Friday roundup: Titans get their $500m in state money after all, who’s next? (Answer: everybody, probably)

Normally here I would say something about a long week finally coming to an end, but now that I know that time doesn’t exist (much like Wyoming, and birds), that just seems silly. So happy eternal present, and let’s get to the news from what we might once have called “the recent past,” if “once” had any meaning to begin with:

• Well, that was fast: One day after the Tennessee state senate stripped a provision from the state budget bill to spend $500 million in state money on a new Titans stadium, the combined legislature put the money right back in, approving it 71-19 in the house and 18-13 in the senate. Arguments for the subsidy: “When you decide to do a dome type of facility, all of a sudden we go from a football dominated venue to an entertainment dominated venue”; “You cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good”; “If you’re not going to give half a billion dollars to the local NFL billionaire, who will you give it to?” (Ed. Note: One of these quotes is not real.)
• The Denver Channel asked Broncos president Joe Ellis if a new owner will likely want to build a new stadium once the team is sold, and Ellis said, “It’ll be the No. 1 decision the new owner will have to make,” and then they went and asked a bunch of other people if that was a good idea, and then that became an article somehow headlined “Will they build it? Broncos president floats idea of new stadium with new ownership.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Denver Post ran pretty much the same article two months ago. The Broncos’ stadium is all of 21 years old, so it’s not clear if the Denver sports press is just bored, or somebody in the Broncos front office or the Denver business community is feeding them these storylines, or things have just gotten to the point where everyone assumes a 21-year-old stadium is of course obsolete by now, but here we are.
• The Santa Cruz Warriors G League basketball team might leave town without a new stadium, because the old one is 10 years old and has “long-outlived its tenure and usefulness for the team,” writes Lookout Santa Cruz. (To be fair, the old arena only cost $3.5 million and was meant to be fairly no-frills; also to be fair, it’s only 10 years old.) “If it becomes evident that there is no viable solution aside from the current arena, we don’t really have much of a choice but to not play in Santa Cruz,” said team president Chris Murphy; the article doesn’t say if he stared meaningfully at listeners’ wallets as he said “viable solution,” but we can read between the lines.
• The Carolina Panthers owners officially bailed on their plan for a new practice facility and surrounding development now that cost overruns have raised the price tag, despite $225 million in public funding that would have come with the $800 million project. “We are prepared to sit down with the City and other interested parties to discuss the significant challenges ahead,” said a statement from team owner David Tepper’s GT Real Estate Holdings, which … actually, that sounds less like abandoning the plan than saying he wants a new plan, only one with less of his money, doesn’t it? Old stadium deals never really die, they just re-emerge with more zeroes at the end.
• Your friend and mine Victor Matheson had a fun op-ed this week about how the $1 billion Buffalo Bills stadium subsidy is “one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory,” which really anybody could tell from that $1 billion figure, but it’s nice to have a professional economist confirm it. A sample: “The Bills have earned over $300 million in operating income since the Pegulas purchased the team for $1.4 billion just seven years ago. And since then, the value of the Bills has risen by another $900 million. The Pegulas have earned enough on their investment in just seven years to pay for the entirety of a new stadium on their own.” But of course, if you spend your own money, then you don’t have it anymore.
• This article would have been 1000% better if the headline writers had dropped the word “Arizona.”
• “Roger Goodell gets booed at NFL draft party in Downtown Detroit, then projects $200 million windfall for city,” on the other hand, is an awesome headline, made only the more awesome by the fact that most of the article is behind a paywall, leaving me to assume that Goodell actually produced a study showing the tremendous economic activity generated by booing him, Roger Goodell, which seems totally in character.
• Elsewhere in headlines, the Voice of OC asks: “Should OC Taxpayers Be Paying the LA Angels $6 Million for Suicide Prevention Ads?” No? I’m going with “no.”
• The Columbus Blue Jackets just got $13 million public money for, I dunno, stuff, because reasons, does it even matter anymore? The world is just an endless flow of money from working people to people too rich to work, who, vampire-like, live only by sucking living labour, and live the more, the more labour they suck. It’s a little late to be getting all upset by every instance of this — sure it’s fun for a while, but eventually either you have to accept it as the natural, if horrible, state of things, or rise up and seize control of the means of production, don’t you think? Just a thought, anyway; have a good weekend, if weekends exist, which scientists say they don’t!