Toronto is a world class city. But, you wouldn't have known it last week.

A completely unscientific, but fairly reliable test of whether a North American big city can claim to be a major city is whether it has a team from each of the four major leagues.

For example, Phoenix knew it had fully arrived once it added NHL and major league baseball teams and built new stadiums for each.

There are, of course, exceptions. Los Angeles doesn't have a football team, but still qualifies as a truly major city, while Minneapolis has a team in each league but no one would mistake Minneapolis for a truly world class city (sorry, Minnesota fans).

Which brings me to Toronto.

Is Toronto more like L.A. or Minneapolis? Toronto, like Los Angeles, does not have an NFL team (and many would say Toronto lacks an NHL team, too, but let's not go there). But for the next four years Toronto will host four Buffalo Bills regular-season "home" games at the Rogers Centre. The first official Bills game (there was a pre-season game in Toronto in August) was last Sunday, as part of a deal Rogers has made with the Bills.

By most accounts, Toronto's first taste of an official NFL game was poorly executed. It makes me a bit angry that Toronto was not able to pull off a better showing.

More than 180,000 people signed up to get tickets through an online registration, but the game still had thousands of empty seats.

HIGH PRICES

There was high demand, but the organizers turned off the locals with absurdly high ticket prices and needlessly onerous ticket plans that required buying seats for a minimum of three games, including meaningless pre-season games.

Of all the major sports, NFL pre-season games are the worst. And yet Rogers' organizers figured we would lap up tickets to see those dreadful pre-season games, and pay high prices to do so. It was a big turn off and a terrible way to begin the series. By the time the real game was played earlier this month, they had to give the tickets away and had squandered away local enthusiasm.

The excitement that the game should have generated in town was lost before it started. Toronto, and Canada, ended up looking like we can't handle the big time.

That is what bothered me most about how the game was handled. Toronto is not Podunk. Canada is not Podunk.

And yet we couldn't even fill the Rogers Centre, which seats at least 10,000 fewer people than the smallest NFL stadium. Heck, the singing of the national anthem at the game got more press than anything else.

Next year there will be another Bills game in Toronto. The Bills in Toronto series should be a showcase for Toronto as a world class city, which it is.

The organizers of the game need to go back to square one.

Make tickets available on a single-game basis and make a good number of them reasonably priced. Loosen the rules to permit more tailgating around the stadium.

Rogers and Toronto need to work more to cross-promote the game and the city.

There is a huge NFL fan base in Toronto, as anyone who has ever stepped into a pub for wings on a Monday night can attest.

There is no good reason, other than poor planning, to explain why the Rogers Centre was not standing-room-only last week.

The Bills will be back in Toronto next fall and I applaud Rogers for bringing NFL games to Toronto. I just hope they don't drop the ball again next year.