Category Archives: NFL

Friday roundup: Sacramento faces cuts to pay arena debt, Henderson approves arena debt, music festival to be held in phantom Yankee Stadium parking lot

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Sorry, getting a late start today, let’s get straight to the news without delay:

Friday roundup: Rattling sabers for Panthers stadium, leagues large and small seek bailouts, and a very large yacht

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So how’s everyone out there, you know, doing? As the pandemic slowly feels less like a momentary crisis to be weathered and more like a new way of living to be learned (I refuse to say “new normal,” as nothing about this will ever feel normal), it’s tempting to occasionally look up and think about what habits and activities from the before times still make sense; I hope that FoS continues to educate and entertain you in ways that feel useful (or at least usefully distracting) — from all accounts the entire world being turned upside down hasn’t been enough to interrupt sports team owners’ important work of stadium shakedowns, so it’s good if we can keep at least half an eye on it, amid our stress-eating and TV bingewatching.

So get your half an eye ready, because a whole bunch of stuff happened again this week:

Friday roundup: CFL calls its owners “philanthropists” who need bailout, plus actual sport with actual fans takes place in actual stadium!

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And how is everyone out there? Going stir-crazy? Waking up early to watch Korean baseball? Starving to death? All good options!

I personally have been watching this 1988 game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos (spoiler: Randy Johnson is, as the announcers keep noting, very tall), while continuing to keep tabs on what passes for sports stadium and subsidy news these days. Let’s get to it — the news, I mean, not the Phils-Expos game, I have that paused:

 

No, seriously, what will happen in restarted sports leagues when a player tests positive?

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Amidst all the so very many articles on when sports leagues may or could or are thinking of restarting, I’ve been keeping an eye out for discussion of one important question: If a league starts play, with precautions for testing players and coaches and TV crews and hotel workers and whatever, what happens when one of those tests comes up positive? And finally, one league has provided an answer:

Fans will be barred from games until the [Korea Baseball Organization] is convinced the risk of infection has been minimized. If any member of a team tests positive for the coronavirus at any point of the season, the league will be shut down for at least three weeks.

If you’re serious about using testing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus through your league, this makes total sense: Any positive test needs to be followed by quarantine of everyone who has had contact with that person in recent days, which in the case of a sports league is going to mean pretty much everyone in the league. It’s going to make for an awfully tentative schedule — not to mention a dicey ESPN programming schedule — but in a nation where they’ve been averaging only seven new cases per day over the last week in a population of 52 million people, I guess they figure it’s a gamble worth taking.

But what if you can’t reasonably expect to test everyone and have everyone test negative? That’s what we’re seeing right now in the Bundesliga in Germany — 1,000 new cases per day out of a population of 83 million — and the way it’s being managed is very different:

Two days before German government officials will announce whether the country’s top two professional soccer leagues may resume play amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, Bundesliga officials confirmed Monday that they had encountered 10 positive tests in their attempt to finish the season.

In all, the governing DFL announced Monday, 1,724 players, coaches, team physicians and other staff members have been tested. At least four of the positive tests came from players — three from Cologne and one “inconclusive result” from second-division Stuttgart on a player who has been quarantined for 14 days — and all 10 who tested positive are not believed to be displaying any symptoms of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the New York Times.

That was yesterday. Today:

The German Bundesliga season can resume this month, Chancellor Angela Merkel has confirmed.

So … what’s the point of all that testing, if not to quarantine those who’ve been in close contact with anyone who tests positive? The Bundesliga has said it will be testing everyone twice a week, but that’s still plenty of time for a player or staffer to catch and spread Covid-19 in between tests, if they’re not quarantined.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that a perfect quarantine isn’t necessary: You really only need to keep R0 (the average number of that each infected person in turn infects) below 1, and any new outbreak will fizzle out. The Bundesliga is adding a ton of other social distancing rules, from requiring that players shower and dress separately to keeping starting lineups to be kept separate from substitutes for meals and warmups, so maybe that will be enough to keep transmission rates low — maybe. You’ll have some individuals getting infected, almost surely, but if it’s only a few, on a societal level it won’t cause devastating effects. (Of course, if you’re a player who comes down with Covid and risks spreading it to your family members as a result, you may not find it quiet so reassuring that you’re statistically insignificant.)

