets you criticism. Trading up gets you criticism. There's no option that someone won't have a defensible critique of. On this whole "football first" thing, I feel this is all American pseudo patriotic capitalist nonsense. Does ANYONE here like their job, all the time, regardless of conditions? Answer this question honestly. Do you like your job? Is it fair to expect a professional football player, one who is under constant scrutiny, constant derision, let alone the massive physical and mental beating he's gonna undertake as the starting QB of the Buffalo Bills, you really think he's gonna be jazzed about coming to work every day, all the time? At least Ryan O'Reilly admitted the truth, that losing sucks, and it beats you down. He's a human person. I don't need Josh Rosen to LIKE being a QB. I don't care at all. I really just need him to be good. Whether you may think there has to be a link between loving the craft and succeeding in the craft is arguable. I just choose to reject that argument. Plenty of people are great at what they hate doing. It's this sad, American capitalist argument, that we all should just LOVE our jobs, and love work because that's what Americans do. I don't live to work. I work to live. Furthermore, most evidence says we work too much, and earn too little. If Josh Rosen wants to play football to earn enough money to pursue his actual passions and interests, good for him. That's what life's about. No one criticizes the doctor who loves boating, and travel. Or the lawyer who puts his money and time into charitable causes. (these are just made up examples). That a public figure, especially a guy that plays a dumb game for a loving, MUST always be job first, all the time, without consequence, is completely unreasonable.

See I agree with this. He made, what, 44 starts as a Bill? That's the most for a Bills QB in a long time. EJ Manuel was a 1st round pick and made 18 starts as a Bill! Think about the playing time versus investment. Tyrod was signed as a throwaway free agent, and ends up starting full time for a decent stretch. His body of work speaks for itself. 3,000 yards passing a season is nowhere near the NFL passing standard in 2018. He has 1, count it, 1, 300 yard game in his career. Not enough.

I subscribe to the "broken" emotional fan you describe above. It's just been too long, and I'm too young to know of the "glory days" when the team lost a bunch of Super Bowls in a row. It's not so much the ability to see the Bills as winners, as I doubt they'll get the help. The odds are something like 13% the Bills win and get all the help they need. So it's not looking good, and that's LIKELY. It's more likely they miss than get in. That's a fact. I can't take much more of this "wait 4 months until the Patriots win the Super Bowl" thing. It's depressing, predictable, boring, and stupid. Nobody cares, nobody likes it, nobody wants to see this again. They'll win another one, and Belichick will COMPLAIN at the postgame podium about how much less time his team has to prepare for the draft after all these long playoff runs. And the wheel keeps turning. Someone needs to put a bullet in my head. I'm at a complete emotional loss. A lot of fans that for some reason either convince themselves (lie to themselves) that they're gonna win each week get on the "naysayers" that offer a reasonable, fact-based, objective perspective. Somehow I'm a bad guy for not believing in a team that's known for nothing but losing virtually their entire existence. They're a franchise loser, with a 408-467-8 overall record. They'd need years of sustained, consistent winning to just get back to .500 overall. The future is bleak. Let Morty explain this better than I can.

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Asking as if he can't understand what this means, or why fans would consider the freakishly Greek tragic ways the Bills lose all these important games, with different players and different coaches is awfully tone deaf. It's not that listeners aren't aware of the fact that Murphy is a Bills employee. I NEED to have Murphy give the listeners more credit than that. Like, not understanding why Bills fans are so broken by a generation of losing for the sake of your employer is terribly dishonest. Tone deaf is the best way I can describe it. It's similar to the classic rock station in town blissfully unaware that that CCR song they just came out of is pushing 50 (!) years old. It's not new. Can't you admit, that I dunno, Nirvana is band after 30 years? It's tone deaf. Just admit your faults and move on. No one is judging you, John. I just need a sense of place, humility, accuracy and accountability. Just be honest about the fact the Bills ARE irrelevant and they lose more often than they win. These are not opinions. They have more losing seasons than winning ones in their franchise history. Just be honest. I think listeners will respect that more.

