NEW YORK – NFL owners have converged on the Conrad Hotel in Manhattan for their one-day, quarterly fall meetings.
Meetings began at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday and it didn't take long for the first bit of news to break.
Applause from the room signified that the first topic on the agenda had been crossed off the list.
Pegula, who said this is the realization of a dream, has close ties to the western New York area and is also the current owner of the NHL's Buffalo Sabres. A three-quarters vote was needed for today's sale to be approved but a unanimous decision was the result.
"Kim and I are honored that the NFL owners have approved us as the new owners of the Buffalo Bills and we'd like to thank the owners for their support," Pegula said this morning.
"If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would own the Sabres or the Bills, I would have called you a liar."
The Colts will travel to Buffalo in 2015 for a regular season matchup. The two teams have played 67 career games against each other with the Colts being AFC East rivals of the Bills from 1970-2001. The Colts last traveled to Buffalo in the 2009 season finale.
Next on the agenda for today is the topic of the league's Personal Conduct Policy, a major focus of this year's meetings.
This issue was scheduled to be discussed for a few hours as the owners are currenlty in a lunch break following the noon hour.
During the personal conduct policy talk, those inside the meetings saw this video with former NFL player Joe Ehrmann featured in the video.
USA Today's Tom Pelissero wrote the following on Ehrmann's video...
Roughly 3 1/2 hours were set aside at these meetings to talk about potential changes to the NFL's personal conduct policy and its social responsibility initiatives — responses to extensive criticism of the league's handling of the Ray Rice case and other domestic violence matters.
The Ehrmann video will be part of the educational sessions the league hopes to implement for separate group sessions with each club — players, staff and family members — within the next three weeks.
The league also is working on a longer video with Ehrmann and others to be used at the college and high school level as part of a broader initiative to provide education on dating abuse and sexual violence.
Earlier this afternoon, NFL senior adviser Lisa Friel met with the media fresh out of meetings where the personal conduct policy took center stage. Friel said the NFL has another month or so of information-gathering before anything final emerges on the promised changes to conduct policy.
"They have to get their own house in order first and the commissioner has been very honest about that," Friel said on Wednesday afternoon. "The first thing we are going to work at is the league's personal conduct policy and educate people about that.
"In a perfect world, the hope is you never have to use the disciplinary end of that policy. You've got your standards of behavior, you educate people about them and you don't violate your policy. That's what we are hoping to do. The hope is that once we get all that in order and we are moving ahead with that, can the league stand on a platform for society? We hope so. I think now that we've drawn such an attention to this issue, now we can do some good outside society."
Friel said no one specific part of the personal conduct policy was talked about longer than another, including when to take a player off the field who is under investigation.
"We had a lot of participation, a lot of thoughtful participating from the owners, from the general counsels," Friel said of the morning discussions.
"Everybody is committed to doing this in a thoughtful way and not to just knee-jerk and do something quickly that might make some people happy, but would not be the appropriate thing for the on-going process."
With the afternoon sessions in progress, issues on the docket includes durg and steriod policy, the Los Angeles market and the International Game Series in London.
