Hmm..I agree--it's pretty dire for the Bills. Candidates go there for interviews just to eat the nice food at the meeting and leave these days. The cities you mentioned are probably what most people think as possibilities. Portland would have been my best bet. San Antonio comes to mind. Not sure what's next for the Bills, the fans have absolutely nothing but 7-9 to look forward to for the next 5 years.
Portland's DMA is 2.2 million
Salt Lake City's is 1.75 million
San Antonio's is 1.7 million
Las Vegas is 1.5 million
Oklahoma City's is 1.1 million
That's the entire viewing area in these places has a circumference of about 60 miles. Now, I drive between Rochester and Buffalo quite a bit, and it takes me 55 minutes to get from one town to the other (62 miles). Together, the two cities have a 2.3 million DMA, and right next to Buffalo is Ft. Erie and Canada where they draw 15% of their fans from, and in the immediate area (i.e. 10 minutes away from downtown Buffalo), you get another 500,000 people. I'm not going to bother including Hamilton, Ont. (45 minutes away) and the start of the Toronto metroplex.
The fact is, as far as the TV network package goes, and viewing eyeballs, the Buffalo-Rochester market is still bigger than most of the open cities.
Buffalo may have less Fortune 500 companies, and it surely can't compete with the oil in Oklahoma City, but that's a concern for the local owner, and not the NFL. As it stands now, the Bills are 22nd/23rd in total revenue (and that's without stadium naming rights). You have to be pretty damn certain that the city you move them to is going to support them as well as Buffalo, because the last thing you want is to move to a small city like Salt Lake or Portland, only to have the local community shrug.
I really think it's very dangerous for the NFL to agree to move Buffalo to another city.
The only reason people talk about moving them is because the purported selling price ($800 million +) is not workable for a local buyer. Jim Kelly has rounded up local people who have something like $650 million to slap down on the table, but beyond that, there's not enough revenue to finance a purchase in Buffalo.
This tells me that whoever is valuing these teams seems to think an NFL franchise is worth $800 million at base. But that's just pie-in-the-sky talk. Put it this way, Weaver down in Jacksonville would scream Halleluia and Amen if someone offered him $800 million.
