Before we get to our weekly cavalcade of doom, some actual good news this week: Tom Scocca, the longtime sports-and-everything-else writer who last got mention here for his excellent newsletter Hmm Daily, which later transmogrified into the excellent newsletter Indignity, announced that he and his longtime running partner Joe MacLeod will be taking the reigns at the online publication Popula, formerly part of the same Civil network of news sites as Hmm Daily. If that was way too many obscure web/email publications for you in one sentence, here’s the tl;dr: Tom Scocca is one of the funniest and most insightful writers out there, and now he’s going to be not only easier to find an link to but he’s going to have a freelance budget to assign more articles by other (hopefully funny and insightful) writers as well. For starters, here’s a column about whether it’s okay to take advantage of the other team not having enough players to run up the score in a flag football game for 9-year-olds. This is the kind of insightful (and funny!) writing that America needs to heal its wounds.
Cavalcade of doom time!
- The city of Calgary and the Flames owners have officially restarted talks on a new arena, nine months after team officials walked away from a previous deal because they were mad they would have to pay too much money. (This seems kinda like city officials are engaging in bad parenting to me, but okay.) Negotiating on behalf of the city will be consultants CAA ICON, best remembered around here for their terrible Buffalo Bills economic impact study; it’s tempting to say better to have them working for the city than against it, but you also have to wonder if they could have found a consultant without both feet planted quite so firmly in the “new venues are the bomb” world.
- Stan Kroenke is reportedly going to be required to pay the NFL $571 million toward its $790 million settlement with the city of St. Louis for yanking the Rams out of town in violation of its own league bylaws. Add in the $3 billion in cost overruns he had to pay for his new L.A. stadium and it’s tempting to see Kroenke as the big loser in the Rams-return-to-L.A. saga, but it’s also hard to see exactly who the winner is — St. Louis got a pile of cash and doesn’t have to spend money on building another stadium, so I guess that’s a kind of win, at least until somebody decides the city needs the NFL back and they spend even more than that on luring an expansion team.
- A giant tranche of public information about the Buffalo Bills stadium project just dropped, though it doesn’t appear to include that Erie County study of the projected cost of renovating the team’s old stadium that the county keeps releasing with all the important bits blacked out. (There is an “alternatives analysis” that rules out renovation on the grounds that “a renovation project of the type that would likely be necessary to encourage a long-term lease renewal would be extensive,” which is studyspeak for “the Bills owners want something real shiny.”) I haven’t dug through it all yet, but feel free to do so yourself, or just enjoy the opportunity to go around saying “tranche” a lot, I sure am.
- Tennessee Titans fans who paid for personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at the team’s current stadium are pissed that they’ll have to pay for new personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at a new one. The Titans say they’ll credit current PSL holders with however much they spent for the old ones, but given that the choice is “give us more money now or else see your entire investment go up in smoke,” I’d be pissed, too.
- St. Louis S.C.‘s new $461 million stadium may not be ready by the team’s MLS debut next spring because some workers broke an electric line, and then it rained. I would make a “time to tear it down and build a new one” joke, but I’m kind of afraid someone would take it seriously.
- Illinois voters are split on whether they want the Chicago Bears to stay in Chicago or move to suburban Arlington Heights, but only 12% are okay with spending tax money on building a new stadium, and only another 28% are okay with devoting public funds to infrastructure for one. None of this should be surprising, given that that’s what polls pretty much always say, though elected officials also pretty much always ignore what the public thinks.
- This excellent Kathryn Schulz article about the history of public lotteries has nothing to do with stadium scams per se, but given that it’s about how government have ended up extracting money from people who can least afford it in order to support a giant private industry while pretending it lets them cut taxes, it at least rhymes.