The Buffalo Bills Got Tons of Taxpayer Money for a Stadium With a Lot of Pretty Lame Problems

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Go out there and set a record today, no asterisk required.

We’ve got a full meal on tap for you today, with Buffalo wings as a fitting appetizer. Then it’s a WNBA entree with a delayed side of congressional NCAA reform, with a little bit of Field of Dreams for dessert. Bon appetit.

This is probably not what the fine taxpayers of New York State and Erie County had in mind when they coughed up $850 million for construction of the new Buffalo Bills stadium.

The obstructed view seating inside the Bills new Highmark Stadium is definitely a significant problem

The fact there are fans claiming ticket reps blatantly lied to them is an even bigger issue pic.twitter.com/Agl1CyRFw2

— alex brasky (@alexbrasky) August 10, 2026

It looks like someone missed sight lines day at stadium architecture school.

Other complaints have mentioned the video boards are too small (I sympathize with this after squinting at small video boards at Lincoln Financial Field and Gillette Stadium this summer), that the roof does not cover as many seats as expected, or that it’s not so effective at blocking the cold wind coming off Lake Erie. For what it’s worth, some people had mixed feelings about the new stadium and some people were fans, and the team now says it will be “addressing” the problems (how?). Plus, at 50-plus years old, it was probably time to retire the old stadium (Free Agent editor Jeff Luse, a Bills fan, described the old one as “fine”).

Still, there are certainly better ways to spend $2.1 billion, the full construction cost of the stadium. Ideally that cost would have been fully borne by Bills owner Terry Pegula, who has a net worth of $15.7 billion and owns a team in the NFL, which basically prints money these days.

Instead, in their infinite wisdom, the politicians of New York State and Erie County decided to give Pegula a handout (what’s especially funny about it is that Pegula made his billions thanks to fracking, which is frowned upon and banned in New York State). New York put $600 million toward construction of the stadium, or about $30 per state resident. Erie County put another $250 million toward construction, or about $260 per county resident (for that much, each resident should get a free ticket to one game). The state will spend another $100 million combined over 15 years on maintenance.

But that’s not all! Fans pay even more to the government every time they buy something as part of the gameday experience. Tickets? Taxed. Parking? Taxed. Food and drinks in the stadium? Taxed! There’s a 6 percent surcharge on top of the area’s 8.75 sales tax (part of that sales tax goes to the county, part to the state). Your $20 stadium burrito is now $22.95. Don’t forget to tip.

Thankfully, New York State decided that with all that investment, they should own the stadium themselves instead of Pegula—except, wait, that’s actually another form of a handout. By leasing the stadium from the government instead of owning it, Pegula is saving tens of millions of dollars a year in property taxes. (I, for one, am all in favor of people paying less in taxes, but Pegula’s savings will almost certainly just mean higher taxes on everyone else.)

If you apply all of these terms to another entertainment business, you see how crazy it is. Imagine if a bar, movie theater, or bowling alley said their building was too old and needed to be modernized, and that state and county taxpayers should have to cover 60 percent of construction costs, and also not have to pay property tax. Most of the time, the government would tell them to shut up and keep paying their taxes and dealing with their red tape. But because it’s the NFL, people think this arrangement is appropriate.

I love the Bills. For some reason, one of my earlier sporting memories is melting down about the Music City Miracle in a family friend’s living room. Seeing the Bills against my Lions in the Super Bowl would be a dream scenario. But it sure seems like taxpayers and Bills fans got stiff-armed by Pegula and politicians.

With all due respect to the man who once gave a great interview to Reason, no one is going to draft Enes Kanter Freedom, or Royce White, into the WNBA. They’d play very well against WNBA players, but no team wants to win so badly that they’d be the assholes (sorry for the language, Mom) to draft or sign two guys who just want to make a mockery of the league.

But the league does seem to be in an awkward position here. The collective bargaining agreement says “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” Apparently it does not define “women” or how gender is verified. So if two guys—er, people?—want to play in the WNBA, the league currently has no process for denying them solely on the basis of their gender.

But if the league wants to say it’s tolerant of transgender athletes, it can’t maintain the leftist position on transgender athletes and say it allows women based on whatever anyone self-identifies as. That would, in theory, open the league up to stunt athletes. But outright denial of all transgender athletes would also alienate the league’s leftist base, so it will have to tread carefully.

Meanwhile, the on-court drama continues (and I’m not just talking about the standings).

On Saturday, the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham took a hard foul committed by the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, who was ejected on review. Back in the locker room, Carrington got on her phone and posted on the social meda app Threads (why?) “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.” Two days later, Carrington responded to critics and said (on X, thankfully) she would “never use that term as a rhetorical weapon knowing the historical and social weight it holds.” Alas, she still didn’t say what she meant with her original post.

But out of all the crazy things people have said about the WNBA in the last week, the craziest was Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who apparently thinks flagrant fouls like this committed in a basketball game should get charged with assault and battery.

Everyone involved should stop saying crazy things just to get attention.

What was once resurrected is now dead again. The Senate bill to reform the NCAA and all of college sports is back on life support, or at the very least in the ICU.

First it seemed dead, then the Big Ten and SEC suddenly got on board and it seemed alive and well, but then it failed to get a vote before the Senate left for August recess.

Now its main backers say it has a “guaranteed vote” in September—which is a long time away, and leaves a lot of time for something to go very wrong (especially with college football season starting). Once the Senate comes back, there are three weeks until it leaves again until after the November midterm elections. Of course, the bill would have to pass in the House as well—and if it doesn’t get taken up there until after the elections, one side (probably Democrats) may decide they could get a much more favorable bill passed if they wait until next year, when newly elected members take office.

Then the whole legislative process, and all the wrangling it entails, gets to start over again.

In the meantime, progressives like Sens. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) and Cory Booker (D–N.J.) are leading the opposition. The Congressional Black Caucus came out against the bill because of gerrymandering (again). And there’s a long list of pending amendments to the bill that could collectively sink it or save it.

No one, unfortunately, appears to care about the trillions of taxpayer dollars the federal government spends every year.

I’ve always thought Field of Dreams is overrated.

Maybe it’s because I got to play driveway baseball and catch with my dad all the time when I was growing up. Maybe I got bored because I was a kid and it’s more talking than competitive baseball action. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been to Iowa, which I highly doubt is much like heaven. Or maybe it’s because I liked other baseball movies better, like The Sandlot or For the Love of the Game (of course I wanted to watch a Tigers pitcher throw a perfect game). Still, it has its moments and it’s a perfectly fine movie to watch on an airplane.

In any case, I’ve never bought into MLB’s Field of Dreams nostalgia. So with the league’s annual cornfield game happening again on Thursday night, I want to share my colleague Matt Welch’s 2023 piece on “The Expensive, Seductive Nostalgia of Field of Dreams.”

Spoiler alert: Matt doesn’t like Field of Dreams either. “It’s not precisely the past these pilgrims are longing for, but rather an ersatz depiction of an idyll that never existed, one that neatly evades decades of messy, real-world dysfunction—in baseball, in America, within families.”

The WNBA deserves some normal media coverage, and we all deserve to see a buzzer-beater in August.

CHELSEA GRAY CLUTCH THREE FOR THE WIN IN OT 🤯

She silenced the Fever crowd once again‼️ pic.twitter.com/4zxQPzq5Rh

— ESPN (@espn) August 7, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the week—not the Field of Dreams game, but 10 hours of Little League Baseball regionals on ESPN on Thursday.