Meh. Perhaps this is the CBS/Buffalo D list NFL treatment, but they rarely show alignments, coverages, hell you rarely get replays during Bills' TV broadcasts. Especially on critical 3rd down stops, or a questionable penalty that extends a drive, etc. I'd rather them cut to a game that's interesting. One could argue 1:00 PM redzone is TOO intense, fast-paced, because it's constant action, no replays, no challenges, no injuries, no penalties, etc. Severe injuries appear to be an every-play occurrence, allowing for more vamping from the also-ran uninteresting fluff CBS crew. "Great stuff Steve, let's go down to attractive blonde lady on the sidelines" Attractive blonde lady asks milquetoast, generic questions that offer no insight to the game or plays at hand, she nods accordingly to every boring thing football coach X says, and its "back to you guys." "Thanks Suzie! That halftime report brought to you by Geico..." Or just the lack of any interesting thing from color analysts too. Bills are 4th and 2 down 9 with 11:00 to go 4th quarter on +43, "oh, well they HAVE to punt this here, there's no way you go for it this early.." "Right you are Rich, punt the ball, put it in the hands of your defense to get a stop and try to win the game." UGHH. And the MNF guys are no exception. You've got Gruden, who has a very small sample size of any NFL coaching success, devolve into some obtuse parody of himself. "I'll tell ya right here man, ya go X y stick z yellow stick y banana cumquad on 3, right there man" It sounds super cool on television, but it's literally just an unintelligible garble of nonsense. That COULD be a football play, or it could just be a bunch of random gobbledygook. But SUPER BOWL WINNING COACH Jon Gruden said it, so OK.

Agreed. I don't have cable, and my TV viewing experience has improved tremendously. There's so much good stuff on Netflix and Hulu, all commercial free. It's too much to watch, and that's only 2 services. I went to my buddy's to watch Game of Thrones once a week. Pro sports has not adjusted to the commercial free, "over the top" consumption model of modern streaming services. While I doubt we'll get to a point where live pro sports will eliminate spots, they need to figure out a way to either charge more for commercials and air less of them, or air longer commercial breaks but less net commercial time. Something's gotta give. The sponsorships are brutal too. "This Toyota.com replay brought to you by Geico, 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more on car insurance. Geico.com technology partners are brought to you by Sprint. Switch to Sprint and get a new iPhone! Details in store. That store brought to you by Target. Target run, and done!

This may be true across the league, but I'm speaking to the professionalism level of the broadcast itself. Lots of bad cuts, mistakes and bad camera angles. This is CBS, network level TV production. It should be the best of the best. There's no excuse for mistakes at that level. It speaks to the irrelevancy of the Bills. To CBS, who cares if there's mistakes, it's the Bills.

I realize the Bills, and subsequently the requisite CBS broadcast of them, are probably the lowest ring on the broadcasting ladder for the network during the season, but holy crap it's gotten so bad. This is not even to necessarily bag on Harlan and Gannon, who are your usual say nothing actually interesting or critical types, it's just the whole damn production. How many important yet questionable plays a week do you NEVER get a replay on? It's a close 3rd down conversion, or an important 3rd down penalty, or a really close "was it a catch?" type play, and you don't even get to see it again. We get 3 minutes of screen time of a maybe-injured referee on the sideline, yet no shot of what's going with the actual game. 3 and out after 3 and out, do we get a look at if the receivers are getting open? Is the offensive line struggling against the Carolina front seven? Give me something, instead we get a ref chirping to McDermott on the sideline and complaining about going to the locker room. We get a terrible, shaky-cam close up of either another camera man or some useless coach on the sideline? What the hell was that shot yesterday? In TV a "technical director" is supposed to know whether to cut to "camera 1, camera 2, or camera 3" so as to know that the camera on that feed ISN'T A HORRIBLE CLOSE UP OF SOMETHING THAT'S USELESS TO THE PRODUCTION. Do these people not exist for the CBS Bills coverage? Did anyone notice the 3 second satellite CBS rejoin filler before the game came back on TV? Like, instead of CBS and WIVB synching exactly at 1:30 from network to local break and back to the network, they seriously thought "CBS Buffalo/Carolina NFL Game" TV card was suitable for broadcasting to the air. It's so amateurish and embarrassing. It's gotten so bad I don't know if I can stomach an entire season of this college broadcasting class level TV. You can bag on Michaels and Collinsworth all you want but at least the NBC cameras look good, and the transitions are smooth, breaks are seamless. Am I alone in this thought?

