Category: Cleveland Browns

Friday roundup: Rays stadium sticks Tampa students in trailers, Wyden wants Blazers owner to accept arena money or else

access_time personNeil deMause

After a summer where the owners of the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Rays each landed, in quick succession, about $2 billion apiece in public stadium funding despite widespread public opposition, I’ve been thinking even more than usual about what this site is hoping to accomplish. To report on and analyze sports subsidy shenanigans, obviously, but to what end? Over the years, the implicit objective has gradually shifted from “expose the scam so that people are empowered to stop it” to “inform people so that if ever there comes an opportunity to make change, they can take action” to “reassure people boggling that this is still going on that we’re not crazy.” And while the earlier goals are still around at least aspirationally, it’s becoming pretty obvious that, as the old Straight Dope tagline had it, this is going to take longer than we thought.

When Joanna Cagan and I set out in late 1995 to research the first article that ultimately became Field of Schemes, I could not have conceived that I would still be writing about sports subsidies 31 years later; I couldn’t have conceived that the public-money-for-private-stadium-profits game would still remain largely unchanged 31 years later. It still needs writing about — now more than ever, probably — but any hopes that calling out the emperor’s new clothes would result in prompt reforms are fading just a bit. Maybe the publication of J.C. Bradbury’s This One Will Be Different next month will be what it finally takes to shift the balance; probably not, given [waves generally at all of history], but sometimes things do get better, even if seemingly not lately.

Where am I going with all this? Venting, mostly: Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for better results may not always be crazy, but beating your head against the same wall does lose some of its charm after a while. But also thanks to those of you who continue to read and support this site, and to debate where all this is going and what it means for both sports and society in general. Hopefully someone somewhere is learning something useful enough to make a difference eventually, even if progress seems elusive much of the time.

Or maybe it’ll just let us laugh to keep from crying until the idiot robots kill us all. Either works!

  • Hillsborough College students are just now finding out they’re going to have to start holding classes in temporary trailers so the Tampa Bay Rays can demolish much of their campus for a stadium, and they are not pleased. “It’s kind of strange that we got to be in a trailer for classes,” said one student who claimed not to have received any word from the community college about the plan. “I’d say that’s definitely not really ideal for college students paying a lot of money to come to college.”
  • U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is reportedly threatening to get Congress to consider rescinding federal tax-exempt bonds for sports projects unless NBA owners talk Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon into sitting down by the end of the year to negotiate how many hundreds of millions of dollars in public money he’ll accept for arena renovations. Given that Wyden is supposed to be acting on behalf of the American people at large and using tax-exempt bonds for sports venues is of zero benefit to the nation as a whole, if he has the power to get rid of them, he probably should just do it; if he just wants to get to keep meeting former Blazers players courtside, though, you do you, Ron.
  • What the headline says: “Chiefs’ stadium move already showing impact on real estate in Wyandotte County.” What the article says: One local real estate agent says one (unnamed) client got an offer on a property (unspecified) he’d been trying to sell for years after the Kansas City Chiefs stadium was announced. Surely a commercial realtor would have no reason to try to goose the market by inventing fake anecdotes, so I guess we’re all fact-checked here!
  • The Kansas City council is fine with holding a public vote in April on the Royals stadium funding plan, so long as it doesn’t actually affect anything. Construction is slated to have already begun by then, but ballot measure sponsor Missouri Workers Power says the vote could impact further city actions needed for the project.
  • I don’t know if “Ohio Democratic state minority tells the Republican gubernatorial candidate to fund his ineffective and regressive gas tax holiday scheme by using the money that would otherwise go to a Cleveland Browns stadium” is serious or a troll, but even if it’s the latter it’s a pretty funny one.
  • Jacksonville Armada F.C., a former NASL minor-league soccer franchise that’s been “on hiatus” since 2018 but is supposed to join the MLS Next Pro minor league next year, has failed to build a new stadium (likely having something to do with the previous clause in this sentence) on land it got from Jacksonville for $1, and now the city would like to be paid for the land, please. This is a pretty minimal ask — the land is likely valued at less than $1 million — but if this is a week for appreciating baby steps, at least it’s something.
  • The public park built next to the new Yankee Stadium to make up for the new Yankee Stadium being built atop a public park is falling apart, and it’s up to the city to find $54 million to fix it. “Everyone was excited about a new additional park in the community but no one thought about how expensive it is to have and maintain,” remarked city councilmember Althea Stevens, who may not be remembering quite right.
  • Las Vegas could build yet another arena for an NBA expansion team, because the umpteen it already has aren’t shiny enough.
Share this post:

