The Buffalo Bills may face a difficult decision when it comes to a major change in the National Football League’s nearly 40-year-old TV blackout policy.
Under the new policy, recently approved by league owners, each team can decide whether to opt into the new looser restrictions – allowing local television blackouts to be lifted if 85 percent of a stadium’s nonpremium seats are sold.
Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park has about 60,000 nonpremium seats. So if the Bills opted in, they would need to sell out roughly 51,000 of those 60,000 to lift the blackout.
Individual Bills fans, elected officials and organized fan groups all are applauding the proposed change, which would give teams more flexibility in allowing local broadcasting of games not sold out 72 hours before game time.
“This is a game-changer for football enthusiasts in Buffalo and across the nation," Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, crowed Monday.
Top Bills officials, though, apparently aren’t waving any pompoms over the proposed change.
Team officials wouldn’t comment Monday, but CEO Russ Brandon issued a short statement to The Buffalo News: “It’s an individual-club decision, and we’re going to continue to evaluate it into the future."
Sources with an understanding of the new league policy cited several reasons why some teams struggling to sell out all their games may not embrace the new policy:
• By opting in to the new policy, teams would have to pay increased gate receipts into a leaguewide revenue pool. In the Bills’ case, that likely would cost them several hundred thousand dollars per season.
That’s a cost that teams could eat – or pass on in ticket-price increases in the future.
• With a lower ticket threshold to lift the blackout, the Bills and other teams might find more fans opting out of season tickets or individual-game tickets, figuring that the games likely will be on TV anyway. That reasoning could threaten the most essential piece of the team’s business model – its ticket base.
• Fans applauding the looser blackout rules might have their expectations raised, only to find that some of the games still will be blacked out.
Based on ticket figures that the Bills previously provided, only one of their last six blacked-out games here would have been televised, if the 85 percent threshold had been in effect then.
So why do the Bills have a tough decision to make?
Because they know that opting out of the new policy likely would alienate the lifeblood of their existence – their loyal fan base.
While the Bills aren’t talking, previous comments from top officials have shown their support of the old blackout policy.
Late last November, as the Bills faced the first of their three local TV blackouts for the season, Brandon was asked what he thought of the league’s blackout policy.
“We need full buildings [across the league], we need a full building in Buffalo, and these are the rules we work under,” he replied.
At the same time, a week before the team’s Dec. 4 game against Tennessee, Brandon strongly suggested that the Bills wouldn’t “buy” the 12,000 remaining tickets, in order to have the blackout lifted.
“It’s not something that we’re interested in participating in, because it devalues our product,” Brandon said at the time.
When the Federal Communications Commission solicited opinions on the blackout policy early this year, Buffalo fans sent in by far the largest number of written opinions supporting a change, said Matt Sabuda, president of the Buffalo Fan Alliance.
“I think this is a huge victory for Buffalo Bills fans,” Sabuda said at a news conference Monday on Abbott Road, just off stadium property. “Without Bills fans being so vocal and speaking up, I’m convinced this change wouldn’t have happened.”
Sabuda, though, acknowledged that the Bills face a tough decision.
Part of that can be measured in dollars, based on NFL rules for sharing gate receipts:
For any NFL game, the home team pays 34 percent of non-premium ticket revenue into what’s called the Visiting Team’s Share pool. But under the new policy, if the Bills opted in, they would have to pay 50 percent for every nonpremium ticket sold above the 85 percent figure (above 51,000 tickets), plus the 34 percent for the first 51,000.
So if the Bills opted in, a sold-out game would mean 60,000 nonpremium seats sold. That’s 9,000 tickets above the 51,000 mark. With the team’s average nonpremium ticket price of just under $60, those 9,000 tickets would yield $540,000 in total revenue; 16 percent of that figure (the difference between 34 and 50 percent) would cost the team about $90,000 per game.
This means that selling out just five home games would cost the team almost half-a-million dollars.
Higgins doesn’t know what the Bills are thinking. But he applauded the fan activists who have turned this into a nationwide issue. And he knows the Bills are listening.
“I think the Bills will do the right thing for this community, for this organization and for the franchise,” Higgins said.
Sabuda chimed in with a similar sentiment: “I have a lot of faith that Russ Brandon will come to a solution that is best for the team and the fans.”
