The Buffalo Bills are offering local residents $10/hour plus game tickets if they swing by Ralph Wilson Stadium and help dig out the arena before the football game on Sunday. The Bills should pay people to dig out their trapped neighbors, not their football stadium.

Complete travel bans are in effect across sixteen communities in the southern Buffalo area because roads are covered in up to six feet of snow with drifts measuring in the double-digits. Photo after photo after photo shows homes quite literally snowed in, offering many residents little option but to tunnel their way out the door. Emergency crews have to carry patients to the hospital because roads are impassable in the worst-hit locations.

And the Buffalo Bills are asking people to come dig out their football stadium.

The NFL proudly boasts on its website that the organization is dedicated to strengthening and building the communities in which it plays football:

Football and community are the twin pillars of the NFL. Whether nationally at the league level, locally at the team level, or individually through the volunteerism and philanthropy of owners, players, coaches and club personnel, there exists a powerful NFL-wide commitment to giving back. This commitment is year-round-there is no offseason to the NFL's multi-tiered, ongoing work to strengthen America's communities.

If the Buffalo Bills were truly that dedicated to the community they serve, they would offer residents $10/hour to help dig out their neighbors who can't help themselves. They would ask their fans to help their elderly neighbors and their ill-stricken neighbors and their impoverished neighbors instead of bribing them to come shovel the stands of a football stadium. They would lead a convoy out to the highways where people have been trapped in their cars for more than 30 hours now.

Instead, they want Buffalonians to dig out their stadium, all while posting on Facebook that they're "#OneBuffalo." Football is king—what's a little community suffering when they might suffer lost profits from a cancelled game?

UPDATE 6:51 PM: Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz seems to agree:

"I think everyone knows what kind of Bills fan I am, I've got season tickets," said Poloncarz, D-Erie County. "There should not be people driving to the stadium.

"I'm sorry Buffalo Bills, we have a major emergency going on and that matters more, truthfully, than whether we have a football game on Sunday."

[Image via Buffalo Bills]

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