Tax district to fund Browns upgrades could push public stadium cost to $2B

access_time personNeil deMause

I mentioned briefly here the week before last that Brook Park had designated the land around a planned new Cleveland Browns stadium to be “blighted,” which Mayor Edward Orcutt said “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future.” It’s now becoming clearer where that maintenance money would come from, and as Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Leila Atassi explains, it’s Cuyahoga County property tax money that would otherwise go to pay for public services:

Here is how it works. Under a tax-increment financing deal, the property taxes on the land as it exists today keep going to the usual places. But the new taxes generated as the property’s value climbs — the growth, which is the entire point of development — get peeled off into a separate fund. School districts are often spared in these deals. Everyone else is not. The county’s share, the library’s share, the Metroparks’ share, Tri-C’s share are all redirected.

That’s how a TIF district works, yup: Any increase in property tax receipts gets peeled off and set aside for special projects — in this case, stadium upkeep and upgrades — regardless of whether the added tax money would have come in anyway without the new development, either in the TIF district or somewhere else in the region. (The stadium itself will already be tax-free, a gift to Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam worth more than half a billion dollars.) And Brook Park has the power to divert property tax money that would go to Cuyahoga County, too, because that’s also how TIFs roll. And while school districts are supposed to get a carveout to ensure they aren’t drained of funding, the same is decidedly not the case for, say, county-funded libraries and parks.

As Atassi notes, giving up this money for future stadium maintenance would be especially crazy because the Browns stadium is happening either way: “The Haslams have committed $1.8 billion of their own money, and the stadium is scheduled to open in 2029. The cranes are already there. Nothing about this TIF is coaxing a reluctant project into being.” (Ohio requires that TIF projects pass a “but-for” test where a project will not move forward without the TIF funding, but it’s not immediately clear whether Brook Park has to actually show evidence of this, or just declare it unilaterally.) But despite the project being well underway, Brook Park and the Haslams have yet to agree on a lease determining, among other things, who would pay for future stadium upkeep — and with a TIF deal, the costs would fall squarely on city and county taxpayers, making this a classic grift that keeps on giving.

How much this would add to the total public price tag of the Browns stadium is unknown: We’d need to know the size of the TIF district first and have some projection of how much tax money it would siphon off, and the former hasn’t been decided yet and the latter could end up pretty much anything. “Hundreds of millions of dollars” is a reasonable guess, though, which would likely push the total public cost into the $2 billion range. That’s no longer unprecedented, but it is starting to talk real money; it’ll be interesting to see how (or if) Mayor Orcutt tries to justify throwing good money after bad once the Brook Park council takes up the TIF legislation in the coming weeks.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Nobody in media or politics can math or word right edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since I’ve thanked everyone who makes this site possible through their generous donations, so: Thanks, everyone, who makes this site possible through your generous donations! I hope you are all still enjoying this journey through the world of sports venue shenanigans, if “enjoy” is the right word for it. Sometimes it feels more like a group therapy sessions for survivors of sports fandom (our own or other people’s or both), but there’s value in that too, right?