And if R0 can’t be kept low enough to stop one Bundesliga player or staffer from turning into a superspreader? No one seems to have thought about that, or maybe no one can bear to think about it out loud. German soccer officials have previously warned that 13 teams could be on the brink of insolvency if the season doesn’t resume, so apparently not shutting down until there’s an actual out-of-control outbreak is the gamble they’re willing to take.

And for sports leagues in nations like the U.S. (27,000 new cases per day in a population of 328 million), clearly even thinking about what to do in case of a positive test result is unthinkable, because no one is mentioning it aloud. In fact, sports leagues (and the sports journalists who uncritically reprint their pronouncements) aren’t mentioning lots of things aloud right now, as witness this article from CBS Miami on contingency plans for a Miami Dolphins restart:

Masks would be required. Fans would order concessions from their seats to be picked up later rather than waiting on line.

Okay, so everyone would wear masks, and to avoid close contact with fellow fans they would stay out of concession lines and instead pick up their food one at a time, and then go back to their seats and eat it … through their masks … um, CBS Miami, I have some followup questions? Hello?

Friday roundup: Another Canadian sports bailout request, and everyone pretends to know when things may or may not reopen

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Happy May, everybody! This crisis somehow both feels like it’s speeding into the future and making time crawl — as one friend remarked yesterday, it’s like we’ve all entered an alternate universe where nothing ever happens — and we have to hold on to the smallest glimmers of possible news and the tiniest drips of rewards to keep us going and remind us that today is not actually the same as yesterday. In particular, today is fee-free day on Bandcamp, when 100% of purchase prices goes to artists, and lots of musicians have released new albums and singles and video downloads for the occasion. Between that and historic baseball games on YouTube with no scores listed so you can be surprised at how they turn out, maybe we’ll get through the weekend, at least.

And speaking of week’s end, that’s where we are, and there’s plenty of dribs and drabs of news-like items from the week that just passed, so let’s catch up on what the sports world has been doing while not playing sports:

Friday roundup: Sports remains mostly dead, but train subsidies and bizarre vaportecture live on

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It’s been a long, long week for many reasons, so let’s get straight to the news if that’s okay:

South Carolina county approves $225 million in tax breaks for Panthers practice facility, no, that’s not a typo

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So maybe one city throwing $30 million at a minor-league hockey facility isn’t enough of a sign that the sports subsidy business is in full effect? How about a county approving full property tax breaks for a $1 billion NFL practice facility?

After more than three hours of debate Monday night, York County Council narrowly voted to approve its end of a package that clears the way for the NFL team to move its headquarters and practice facilities from Charlotte to an undeveloped site off I-77 between Cherry Road and Dave Lyle Boulevard.

The deal on Project Avalanche, as the county termed it, involves the City of Rock Hill foregoing all its property tax revenue from the Panthers project for up to 30 years. The Rock Hill School District would put 75% of its Panthers revenue up in the agreement, and the county 65% of the revenue it collects. Those funds would go to $225 million worth of project infrastructure.

A few notes on this:

  • Yes, that’s really a $1 billion practice facility, though it also isn’t really just a practice facility, since it will also include other development like office and residential space. And yes, this will inevitably siphon off development that might have taken place elsewhere in the county; councilmember Robert Winkler, one of the three no votes, noted that Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper will have an advantage over nearby developments in leasing space thanks to his lower property tax payments: “We’ve picked Tepper as the winner in York County for the next 30 years,” said Winkler.
  • Yes, that’s $225 million in “infrastructure,” up from $160 million last June, though even then it was anticipated that the public price tag would increase.
  • Yes, the council vote was taken without any members of the public present, though they were allowed to submit comments via Zoom. And yes, the vast majority — 26 out of 30 commenters — were opposed to the deal, but councilmember Joel Hamilton said, in the words of the Rock Hill Herald, that he “wouldn’t want to explain decades from now why council whiffed on a billion-dollar deal because of a Zoom issue,” because Zoom must offer a filter that makes you look more opposed than you actually are, or something?
  • Yes, there was a swing vote who switched to the “yes” side at the last minute, as there almost always is: Councilmember Allison Love told the Herald she decided to change her vote because the project would be an economic boon for the whole region: “Everybody’s going to benefit from it.” Cf. above re: cannibalizing development that would otherwise go elsewhere in the county, though I guess you can’t put a price on all those people who turn out to watch football practices.

