The Royals were sold and moved to Hartford, Connecticut following the 1974 season, but folded on February 1, 1975, without ever playing another match. The franchise was originally granted to Toronto to begin play in WTT's inaugural 1974 season, but management decided to play in both cities. In 1974, the Toronto-Buffalo Royals of World Team Tennis (WTT) simultaneously called both cities home, playing half their home matches at the CNE Coliseum in Toronto and the other half at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. The Raptors have discussed the possibility of playing additional preseason and regular season games in Buffalo, while the Toronto Blue Jays have considered playing an exhibition game in Buffalo, which is home to their Triple-A affiliate the Buffalo Bisons, having previously played the Cleveland Indians in an exhibition game at War Memorial Stadium in 1987. A similar arrangement saw the Buffalo Braves play a total of 16 regular season games at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto from 1971 to 1975, while the Toronto Raptors played a preseason game at Marine Midland Arena in Buffalo in 1996 and had a second game scheduled for 1998 that was cancelled due to the 1998–99 NBA lockout. The Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League played a preseason game at Buffalo's Civic Stadium in 1951.
Īpart from the NHL (which is the only major sports league with teams in both Buffalo and Toronto), teams from the two cities often host games in the other. However, a 2012 poll by Sun Media found that the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots (a divisional rival of the Bills) were more popular than the Bills in Toronto. About 10,000 to 15,000 attendees (15-20% of the total) of Bills' home games at Ralph Wilson Stadium come from southern Ontario. Much of southern Ontario is within the Bills' marketing territory as defined by the NFL. Toronto is about 60 miles (97 km) by air from Buffalo and 86 miles (138 km) by car via the Queen Elizabeth Way.
#SEAHAWKS TV SCHEDULE CANADA SERIES#
Both of those events were separate from the Toronto Series, in that the Toronto Series was orchestrated by an individual team while the other regular season games were orchestrated by the league. Regular season NFL games have been played outside the United States since 2005, with Fútbol Americano (a one-off regular season game in Mexico City) and the 2007 debut of the NFL International Series, which has promoted regular-season games in London. Īlthough NFL exhibition games have been played in Canada since 1950 (and even before that, the American Football League of 1926 played a regular-season game in Toronto), it was not until the Bills Toronto Series that a regular-season NFL game was played north of the border, on December 7, 2008.
The series was conceived by a group that included former Bills owner Ralph Wilson, Ted Rogers of Rogers Communications and Larry Tanenbaum of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment.
On December 3, 2014, it was announced that a deal had been reached to terminate the remainder of the contract, ending the Bills' experiment in Toronto. The agreement was renewed for five additional years, with an annual regular season game and one preseason game, on January 29, 2013, but following the 2013 contest it was announced that the 2014 game had been postponed for a year. This included the first regular-season NFL game played in Canada, which the Bills lost to the Miami Dolphins. The Bills were originally scheduled to play eight (later reduced to seven) home games over five seasons as part of the agreement, which included one regular-season game each of the five years and one pre-season game on the first, third and (originally) fifth year of the series.
The original series began in the 2008 season and ran through 2012. The Bills Toronto Series was a series of National Football League (NFL) games featuring the Buffalo Bills played at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.