I’m going to take the fact that you’ve read this far as a “yes.” Let’s get on with the rest of the week’s news roundup:

  • The Kansas City council approved spending $185 million on expansion of the Current‘s (checks calendar) two-year-old stadium yesterday, something that KMBC described as “$185 million in public financing,” which is absolutely wrong: This would be private debt, but repaid by the city, so private financing but public funding — these things matter. Fox4KC, meanwhile, reported that “the project will be funded by revenue generated by the stadium and surrounding development,” which is also wrong: It will be funded by sales taxes on spending in and around the stadium, most of which probably won’t be new to K.C. at all. This is no way to educate the electorate about stadium economics in advance of a public vote on a Royals stadium next spring, when it will very possibly be too late to matter anyway.
  • Los Angeles County has issued an economic impact report on hosting the 2028 Olympics, far too late to be used to determine how much to spend on the event, but oh well. My eye was immediately caught by the prediction that “the 2028 Games could boost tourist spending by $1 billion above and beyond a typical summer,” a curious conclusion given that actual studies of past Olympics, including Atlanta 1996, Salt Lake City 2002, and London 2012, have found that spending overall doesn’t rise during an Olympics, in large part because locals flee town during the Games. From what I can tell from the county report — turning my laptop sideways to read it because the county doesn’t know how to rotate PDFs properly — consultants HR&A didn’t actually conduct an in-depth spending study, just plugging Olympic visitor numbers into the off-the-shelf IMPLAN software package, because “garbage in, garbage out” is how HR&A rolls.
  • NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says the league is talking to three different potential Atlanta expansion team ownership groups — because what did that fictitious Einstein guy know, anyway — plus also Austin and maybe Phoenix “with the right location” or maybe expansion “might not happen” at all, Bill Daly clearly got an A in playing hard to get at deputy commissioner school.
  • The Brook Park city council has declared the area around the new Cleveland Browns stadium blighted, which Mayor Edward Orcutt says “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future,” another way of saying “lets us keep spending money on the stadium ad infinitum,” somebody clearly got an A in doubletalk at mayor school.
  • Throw another $60 million on the fire for San Antonio taxpayer spending on a new Spurs arena, this time to acquire land for the project. This brings the public cost total to, you know what, I don’t feel up to mathing today, let’s just call it an even squillion dollars.
  • Residents of Chicago’s Bridgeport’s neighborhood this week protested a proposed Amtrak maintenance facility that could be built there as part of a land swap for a new White Sox stadium, with local alderman Nicole Lee saying, “f the Sox move and we’re left with a 24/7 rail maintenance yard and an empty stadium, we’re done for here.” Team execs, meanwhile, are distancing themselves from minority owner Justin Ishbia’s stadium plan, issuing a statement saying only, “If the site proves viable, it would be added to the locations up for consideration for a new ballpark, along with The 78 and other options.”
  • Judging from my inbox, a lot of you are really excited to see the latest renderings of a new Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers arena, so here, go to town. I’m mostly interested in whether they include fireworks (nope) and how they handle the question of which players’ jerseys fans will be wearing when the place finally opens in 2030 (one part guys currently on the team, one part guys like Charles Barkley, hey remember when he was a Sixer?).
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Blazers arena staredown escalates, haggling continues in Rays stadium standoff

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! There’s nothing in the latest batch of stadium and arena news that can quite compete with the European and North/Central American soccer federations vowing to start boycotting FIFA events as soon as this September if FIFA sells operating rights to the World Cup to Jared Kushner’s brother, but it was still a pretty eventful week:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: On being a fan of the World Cup without being a fan of the FIFA World Cup 2026™

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we start with this week’s roundup, a note about the World Cup: I’m enjoying it! The one-game knockout format, even in its dumb expanded iteration, is great for generating drama, and when you mix in international politics and colonial history, you get even more opportunities for hilarity.

