Now this is a city that gets it right! Why can't Burgh leaders and Merrile Stabile understand this and be like Buffalo?? Best part is the team bascially assuring the league that they will do everything they can to get their fans as liquored up as they were for the Cowboys game when 48% of their arrests this year were made. What a city...
"Can we ask the network if we can decline the privilege?" Orchard Park Police Chief Samuel M. McCune asked, in a tongue-in-check remark after he heard the news.
“It’s always good for the team and the community — the Bills being put in a positive light on national TV,” McCune added, in a more serious tone. “But night games definitely are a bit more difficult than afternoon games for law enforcement.”
The reason is obvious, and it can be stated in one word: alcohol.
For a 1 p.m. game, only the most hard-core drinkers start getting lubricated four or five hours earlier, at 8 or 9 a.m. For an 8:15 p.m. game, drinkers who like to wait until noon still have eight hours of drinking.
No further evidence is needed than the statistics from the Bills’ first five home games this season. In five games, law enforcement officials have made 134 arrests for rowdy behavior inside the stadium; 64 of those, or 48 percent, came during the Oct. 8 Monday Night Football game against the Dallas Cowboys.
While the Bills weren’t talking Monday about the decision to move the game to Sunday night, Ebersol suggested that the team assured the league that the fan frenzy from the Cowboys game would be repeated.
". . . the league office told us that [the Bills] called back and said, ‘We just want to pass on to your television partners at NBC that we will bring that same level of enthusiasm that we’ve brought to everything we’ve done in the past with them. We will really work to make this a major event in our stadium.’ "
