The Buffalo Bills will host the Chicago Bears in Toronto on Sunday, less than three months after a sparse crowd showed up for a preseason game.
Gene Warner of the Buffalo News recently reported that Rogers Communications, which owns the stadium, will be announcing a sellout on Thursday.
“I’ve been told by FOX that the game will be on my TV channel,” Nick Magnini, General Manager of WUTV Channel 29, told Warner. “So far as I’m concerned, the game is a go.”
But is it really a sellout? As of this posting, a search for four consecutive tickets in the lower bowl and the upper bowl at BillsInToronto.com instantly returned available seats.
Thus, we’re wondering whether someone already has agreed to “buy” the surplus tickets at 34 cents on the dollar, in order to avoid the embarrassment of failing to sell out the foreign-soil NFL contest.
If it’s not a true sellout, it will be harder to regionalize the Bills -- which in turn will make it harder to keep the team in Buffalo over the long term.