But I enjoy most sports, even the dumb ones. The issue about sports mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics isn’t whether they should exist, but whether they should exist in their current form, as means for extracting tons of money from host cities and delivering it to corrupt oligarchs. The reports just keep coming in confirming that any claimed economic benefits of hosting the games are overwhelmed by the public costs — look, here’s another one from Atlanta about vendors trying to get their money back after being suckered into joining a city-sponsored program for World Cup-related booths that turned into what one called “a financial nightmare” — and while big public watch parties are fun, you don’t actually need to have the World Cup in your city, or in your country, to hold one. The World Cup, like pretty much all sports at this point (I may be willing to make exceptions for curling and Ultimate Frisbee), has been weaponized to transfer money from the many to the few, which is why we keep complaining about it here every week. If we have to live under toxic capitalism, the least we should get to do it the joy of pointing and laughing.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s gone on recently that is likely to cost you money on the grounds that sports are fun, please enjoy ridiculing it:

  • Washington, D.C. is preparing to sell $975 million in personal seat licenses allowing fans to buy Commanders tickets and use the proceeds for stadium construction, which momentarily excited me until I realized it looks like the PSLs will be funding the team’s share of costs, notwithstanding the city’s involvement in doing the sales. Anyway, some quick long division determines that team officials are presumably planning to ask for an average of $15,000 per seat for the mere right to spend hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets, though it’s always possible the team will have to take a loss on the whole transaction if fans aren’t willing to pony up that much.
  • Congratulations, everyone in the United States: You now get to help pay for $25 million in road work around the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, after that city won a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “reconfigured freeway ramps and streamlined local roads [that] will lead to the stadium and the surrounding entertainment district.”
  • The city of Oakland may try to sell the Oakland Coliseum and its neighboring arena in separate deals after concerns that wavering plans for redevelopment of the stadium site are holding up the arena sale. The Coliseum is set to finally be entirely empty next year, after the announced departure of the Roots USL Championship club to, uh, somewhere, they’ll get back to you on that.
  • Two contrasting headline styles in reporting on the return of corporate stadium names after FIFA decreed them unallowable during the World Cup because they might compete with their own sponsorship contracts: “Lumen Field returns as Seattle says bye to World Cup and Seattle Stadium” vs “Praise Be: ‘Philadelphia Stadium’ Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords.” Well played, Philadelphia sports site Crossing Broad, even if you do appear to be mostly an excuse to run lots of posts promoting sports gambling.
  • Not sure which is more on the nose for 2026, a proposal to have the Bay Area’s Cow Palace host a data center now that it’s been superseded by the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena or a related proposal to have it host a helicopter landing pad. No word yet on whether these would require public money, but given that a data center is involved, probably.
  • New Dallas Stars vaportecture renderings, though they’re mostly unspecific and from a great distance, aside from the one that appears to show fans watching a Stars playoff game on a giant video screen atop a new team store, which is maybe even more on the nose for 2026.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Portlanders balk at giving Blazers owner $600m, KC gives initial okay of $235m to expand 2-year-old soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Too damn hot! Gonna see how few words I can use today, to save electricity, y’know. That headline already caused voltage reductions across Brooklyn!

Share this post:

Creating authority to own Browns stadium would push Haslam’s total taxpayer subsidy to $1.3B

access_time personNeil deMause

Cleveland Browns update: University of Colorado Denver economist Geoff Propheter got back to me yesterday with an estimate for how much Brook Park, Ohio will give up in property taxes by setting up a public authority to own a Browns stadium, and the number is: $539 million in present value, on the low end.

(While the property tax break is money that Brook Park wouldn’t get if the stadium development isn’t built — at least not unless the land is used for something else — it’s also money that would be needed to pay for things like police and fire services and roads and schools to support the development, so not collecting it comes at a real cost to Brook Park.)

This gives us the opportunity to do a fresh estimate of the total subsidy Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is seeking as payment for moving from one part of Ohio to another:

That’s $1.3 billion right there, not counting the $178 million in county tax money and $422 million in city tax money that Haslam was talking about last year but has been quiet about since. Even without that, he’s still looking at getting half of his $2.6 billion stadium cost paid for by taxpayers, and he would be able to cover a bunch of his share with such things as naming rights proceeds or $150K-a-seat personal seat licenses.