Here’s where I should probably say something snarky, but I’ve been boggling at these votes for almost 25 years, man, and it’s tough to come up with new ways to laugh to keep from crying. Two massive public subsidies in one day, though, one for minor-league sports and the other for a practice facility, in the middle of a global pandemic that has shut down much of the world’s economy and drained public treasuries, is admittedly a cut above the usual level of jaw-dropping. I’m tempted to call it Peak Griftocracy, but I’m not really confident that it won’t be topped in another few months — if there’s one thing this gig has taught me, it’s that things can always get worse.

Where will the Raiders start the 2020 season, if there is one?

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For most of the teams facing possible stadium or arena construction delays thanks to the coronavirus crisis, there’s an easy fallback plan, which is to just keep playing in their current venue for a bit longer. Even the Worcester Red Sox could just stick around in Pawtucket for one more season, which I would actually appreciate since I’ve never been to 78-year-old McCoy Stadium and was planning on going this summer, back when there was going to be a this summer.

For the soon-to-be Las Vegas Raiders, though, things aren’t so simple, because the team declined its 2020 lease option at the Oakland Coliseum early in March, even though it had until April 1 to decide whether to do so. Even if it would have been hard to return to a city whose fans said farewell to their team by throwing nachos at them, this was maybe not the best decision to rush into rather than waiting a few weeks to see if the entire world was going to come to a screaming halt and leave your football team with nowhere to play, assuming anyone can play. Possible options include:

  • UNLV’s old Sam Boyd Stadium, San Antonio’s Alamodome, or El Paso’s Sun Bowl, according to Forbes, citing no sources at all other than that this is what is “said to be” in the works.
  • Salt Lake City, Phoenix, or San Diego, all of which are just the speculation of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which notes that “it is realistic to think that all of those options could be resurrected” since they were all options being considered for 2019 before the team re-upped with Oakland for one last season.
  • Play the preseason and possibly the opening of the regular season on the road, suggests the Review-Journal, while the Las Vegas stadium is finished.

All of this, of course, assumes that there will be a 2020 NFL season, which while the league swears is what it’s planning is not at all certain, given the difficulties of staging games safely even in front of empty stadiums when it would require so many people to play and broadcast games and feed and house all those people and if any one of them tests positive, suddenly you could have to shut down. (There’s also the question of whether it’s worth starting a season that could have to get interrupted again for renewed shutdowns if the virus flares back up again.) Though if the season is played in front of empty seats, then suddenly it doesn’t matter where the Raiders play: Forbes quoted “one NFL insider” as saying “the Raiders would hold games on a Las Vegas playground before going back to Oakland this year,” and they could totally do that if they don’t need anywhere for fans to sit.

One longer-term question for the Raiders and owner Mark Davis, meanwhile, is whether their business model of selling tickets mostly to out-of-town fans who’ll use Raiders games as an excuse for a trip to Vegas can survive the coronavirus, and the coronavirus recession. Will long-distance travel still be as common in a post-virus world? Will enough people have the money to do so anytime in the near future? These are small questions, maybe, in comparison to the bigger one of how any of us are going to watch sports (or live our lives) in the coming weeks and months and years, but if we can’t rubberneck at the bad fortune of Mark Davis (and David Beckham, always David Beckham), then it’s going to be a long 2020.

Friday roundup: Won’t anyone think of the sports franchise owners?!?

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Coming up on the end of week four here, I think, and how is everyone doing? I remembered that today was Friday and I needed to do a news roundup, which was the first day in several that I remembered what day it was, so I feel like things are looking up! Except for the fact that large numbers of people gathering in close confines is looking like the main way this virus spreads, and that describes perfectly spectator sports and music and theater and many other things that make life worth living, so that’s not so great. And, of course, nearly 17,000 people have died and tens of thousands more deaths are expected, and that’s not counting all the people who are dying uncounted at home. Small victories may be victories, but they’re also small.

Eventually this will all be over, though, whatever “over” means, and it’s not too soon to start wondering about what the sports world will look like on the other side. Especially for sports journalists who are twiddling their thumbs right now and hoping that their employers still exist once the worst of this has passed:

Be well, stay safe, and see you Monday!

