The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle football reporter Sal Maiorana has a story up today about how fan misbehavior in the parking lot outside Buffalo Bills games is concerning team execs — Bills fans were apparently rated #1 in drunkenness in 2015, which is impressive both because of the baseline and as something that can actually be measured — which naturally enough segues into a discussion of how Buffalo could solve this by building the team a new stadium with fewer parking lots:
Of course, much of the nonsense in the parking lots would go away if and when the Bills build a new stadium in downtown Buffalo because with so little space to park, the tailgate experience would almost cease to exist.
However, that’s not happening anytime in the near future. [Bills president Russ] Brandon said the issue of building a new stadium has been pushed to the back burner, going so far as to say that the New Buffalo Bills Stadium committee that was formed in 2014 has, for now, been “suspended.”…
“With the lease being up when it is (2023), there’s going to be very thoughtful conversation in both the private and public sector down the road if that’s the route we go,” said Brandon.
If this bizarro argument sounds familiar, it’s probably because you remember when SBNation’s Bills blogger said pretty much the exact same thing less than two months ago. It’s tough to guess from this distance whether “Aging stadium causes football fans to get drunk and act stupid” is a meme that someone in Bills management is trying to plant in the sports media, or just something that sportswriters have come up on their own in hopes of having something to write about in the offseason, but here we are. Can we maybe somehow blame the Buffalo accent on it, too? Crazier arguments have been made!