The stadium authority plan still needs final signoff from the Brook Park city council — further votes are scheduled for June 23 and July 15 — and it’s unclear what Haslam would do if it were voted down. For that matter, it’s unclear what Haslam would do if the state backed off of (or was forced by court rulings to back off of) using the unclaimed property funds, given that he’s already broken ground in Brook Park. There’s definitely room for elected officials in Ohio to try to renegotiate a better deal for the public here, but instead they seem dead set on finding ways to make it worse.

Share this post:

Brook Park gives initial okay to stadium authority to provide more tax breaks for Browns owner

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland Browns are already in the process of moving to a new $2.4 billion stadium in suburban Brook Park with the aid of $600 million in state money and $245 million in city money — they’ve even held a groundbreaking — but that doesn’t mean team owner Jimmy Haslam is done asking for stuff. In the latest, he got the Brook Park council last night to give preliminary approval to creating a stadium authority that would own the stadium and lease it back to him.

Lease-back deals like this are typically associated with property tax breaks: Since the building is owned by a government entity, it’s not subject to property taxes. I can’t immediately tell if Ohio would apply possessory interest taxes to the value of the lease itself — I’m sure Geoff Propheter will chime in soon to school me on this — but even if it does, this is a potential tax break that could increase Brook Park’s costs in exchange for no clear concessions at all from Haslam.

Mike Florio of NBC Sports also cites a savings (“apparently”) of $100 million in construction sales taxes, which was actually already approved last month as part of a development agreement between Brook Park and the team. (How Brook Park can exempt the project from sales taxes when it doesn’t have a city sales tax is an interesting research question.) Approved, but not released, as WOIO notes, so we don’t actually know what’s in the development agreement or whether Haslam would agree to pay rent or share revenues as part of the stadium authority ownership scheme.

The Brook Park council still needs to hold two more votes (the first is today) before the stadium authority becomes official, so maybe we’ll get more information before this whole thing is signed off on. Either way, demanding additional tax subsidies before a stadium has even been built is a pretty extreme example of the Grift That Keeps on Giving.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Rays may have bot-lobbied for stadium funds, OR gov says not rubber-stamping Blazers cash is “playing politics”

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve run off the end of April, and — spoiler alert — neither the Chicago Bears nor Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations have yet been resolved as team owners had hoped. Sportswriters often like to portray a slow approval process as dysfunction, but it can equally well be the opposite: Taking your time and driving a hard bargain are good negotiating tools, and when billions of dollars in tax money are at stake, rushing to get something approved just because the local billionaire is impatient is a great way to end up with unexpected costs. It’s still very much unknown whether residents of Illinois and Florida will end up with better stadium deals as a result of legislators taking their time, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll end up being any worse than if they’d just signed off on whatever they were presented with without reading it.

Anyway, lots of news did happen this week, even in Tampa Bay and Chicago, so let’s get to it:

  • Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal claims that somebody sent more than 2,000 bot-written emails from a single IP address in Los Angeles urging county commissioners to hurry up and approve the Rays’ stadium deal. Wostal says he doesn’t want to move forward with any stadium plan until the Rays owners provide documentation of where they’ll get the money to finance their part of the deal, which would include more than $1 billion for the stadium plus possibly billions more for surrounding development (some of which would be recouped by tax and land breaks), though the team hasn’t actually committed to what exactly it will build; a Rays statement said only that it would provide financing details “at the appropriate time as is standard with similar public-private partnerships,” which must be ownerese for “maybe after we’ve cashed your check.”
  • Bears executives held a meeting with NFL officials this week, in which everyone agreed that the best stadium options are either in Arlington Heights or Indiana. The assembled dignitaries then warned Illinois legislators that if a stadium bill to the Bears owners’ liking isn’t approved ASAP, the team and league could meet again.
  • Count Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek among the hurry-up-and-rubber-stampers: After signing a bill to provide $365 million in state money for Portland Trail Blazers renovations, she chided city and county officials for not swiftly approving their own $235 million, saying, “This is not a time to play politics. This is a time to get it done.” (“Playing politics,” in this case, includes things like not wanting to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering into arena funding talks.)
  • The Cleveland Browns held a groundbreaking for their new Brook Park stadium, even as legal questions remain about the state unclaimed funds money that is supposed to pay $600 million toward the project. Everyone involved is still moving full steam ahead, though: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that “we’re not attorneys, OK?” but after talking to actual attorneys “we do think it’ll be resolved,” while Gov. Mike DeWine reassured everyone that if this public funding plan fails, the state could always go back to his plan to raise sports gambling taxes and give the proceeds to sports teams that everyone hated. No one is saying exactly what will happen if the state — and the city of Brook Park, which is still negotiating its own $245 million in stadium spending — can’t come up with the money after stadium construction is already underway, probably because nobody wants to admit that “let the Haslams figure out how to find the rest of the money” is still an option for fear of risking the benefits of moving the Browns from Ohio to Ohio.
  • But if (greater) Cleveland doesn’t get a new stadium, how will it host a Super Bowl? Don’t worry, it probably won’t get one anyway unless it builds more hotels, says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who pointedly did not mention this during the runup to the stadium funding vote.
  • MLS has a prospective Las Vegas bidder for the Vancouver Whitecaps: a group led by Grant Gustavson, the 30-year-old son of Kentucky’s wealthiest billionaire. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Whitecaps will move if they don’t get a new arena deal in Vancouver — Vegas doesn’t have a soccer arena at all (though Gustavson said he’s ready to “privately finance” one, without providing details) and is getting dangerously close to a market glut of sports teams — but it’ll likely light a fire under officials in British Columbia, who already started scrambling the jets once the league announced its Vegas move threat earlier this week.
  • Team owner insists he needs state money for a new stadium, state says no you can’t have any, team owner finds an existing stadium to play in. Happy endings all around in the CT United F.C. story, unless you’re team owner Andre Swanston, who now has to settle for just selling tickets to watch soccer matches instead of getting $127 million in state aid to help boost his team’s bottom line.
  • Would this Comiskey Park–inspired stadium design be a better place for Chicago White Sox fans to watch a game? Undoubtedly, since it would bring back that ballpark’s close-to-the-action upper deck. Would it make more money for the White Sox owners? Probably not, because it would be missing the wall of luxury suites that are to blame for the current stadium’s unloved distant upper deck: Extra-nosebleedy cheap seats in modern stadiums are a feature, not a bug. Maybe work on reducing soaring income inequality that has created such a soaring market for high-priced tickets, and then we can get back to stadium design that actually works for everyone.
  • How did the economic impact go from the NFL Draft that Pittsburgh canceled school for? Not so hot, according to one restaurant worker who fought through draft-related bus rerouting only to have her hours cut because fewer customers than usual showed up. (Economists are shocked, shocked!) The city tourism agency responded with a statement that really the NFL Draft was less about bringing in new spending than “positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
  • In related news, New Jersey transit officials are recommending that state residents work from home during World Cup matches to avoid the transit nightmare caused by rerouting trains to take fans to matches since they won’t be allowed to drive there. This could be good news for New Jersey restaurants, maybe, unless everyone just makes their own lunches those days, see why economic impact of sporting events is harder to calculate than just adding up all the fans and declaring “> ? > profit”?
  • No, the Athletics aren’t going to change their name to the “Las Vegas Black Fire” just because they listed that as a location in a job listing, it’s just the name of a co-working space in Vegas. Thanks to SF Gate for clearing this up, maybe everyone should have done a little more research before firing up the AI jersey designs.
Share this post:

Friends don’t let friends listen to what comes out of sports team owners’ mouths

access_time personNeil deMause

Imagine you’re a wealthy sports team owner in the middle of trying to strike a stadium deal. (You go get your top hat, monocle, and snifter of cognac; I’ll wait here.) What is the best thing to say in a public statement, on the occasions it seems necessary to deign to speak directly to the public? You don’t want to make the task at hand seem impossible, because that could be interpreted as a loss of momentum for your demands; but at the same time, you don’t want to make it seem a sure thing, because that could take the pressure off elected officials to grant you the bags of cash/tax breaks until the sun burns out/land grants from here to the distant shore that you so desire. How to thread that needle?