A fair point, but one could argue Kyburn is a scientist, a necromancer. He raised the Mountain from the dead with science, not magic. It is technically different. He used the technology and means of his time to "resurrect" him. I think it is an important distinction. I really like how one could argue that Sam and Kyburn are opposites. Both left the Citadel because they want to be harbingers of change, not just history. Kyburn's ideas are too radical, yet prove they yield results. Not just with the mountain, see the scorpion. That weapon was a marvel of medieval engineering; how it so easily moved on its tilt, aimed and reloaded with efficiency. Kyburn knows his stuff, despite his wretched intentions. Sam doesn't want to record the histories "of better men," and so sets out to make history himself. He already cracked the biggest mystery of the seven kingdoms, is one of 2 living people to kill an ice zombie demon of the Apocalypse, and is in the heart of the battle to come. Could he be the one retelling "the song of ice and fire" to young students at the Citadel when the story ends? The fact he's a chubby dude named Sam, a la LOTR, and hangs out with all of the major characters can't be a coincidence. Ugh. We all should start working out, eating healthy and hope North Korea doesn't start the actual Game of Thrones before 2019.

Meh. The Greyjoys are in my opinion the most useless House and most useless storyline in the entire plot. Why should I root for yet another Theon redemption arc? What's the point of them at all? They serve no purpose, other than to ferry a few dozen thousand soldiers over the Narrow Sea to add to the Night King's roster.

It's tough. I think to level the playing field, (which I think already is a stretch considering how broken the Night King already is) a dragon HAD to die. I mean, what's sicker than ice zombies v dragons than ICE ZOMBIE DRAGONS V DRAGONS? Even though Khaleesi still has the dragonvantage (sorry, had to), I still don't see how team pulse makes it out on top in 6 episodes. The dead are at least 100,000 and climbing, and you've only got 2 armies committed to the cause. Could The Kingslayer himself use his Valyrian steel to take out the Night King? Could he be Azor Ahai all along? It seems like Jamie's gone full good guy and leaving his sister for good. We'll see if he it makes to the North alive. Despite some pacing/clumsy issues with this season, is there really any debate we've lived the greatest television event in history? What tops this damn show?

I think rebuilding/tanking is more a question of end goals. If the Bills want to win championships, and consistently compete for one, they're very unlikely to do so as the team is presently constructed. Tyrod Taylor is very likely not the answer long term, and without that QB, you're stuck. Even "if the defense improves, if they get lucky on calls, if the qb sees the middle of the field, if Watkins, Wood, McCoy, Darby K.Williams, Dareus et al stay healty...." and they get all the breaks and actually break the drought, what happens next? No one in their right mind bets the Bills in the playoffs. What's the point of any of this? NE will represent the AFC in the Super Bowl again, or it least is certain to appear in the Conference title game. If we want to win championships, maybe it's best to think long and hard about what we really want out of this year. But once again, it appears the Bills are middling it. Getting another 1st round pick next season, but bringing back Kyle Williams, LeSean McCoy and other aging veterans. You want to "build for the future" and "trust the process" but also want to "win every practice, every preseason game, and as many regular season games as we can." It's a mixed message. Are you "trusting the process" or "leading the charge" (to 7-9)?

This is an interesting analysis. I don't what really the answer is. Ultimately, I as a fan want a championship. It's very unrealistic for the Bills or Sabres this season to seriously compete for one. That's how tanking gets into the conversation. Patriots domination of the AFC, the terrible state of QB play overall in the league, and the playoff format makes it very, very hard for Buffalo to clinch a spot every season. So what is the goal? You have to be VERY bad to clinch the 1st pick, and you have to be the Patriots to win a championship. The Bills are about exactly halfway between these two realities. What's the point? The NFL has a problem on its hands and no one seems to care. When you have 1 team that has a chance at winning, realistically winning it all, what is the point of any of this? I honestly have no hope left. I can't conceive a reality in which the Bills are ever good. I'm broken. Cue the Pantera riff.

I don't really even think the players care that much. The schedule should be first and foremost about competitive balance and equal opportunity. The Patriots domination of the AFC East has shifted the balance of power so far in their direction, it would benefit other AFC contenders to not have them walk into a first round bye every season. Think about it, New England has to win one playoff game to lock in their spot in the AFC title game every year. That's insane. The system is desperate need of reform.