Buffalo News says Bills stadium plan delay is meant to evade oversight, and that’s a good thing, a real good thing

You know things are going inauspiciously when an article begins like so:

Why is it taking so long? Buffalo Bills fans have been asking that question regarding one thing or another – be it winning a Super Bowl or finding a quarterback or firing Rex Ryan – for generations.

And now some are asking it again, as they wonder why negotiations between Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Erie County over building a new football stadium in Orchard Park have been quiet for weeks.

Umm, maybe? If past evidence is any guide, some Buffalo Bills fans who, living in New York state, are also New York state taxpayers may be wondering more “Why are we being asked to build a new stadium for the Bills exactly?” The last time anyone deigned to take a poll of Western New Yorkers, nearly half said taxpayers should contribute nothing to the cost of a new Bills stadium, so it’s possible this is not something that fans see in a “winning the Super Bowl” category of pure good.

But this is not that kind of article. Weirdly, after assigning weekly articles on the Bills stadium to an odd assortment of sportswriters plus their Albany correspondent, the Buffalo News instead asked their Washington, D.C. correspondent, Jerry Zremski, to look into it this time. And what he found — after the requisite “I’m a non-sportswriter writing about sports, I’m gonna throw in some sportsy references to show that I know who Rex Ryan is” — is that the delay in putting forward a Bills stadium bill is likely an intentional gambit to keep the state legislature from looking too hard at the taxpayer costs:

None of this should come as a surprise, or as something requiring the services of a “longtime Buffalo political insider.” (Hey, Jerry, most newspaper ethics guidelines say that anonymous sources shouldn’t be used for opinion or speculation!) Especially given that the News’s own Albany correspondent reported state legislators saying it on the record two months ago.

The really weird part, though, is that Zremski reports this less as a problem than as savvy political strategy: Ha ha, don’t want those “progressive progressives” to have a chance to think about things! The other gubernatorial candidates and downstate news outlets have hardly reported on the Bills stadium at all, good going, Gov. Hochul! It’s possible that he is trying to present this with the most subtle helping of sideeye — he does, after all, get in that the Pegulas are billionaires (or only Terry Pegula is, while Kim Pegula is just “his wife”? has Zremski gotten a peek at their prenup?). But the overall tone remains one of reassurance that Albany behind-closed-doors-politics-as-usual will result in a billion-dollar subsidy to NFL billionaires, don’t you worry, especially when he gets to his conclusion:

Noooo, you’re not supposed to use sportsy references to remind fans of terrible things they want to forget! Damn, he was so close to nailing it, too.