BLEAV in Bills: Observations as minicamp comes to a close
The Bills wrapped up minicamp Thursday and now head off for six weeks of vacation. Sal Maiorana and Adam Benigni hit the primary topics from the spring.
For close to two decades starting in 2000, St. John Fisher University signed several different multiple-year contracts with the Buffalo Bills to serve as the home of the team’s summer training camp.
Ever since the pandemic, which coincided with the conclusion of the latest of those multi-year deals, the Bills and the Pittsford school have remained partners on a series of one-year arrangements, but that is about to change.
Pete Guelli, the Rochester native and Aquinas High and SUNY Brockport graduate who is now the Chief Operating Officer of the Bills and Buffalo Sabres, told the Democrat and Chronicle in an exclusive interview Monday that a long-term deal between the team and Fisher is imminent.
“We finalized, obviously, a deal for this year, and then we immediately sat down and started talking about what a longer-term extension would look like,” Guelli said. “We haven’t agreed on the exact term as of yet. We’re going through some of those mechanics now and once we get those nailed down we’ll have a better idea on what the term will be, but our goal is to stay in Rochester for the foreseeable future.”
Guelli started his first term with the Bills as their senior vice-president of business ventures back in 1998 and with the training camp contract at SUNY Fredonia expiring after 1999, he was on the ground floor in helping bring camp to Fisher. He left the Bills following the 2009 season, then returned in 2024 as COO and he said when he saw how camp had evolved at Fisher, it was obvious how excellent the situation is on all fronts.
“It was nice coming back last year, having been involved when the camp was initially established and seeing how it’s grown and seeing how much better it even was than we initially envisioned it to be,” Guelli said. “And I think most importantly seeing how well it’s working for football. I had to spend a year and sit down with Brandon (Beane) and Sean (McDermott) and make sure that it is continuing to meet their needs. They’ve had such a great experience and obviously the team’s been incredibly successful during their time here, so it’s still a perfect fit for us.”
The team was not at Fisher in 2020 or 2021 because of the pandemic so they held camp in Orchard Park, and that fueled ample speculation that they would not bother to return to Rochester in 2022.
While they did go back, some believed it was only temporary because with the new stadium being built in Orchard Park, the assumption was that they would eventually conduct all of their training camp operation at their home base. After all, more than two-thirds of the NFL’s 32 teams stay home for training camp, but the Bills don’t want to do that.
“It works really well for us, so we see no reason not to continue,” Guelli said. “When COVID hit and they brought camp back (to One Bills Drive), I don’t know if they knew what shape this would take moving forward. But after bringing it back to Fisher, I think everybody realized pretty quickly what an incredible setup that is. It works very well for our football ops team and it’s a great marketing extension into Rochester so there’s a lot of alignment that we wanted to continue on in Rochester.”
Hard Knocks to bring large crew to Bills Camp
This will be a rather unique summer for the Bills, both at Fisher and then when they return to Orchard Park, because they are the subject of this year’s training camp version of Hard Knocks on HBO.
“That’s obviously not something we sought out,” Guelli said. “When the league changed the rules around who could participate, they immediately came to us and our goal is just to make it as positive of an experience as we possibly can.”
Guelli confirmed that a crew of somewhere between 30 and 40 people will be embedded with the team from the start of camp here through Labor Day. They will film behind the scenes in both camp locations, plus during all three of the Bills’ preseason games, and the team will have some editorial control, but not a lot.
“I wouldn’t go as far as saying we have control, but we’ll be involved,” he said. “We know that we’ll have a chance to meet with NFL Films and talk through some of the content that’s part of the show. We’ve had some really productive meetings with them around logistics and how to integrate them into the campus without it being a challenge for anything that we’re operating. We talked about the process of how we collaborate on the show but nothing’s been defined.”
Guelli also said that he expects some, or perhaps all of the new limited ownership partners to attend at least a day of camp to get a look at what it’s all about. That would include former NBA stars Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady and former soccer star Jozy Altidore.
“I would anticipate a lot of those business partners being at camp this year, seeing the operation, kind of getting involved with how we prepare the team and just being directly connected to ownership now,” Guelli said.
Camp gets underway on July 23 and the Bills will conduct 11 practice as Fisher through Aug. 7. Guelli said the lottery system for free tickets is still in place because, “We know they’re going to be in high demand so we’re going to continue with the lottery system because we want to give everybody an opportunity to get there.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.