TORONTO

The disastrous Bills-in-Toronto series is as dead as football atmosphere at the Rogers Centre.

Of all the places on this planet where football can be played -- American football, Canadian football, Aussie Rules, footy, any kind -- Toronto’s downtown dome is the most dismal.

Well, outside of a Shawshank-like prison yard.

NFL games, Argos games, Vanier Cups, Metro Bowls, soccer friendlies -- even soldout Grey Cups can’t quite overcome whatever it is that sucks the life out of that cavernous, monstrous indoor/outdoor edifice that, in a couple decade’s time, surely will be replaced by another dozen jammed-in, glass-boxed Lake Shore Boulevard condo towers.

The Buffalo Bills and Rogers Media Inc. on Wednesday morning announced they’ve finally put the ill-conceived Bills-in-Toronto initiative out of its misery.

The NFL team will no longer relocate one of its eight home games per season -- and the occasional preseason game -- to Toronto, as it did from 2008-13.

The Bills and Rogers had announced in March that this year’s game merely was “postponed.” The suggestion being that the four remaining regular-season games (and one preseason game) in the five-year Bills-in-Toronto contract extension would still be played.

Uh, no.

Everyone knew that was bull. It was just a careful, measured, half-step toward this exit, which both sides agreed to on Tuesday.

No money changed hands, QMI Agency has learned. All sides just wanted to be done with it, and the lawyers drew it up.

It’s as easy as it is wrong to read too much into this failure. No, Toronto does not hate football. Especially NFL football.

The Rogers Centre notwithstanding, the Bills-in-Toronto series failed for four principle reasons:

1. MISREAD OF TORONTO NFL FANS

Those who conceived the series -- Bills people, Rogers top execs and probably even some NFL owners -- apparently believed Torontonians are Bills fans first, over any other NFL team.

Wrong.

That probably was true 20 years ago when the Bills ruled the AFC and competed for Super Bowls every year, when you had to fight for a seat on one of the many Ontario charter buses headed to (then) Rich Stadium. But it definitely hasn’t been the case since probably the Doug Flutie years (1998-2000).

NFL Canada has known this for years. Based on NFL merchandise sales alone, the Bills have steadily dropped in popularity in Canada. They’re down to 10th, NFL Canada says, after Seattle, New England, Green Bay, San Francisco, Denver, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Chicago and Detroit.

Another NFL Canada survey recently showed the Bills have no more fans in Toronto than do a handful of teams, including the Patriots, Packers, Cowboys and Steelers.

So it’s not that NFL football isn’t wildly popular in Central Ontario; it is. NFL Canada for years has conducted empirical studies showing that in Toronto, and in other Canadian urban markets, NFL football trails only the NHL in avid fandom.

A study this past June by Lieberman Research Worldwide found this to be the case again.

2. MISREAD OF ONTARIO BILLS FANS

Bills fans in the Toronto area that I know, or have heard from, almost universally preferred the inconvenience of travelling 4-5 hours to and from the Ralph, over the convenience of watching the Bills play in their own backyard at the Rogers Centre.

Why? To enjoy Buffalo’s tailgating and raucous game-day atmosphere. Football tailgating is almost non-existent in Ontario because it’s illegal to consume alcohol outside of homes and licensed venues. And, yeah, folks know how to tailgate outside the Ralph.

As I’ve written before, I know one devout Bills fan who lives literally across the street from the Rogers Centre who hated the Bills-in-Toronto series, merely because of the game-day excitement the Ralph provides -- despite, as he wryly notes, all those heart-crushing losses.

There probably are tens of thousands of rabid Bills fans among the 8 million-plus who live in Central Ontario. Especially in the Niagara Region.

A QMI Agency analysis of raw numbers provided in the summer by the Canada Border Services Agency shows that Canada-bound traffic on the four Niagara-region bridges connecting Ontario with New York state rose by an average of 5,300 vehicles on Bills home-game dates in 2012 and 2013.

That jibes with what the Bills said last year -- that 18% of their ticket buyers now come from Ontario. One source said that the percentage has since grown to slightly more than 20%. That means for every game at the Ralph, some 13,000 to 14,000 drive in from Ontario -- almost three per car, which sounds right.

And realize this, that for Bills fans in the Niagara Region the Rogers Centre is about as far, or farther away, than Ralph Wilson Stadium.

3. TICKET PRICES

The third reason the series failed is ticket prices. At first they were truly outrageous. The market never forgot, nor ever forgave, Rogers for its incredibly greedy decision to screw over the Toronto NFL fan by charging the most expensive tickets prices in the league for the “privilege” of watching the Bills play in an awful venue.

Anyone who was a sports-loving adult in Toronto in the 1990s knows how hot this market was to obtain an NFL franchise. I remember friends saying at the time that a Toronto NFL club could sell 150,000 tickets to every game and not meet demand. And they might have been right.

On the heels of Toronto winning back-to-back World Series titles in 1992-93, and around the time the NBA signed off on the Raptors expansion franchise, this city for a time became absolutely obsessed with the idea of becoming a big player on the biggest American sports stages.

It would have been the perfect time for the NFL to have arrived. Alas, the long-time, tireless efforts of Paul Godfrey and others went for naught; expansion franchises instead went to Jacksonville and Carolina.

Fast-forward to 2007, when the late Ralph Wilson and the late Ted Rogers yukked it up at The Worst Press Conference Ever, about how much money Torontonians would have to shell out to watch these Bills-in-Toronto games. Stunningly unaware arrogance.

Still thinking that enough Torontonians would pay anything to effectively get that one-16th taste of NFL relocation, Rogers proceeded to poison the marketplace.

Average ticket prices in Year 1 were $183 compared to $51 for Bills games at the Ralph. A buddy said he had to pay as much for two tickets to the first Bills-in-Toronto game as he did for his two season tickets at the Ralph.

A shocked Rogers Media had to literally give away thousands upon thousands of tickets to fill up the dome that first year.

In Year 2, Rogers slashed ticket prices by an average of 17%, including offering 11,000 tickets for under $100. But the communications/media giant still had to paper the place, as it did again in 2010 and, to a lesser extent, in 2011.

Don’t think the Bills were blameless here.

Rogers top executives might have been dumb enough to agree to pay the Bills $78 million for the right to host one regular-season game per year from 2008-12, and three preseason games (one of which Rogers punted back).

But while laughing all the way to the bank in doubling their per-game profit from the Ralph, Bills bean-counters apparently never bothered to consider how much Rogers might charge Toronto-area ticket buyers to try recoup that senseless outlay.

Even in 2012 (the last year of the original Bills-in-Toronto contract) and in 2013 (the first game of the five-year extension), Rogers quietly gave away freebies to try to fill up the Rogers Centre even though most tickets by then cost less than $100. It was too late.

A seminal marketing case study is begging to be done on this aspect alone of the Bills-in-Toronto debacle.

4. THE BILLS SUCKED

They did, all the way through the life of the Bills-in-Toronto series.

There’s no way Rogers would not have sold more tickets -- and no way more fair-weather Toronto-area Bills fans would not have got off their couches -- had the Bills fielded winners.

Or just didn’t suck.

Since 2008, the Bills have been a 42-66 football team with 7-9 being their best season. The Bills torpedoed walk-up sales in five of the six years by stinking. Their record the week of the Bills-in-Toronto game was 6-6 in 2008, 4-7 in 2009, 0-7 in 2010, 4-1 in 2011, 5-8 in 2012 and 4-7 last year.

You try to sell that.

The only regular-season game the Bills won was in 2011, when they beat an even worse Washington Redskins team before falling to pieces starting the next week.

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To sum up, the Bills and Rogers greatly misjudged the number of Bills fans in the GTA; never understood the things that attracted what Bills fans there are in the region to the Ralph in the first place; poisoned the market by brazenly, obnoxiously overpricing the tickets; and had a crappy product to sell.

Four strikes and yer out.

An American equivalent of the Bills-in-Toronto series would be if the San Diego Chargers sucked for 10 years, relocated one home game a year 90 miles up the Pacific Coast Highway to neutral-city Los Angeles, then scratched their heads in wonderment as to why that one game a year can’t sell out in LA. And it wouldn’t, my California NFL media friends say.

A year ago this week, I advocated for the end of the Bills-in-Toronto series. I’ll repeat what I wrote then: I’m an NFL columnist based in Toronto, and it brings me no joy to write this, believe me.

But the series was a failure for every party involved. An embarrassing failure. For the Bills. For Western New York. For Rogers. For the Rogers Centre. For Toronto. And for the NFL.

Wednesday’s mutual, no-cost walk-away for all parties merely underscores it.

Torontonians still love the NFL, make no mistake about it. Just not the Bills, in Toronto, at those prices, when the Bills suck.

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What the principals had to say Wednesday about the end of the Bills-in-Toronto series, in statements:

Bills president Russ Brandon:

“We greatly appreciate the support we’ve received over the past seven years from all of the tremendous people at Rogers Communications. We will continue to work hard to solidify our footprint in Southern Ontario. Our fan base in this region remains extremely important to our organization and their support has been well documented.”

Rogers Media president Keith Pelley:

“When we announced the hiatus earlier this year in March, we said we were going to make a full evaluation of the Bills-in-Toronto series. We’ve taken the time to discuss and review all aspects of the experience, and at the end of the day we’ve concluded that the best thing for fans on both sides of the border is to end the series. We’ve enjoyed a terrific relationship with the Bills and remain committed to delivering world-class sports experiences to Canadians.”

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The results:

REGULAR-SEASON GAMES

2008: Dec. 7, Miami 16, Bills 3 (52,134)

2009: Dec. 3, NY Jets 19, Bills 13 (51,567)

2010: Nov. 7, Chicago 22, Bills 19 (50,746)

2011: Oct. 30, Bills 23, Washington 0 (51,579)

2012: Dec. 16, Seattle 50, Bills 17 (40,770)

2013: Dec. 1, Atlanta 34, Bills 31 OT (38,969)

PRE-SEASON GAMES

2008: Aug. 14, Bills 24, Pittsburgh 21

2010: Aug. 19, Bills 34, Indianapolis 21