Let’s see how some actual sports team execs do it! Contestant #1:

“It’s always been my experience when you’re doing important work, it’s not easy,” [Kansas City Royals owner John] Sherman said. “It shouldn’t be easy, and these are complicated processes. Public-private partnerships, multi-jurisdictional, dealing with multiple entities as well. But I think we’re making progress. I’m as anxious as anybody to get this behind us.”…

“We’ve got a little bit of a cushion, but not a big one,” Sherman said. “It’s time to get on with it.”

This is pretty much the same as Sherman said last month, when he described the lack of a finalized stadium deal as “from the governor on down, there’s a lot of effort being put forth” but also “when you have a window of opportunity, you better run through it because those windows close.” You’ll also note the Sherman avoided mentioning what the holdups are, or when some decisions might be reached — to date, Sherman hasn’t even identified a site or sites where he might want a stadium built, but that’s a double-edged sword, since the more you narrow down your options the fewer potential bidders you have. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, or at least nothing in a lot of words, and hope that the media wanders off and pressures elected officials for some action instead.

(Sherman also got in a statement about how much he liked the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district when he visited this past week for opening day, because “there were bands playing” and “tons of people around.”)

Contestant #2:

“We’re confident that [the $600 million is] going to come through and obviously we’re starting a stadium,” [Cleveland Browns co-owner Dee Haslam said. “We’re building a stadium. So we’re full steam ahead, but we’re pretty confident. I mean, they’ve done it in the past for economic development and this definitely fits into that criteria.”

This is in reference, of course, to the $600 million that the state of Ohio promised to give the Browns owners last summer, yet which is being held up by lawsuits over whether the state can legally use unclaimed private funds to supply the cash. Dee and Jimmy Haslam are already moving dirt for the stadium and have an official groundbreaking set for April 30, so they have to be at least a little bit antsy about how to pay the construction companies. Nothing they say is likely to sway the courts, though, so they best they can do is express confidence in the system of “economic development,” which is that governments give a lot of public money to “job creators,” and then some number of jobs are created, or not.

And contestant #3, who is not strictly a team owner but plays one in the press conferences:

“We have the legislation passed in Indiana, and they’ve been a great partner to work with,” [Chicago Bears] president Kevin Warren said. “We are going through legitimate due diligence because we have working through traffic, and construction items, and transportation and all those kinds of different things. It’s progressing right on pace.

“Illinois, they’re still working on legislation and we have a wonderful piece of land in Arlington Heights — 326 acres. So we don’t have a set deadline, but I am confident that sometime this spring/summer, we’ll know.”

“We’ll know” is a strange way of saying “We’ll make a decision that is entirely up to us,” though less so if you take it as “We’ll see what offers we have on the table, and then we can decide which one should make us the filthiest rich.” As discussed here last week, Bears owner George McCaskey doesn’t have any pressing reason to make a decision before the Illinois legislature adjourned at the end of May, so we can expect another two months of kicking the can down the road while hoping that Illinois will match or even raise Indiana’s bid. (Or at least come close: It’s always possible that McCaskey would take a lesser deal to stay in the state where most of his team’s fan base is, though if so he’s sure never going to admit it.) “I am confident that sometime this spring/summer” there will be a Bears stadium decision is an especially clever turn of phrase, given that it sets an expected deadline without actually setting a deadline deadline that anyone can hold Warren to in case circumstances change over the next two months.

What did we learn from all this? Not much in terms of the actual state of stadium talks for the Royals, Browns, or Bears, which is why it’s almost certainly bad journalistic practice for the news media to start transcribing every time the local sports team owner opens their mouth. Ask questions about the stadium deal process? Absolutely. Run an article when the owner says something newsworthy? Sure. Give the local rich guy or gal unlimited column inches to spin the situation however they like, instead of going out and investigating what’s actually being discussed or what experts have to say about whether it’s a good idea? This is maybe not what you spent $130,000 on that journalism degree for.

Share this post: