‘Big money, big times’ as Bills’ new stadium harkens memories of 1970s rollout
Times have changed as the rollout for the Bills' new stadium is a reminder of Rich Stadium's early days.
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No need to consult an inflation calculator. We’ve done the math for you.
But if you want a quick reminder of how much things have changed since the last time the Buffalo Bills opened a new ballpark, then we can simply refer to Page 4 of the first game program. That’s right: You could buy a brand-new Datsun 1200 Fastback from Tunmore Oldsmobile for $2,195.
That was August 1973, when Rich Stadium opened in Orchard Park. It cost $22 million to build, which would be $174.2 million in today’s dollars, almost exactly half of what the Cleveland Browns paid to all their players last year.
At a working figure of $2.2 billion, the stadium being erected across Abbott Road is projected to cost 13 times as much as the adjusted-for-inflation total it took to build the previous one.
But the stadium number Adam Ziccardi considers totally kablooey pertains to the job he once held. Ziccardi was the Bills assistant ticket director when they transitioned from War Memorial Stadium in the city to Rich Stadium in the suburbs.
Buffalo’s ticket office back then handled the task with four people in the span of four months. The most recent Bills team directory listed 20 people in the ticket department, six of them with titles of “director” or higher. Then the Bills in 2021 contracted Legends Global Partnerships to pick up additional sales needs, an army of 44 more to help over five years until the stadium opens in 2026.
While not all 44 troops are directly selling tickets, the most recent Bills front office directory (the team has scrubbed a rundown of every position and name from its website, but an archived version from December exists) shows Legends added a sales director, two ticket sales managers, four PSL coordinators and 19 account executives among the crew.
So let’s say 50 people are currently selling Bills PSLs and tickets and suites.
“That is definitely crazy,” Ziccardi said from his retirement home in North Carolina. “Sounds like, with that many people, they got one person for each section of the stadium.
“Big money, big times.”
Rich Stadium, although eventually downscaled, opened with a gargantuan inventory of 80,023 possible seats compared to The Rockpile’s 46,206 at-the-seams capacity. And the turnaround was swift. Dignitaries broke ground in April 1972 with one last season planned in the city.
Yet there were no guarantees Rich Stadium would be completed in time for the 1973 campaign. The final 1972 game program mentioned nothing about a farewell. The Bills in January 1973 requested a provisional, one-year lease extension for The Rockpile just in case. Four months later, the Bills still were worried enough to pay $5,000 to resod the neglected, patchy field because their new home might not be ready.
But as soon as the 1972 season ended with a 4-9-1 record and a sixth straight failure to reach the playoffs, Ziccardi and his crew couldn’t wait around. Season tickets for the as-yet-unnamed stadium had to be sold.
While the current Bills have a battalion, the 1972-73 staff was a lean, mean dialing machine.
Ziccardi worked with ticket director Jim Cipriano and staffers Pat Shaughnessy and Adrianne Kolesar at the team’s 69 W. Mohawk St. office. Working off index cards, they phoned season-ticket holders in order of seniority and told them their options: stay in roughly the same seat or upgrade to the club level.
“I had the lucky privilege of numbering the whole damn stadium,” Ziccardi said. “The architect gave me the sections and how many rows there were and how many seats in each. I made the seating charts and numbered each seat. As people would take the seats, we would X them out, write up the change order that would go into the computer, and that would put them in the seat so it couldn’t be given to somebody else.
“We called everybody, working from 8 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night, seven days a week. It was a real effort, but we got it done. I think we were done by April or May.”
As Ziccardi recollected, Bills vice president Patrick McGroder and administrative assistant Bill Munson handled sales of 34 “business suites,” as they were called. Those cost $60,000 on a five-year lease.
As for courting new season-ticket holders, they essentially waited for their phone to ring.
“Exactly,” Ziccardi said. “That was it. The stadium marketed itself.”
Rich Stadium opened in 1973. (Jeff Goode / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
That’s nowhere near the case today.
In addition to beefing up the personnel, selling for a significantly smaller stadium and years of transition time, the new PSL-based sales operation has been sweetened with the Bills Stadium Experience at 5110 Main Street in Williamsville. The initial budget to build the preview center in the Tony Walker Plaza — with touchscreens, intricate scale models and a virtual-reality theater — was $4 million.
The Bills’ promotional materials in 1973 consisted of a four-page folder on cardstock (the cutout cover showed the upper deck; open it up to isolate the club level and lower bowl) and a 16×20-inch poster of an artist rendering. Lower-level end zone season tickets went for $55 ($399 adjusted for inflation), corner stadium and club end zone for $70 ($508), sideline for $85 ($617) and club level for $120 ($871).
Oh, you also could borrow from the Bills a 16 mm highlight film, “A Year to Cheer,” for your stag parties, smokers, church groups and any other “organization of 25 or more persons and is free of charge.” But you had to supply the sound projector and screen.
“It was so unsophisticated, even as recently as the 1980s,” Rice University sports management professor Tom Stallings said. “You would just call in, and the reps would be more for service than for sales.”
Stallings formerly sold group and season tickets for the Houston Astros and was an award-winning executive with the Houston Aeros of the International Hockey League before entering academia. One of the classes he teaches at Rice is sales and revenue generation in sport.
With so much money on the line in the major leagues, especially the NFL, all these sales reps are not overkill in the 21st century.
“Every year, you’ve got to do more and more,” Stallings said, “because people have so many options on how to spend their money and how to watch the games. Do I want to buy season tickets and force myself to go to 10 games, including the preseason which nobody cares about anyway, or sit on my couch and watch everything in high-definition with no restroom lines and beer in my fridge?
“There are retention reps. There’s ticket ops. Some are new-sales reps. There are sales assistants. You have premium reps. There are inside-sales reps that always try to upgrade existing customers. They all have specialties.
“You break your staff up into hunters and farmers. The farmers are great at retention. They grow the business. Then there are your hunters, who are always looking for the companies that don’t have tickets with us and why not. Who should we be going after? It’s not like they have 20 people all doing the same thing.”
PSLs add another important dimension to the Legends dynamic. Buffalo is one of the last big-league markets to mandate these licenses, and potentially aggravated fans need to be educated about why they’re inevitable.
By all accounts, Legends is doing well in this regard. Bills executive vice president and chief operations officer Pete Guelli repeatedly has remarked how swimmingly the PSL rollout has gone for the new Highmark Stadium.
“It’s all to maximize that golden opportunity for sales,” Stallings said. “That’s the big picture. This stadium didn’t come free. You have to pick up the prices somehow. People might say ‘No,’ but the team will just go find someone else who will say ‘Yes.’ That’s just the way it is.”
Stallings said breaking down PSL information for Bills fans is “Real World 101.”
Ziccardi called it something else.
“It’s gouging,” said Ziccardi, who grew up in East Lovejoy and worked for the Bills until 1987. “I don’t like it. To make someone pay 10 grand or whatever they’re asking before they even buy a ticket? There’s more than enough TV revenue. Even when I was there, Ralph didn’t spend a dime because TV was enough. The owners got a check from TV that paid all their expenses, and everything else went into the owners’ pockets.
“Revenues and player salaries are all higher, but it’s all a mathematical equation, a percentage that guarantees massive profits.”
Definitions of what’s sufficient, what’s fancy, what’s unnecessary and what’s overkill have changed in the past 52 years.
The April 1973 edition of the “Buffalo Bills Bulletin” fan newsletter trumpeted the luxuries of the stadium that was being built.
“Every one of the 80,000 seats will have an unobstructed view of the playing field,” the front-page article read. “The seats are individually contoured aluminum with comfortably contoured backs. The new club level seating can be described as chair-style seating with arm rests.”
The Buffalo Courier-Express reported in August 1973 that “Wisely, the designers built the benches hanging in mid-air, with no legs, giving the fans a convenient place to stash their coats and stadium blankets.”
That, of course, was at a time when many of the program ads featured fans wearing neckties. What happens under those seats today is no place to put anything you don’t plan on fumigating later.
And let’s not forget the $1.25 million scoreboard “composed of a set of nearly 10,000 light bulbs … The scoreboard will combine sight and sound with vivid, high-definition images, all created with modern computer techniques.”
Imagine that.
“People weren’t really excited about it like they are this new one,” Ziccardi conceded.
The Bills, more or less, simply shuttered The Rockpile and told fans not to forget to show up in Orchard Park next season. Rich Stadium’s rollout was minimal, partially due to concerns it wouldn’t be completed in time, but also because ballparks back then were more utilitarian than loaded with accoutrements.
Even so, Ziccardi and his skeleton crew sold a whopping 52,474 season tickets for Rich Stadium’s launch and in 1974 raised the total to 54,146 – a club record until 1991, the year after their first Super Bowl appearance.
“If they went to the Super Bowl this year, imagine how high the season tickets would climb,” Ziccardi said. “The prices would be absolutely astronomical.
“But they would sell out. That’s just how Buffalo is.”