Friday roundup: Stadium construction continues despite sick workers, drained city budgets may not slow subsidy demands, and other news from our continuing hellscape

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How did everyone do during Week Whatever (depending on where you live) of the new weirdness? I finished another jigsaw puzzle, spent way more time than I thought possible trying to understand the new unemployment insurance rules, had the best idea ever, and wrote another article about how the media should stop feeding the troll. (Here’s the previous one, if I neglected to post a link to it before, which I probably did.) And, of course, continued to write this site, even if the subject matter, like all subject matter everywhere, has taken a decided turn for the microbial. Hopefully it’s helping to inform or at least distract you, because it looks like we may be here a while.

Anyway, it’s Friday again, so let’s celebrate getting another week closer to the end of this unknowably long tunnel with some stadium and arena news:

  • Construction is now shut down on the Worcester Red Sox stadium, but continues on the in-progress stadiums for the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Texas Rangers, even after workers on the latter two projects tested positive for COVID-19, and despite it being pretty much impossible to do construction while maintaining a six-foot distance from your fellow workers. The USA Today article reporting all this cites continued construction as a “boost to the economy,” which is slightly weird in that 1) pretty much all economic activity is a boost to the economy, but everyone has kind of decided now that keeping millions of people from dying is more important (okay, almost everyone), and 2) given that these stadiums will all have to be finished eventually regardless, shutting down construction would only push the economic activity a few weeks into the future, to a time when construction workers would actually have stores and restaurants open where they could spend their salary. It really would be nice if journalists writing about economics talked to an economist every once in a while.
  • Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin says she’s preparing for a “recession budget” that could require cutting back on planned projects including “a planned renovation of the PNC Arena, an expansion of the Raleigh Convention Center, an addition to the Marbles Kids Museum, a proposed soccer stadium in south Raleigh and a recreational complex at Brier Creek,” reports the News & Observer. Since every local government in the U.S. if not the world is about to see its tax revenues plummet, could this mean a temporary lull in stadium and arena demands while teams have to wait for treasuries to refill? Or will team owners just do like during the Great Recession and pivot from “times are good, now is when you should spend your surplus on giving us new sports venues” to “times are tough, now is when you should be spending to promote any development jobs you can get”? Hawaii officials say the latter, and they don’t even have a team owner lobbying them, so I think you know where I’d be laying my bets.
  • A new poll shows that sports fans believe they’ll be less likely to go to live sporting events once they’ve been “deemed safe,” mostly over fears that they won’t actually be safe. (Nearly two-thirds said they’d be concerned about “health safety,” and more said they’d avoid indoor events than outdoor ones.) There’s presumably some push-poll effect here — if someone asks you if you’re going to be concerned about your health at large events, that’s going to get you thinking about how you maybe should be concerned — but still it’s at least one data point suggesting that game attendance could suffer for a while despite pent-up hunger for live sports.
  • Meanwhile, ratings have plummeted for pro wrestling events before empty venues, which could be a sign that a big part of watching televised sports is enjoying the roar of the crowd, or that pro wrestling isn’t really a sport, take your pick. Where are those New Jersey Nets sound operators when you need them?
  • Don’t count on getting back your “sports fee” on your cable bill even if there’s no sports to watch, though maybe if your TV provider can recoup some fees they’re paying to sports leagues, they’ll consider sharing some of the savings with you.
  • A study by an “advertising intelligence and sales enablement platform” that is no doubt really annoyed right now that this press release didn’t get me to use their name and promote their brand projects that ad spending on sporting events will drop by $1 billion this year. And will that cost sports teams, or the cable and broadcast networks that are contracted to carry them? Sorry, didn’t study that part, we figured Forbes would report on this even without that info, and we were right!
  • Speaking of dumb Forbes articles, here’s one about how baseball should make up for lost revenue by expanding, which overlooks both that this is undoubtedly the worst time imaginable to get the highest expansion fee possible, and that MLB teams are all owned by billionaires so really the issue isn’t having cash on hand, it’s getting yearly income back up, and diluting your share of national revenues by one-fifteenth (if two new teams were added) is no way to do that.
  • But hey, at least stadiums come in handy for herding homeless people into en masse to keep them from getting sick, that’s neither disturbingly dystopian nor terrible social distancing policy, right? What’s that you say? You’re right, let’s instead spend some time revisiting cab-hailing purse woman, that’s a much more soothing start to the weekend.