Category: Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Friday roundup: Special Tampa Bay Rays roof crisis edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Seems like all anybody wants to talk about today is what the Tampa Bay Rays will do now that their stadium roof blew off and also how insensitive it is to be talking about what the Rays will do when millions of people are still without power, so let’s get right to answering your questions and/or offending your sensibilities:

  • Rays management put out a statement yesterday saying “our priority is supporting our community and our staff” and “over the coming days and weeks, we expect to be able to assess the true condition of Tropicana Field,” which is PR for “dunno yet.” Playing without a roof apparently isn’t an option because the stadium doesn’t have a drainage system for when it rains, so it looks like the Rays and the city of St. Petersburg are going to have to look into a rush job of repairing the roof on a stadium that is set to close in three years regardless. Just in case, sportswriters are over are rushing to publish their lists of other places the Rays could play the start of next season, including various minor-league stadiums in Florida, the Oakland Coliseum, the Texas Rangers‘ still-standing old stadium next door to their new one, or, sure, Montreal, maybe its roof will be fixed before Tampa Bay’s is.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium got off without much damage after being flooded during Hurricane Milton, but the first responders using it as a shelter did have to evacuate. All of this should be having people rethink the whole “stadiums can double as emergency shelters” thing, maybe?
  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says a Chicago lakefront stadium is still “the focus” but his stadium architects are designing a building that would be “agnostic” with regard to location, which doesn’t really make sense — you have to at least know which direction fans would be arriving from and where the sun would be, for starters — but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to play off against each other multiple cities that have all shown little interest in throwing money at you.
  • If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Diamond Sports Group’s ongoing bankruptcy and its effect on MLB TV rights, Marc Normandin has a good writeup in Baseball Prospectus. Tl;dr: Two more teams have been dropped by Diamond (the Rays and Detroit Tigers) and the Texas Rangers had their contract expire, meaning it’s likely that MLB is going to end up running TV rights for a bunch of teams in 2025. For now it sounds like the league will be paying teams based on what they were getting from Diamond, but if you want to dream on a future where MLB holds NFL-like control over the whole league’s broadcasts and doles out money evenly and market size no longer matters, I’ve got you covered.
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Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

  • The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
  • Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
  • Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
  • The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
  • Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.
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Friday roundup: Every disaster has a silver lining, and vice versa

access_time personNeil deMause

When I was seven years old, my family drove down to Sanibel Island for vacation — twice in one year, for some reason — so I’m pretty familiar with the causeway bridge that was just wiped out by Hurricane Ian, which is very not good for anyone who is now entirely cut off from the mainland. I suppose I should make some observation about how the substitution effect means Sanibel’s loss will mean some other Florida beach spot’s economic gain, but too soon, people.

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Friday roundup: Titans seek $300m in tax kickbacks to keep stadium “first-class,” Bucs could be next

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy first Friday roundup of 2022! A couple of days ago I thought maybe we’d have a refreshing lull in new stadium demand news to start the year, but then hell started a-popping to make up for lost time:

  • When the Tennessee Titans moved from Houston in 1997, they became one of the teams to get a state-of-the-art clause requiring their city to spend whatever it takes to keep their new stadium “first-class” relative to other NFL stadiums. (The St. Louis Rams, who moved two years earlier, ended up using their clause to demand a whole new stadium, then when that didn’t happen to break their lease and move to Los Angeles.) Now, a year after dropping hints and some renderings about what kind of upgrades they were looking for, Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk has revealed the price tag: $600 million, half of which would be funded by kicking back future sales taxes from 130 acres of land around the stadium. This would be part of a lease extension for the Titans, which makes one wonder why the state-of-the-art clause in the old lease is even in play, but when you have Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. CEO Butch Spyridon saying “there’s a sizzle that comes with Nashville because of the entertainment industry” and “you can’t buy that kind of aura,” it may be too much to hope for hard-nosed bargaining.
  • “Tampa Bay Buccaneers will not seek a new stadium, county commissioner says” is the headline in today’s Tampa Bay Business Journal, but it leaves out what Hillsborough County commissioner Ken Hagan also said: “They’re going to want to ensure that we’re continuing to make that a world-class facility so you don’t need a new facility.” Bucs owners the Glazer family just got $29 million in renovation money in 2016 (plus $10 million in federal pandemic stimulus money in 2020); no word yet on what the Glazers will be asking for this time around, but given that Hagan is already setting this up as at least it’ll be cheaper than a whole new stadium, expect it to be a lot.
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ended up not discussing Buffalo Bills stadium spending in her State of the State address, but a team spokesperson and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz both say there should be an announcement soonish.
  • The Voice of San Diego has a long story about San Diego’s Frontier neighborhood, an integrated community with low rents built by the federal government to solve a World War II housing crisis that the city demolished in the 1960s in the name of “urban renewal” and replaced with its sports arena. There was a lot of that going around in Southern California at the time.
  • For those readers who complain that this site focuses too much on sports subsidies when plenty of non-sports construction projects get equally huge taxpayer gifts — there aren’t many, since most readers appreciate that life is short and corporate welfare is long, but I hear from you occasionally — here’s a story about how the state of Texas is giving Samsung $981 million in property tax breaks plus $260 million in infrastructure improvements for a new chip plant in the Austin suburb of Taylor. Good Jobs First has calculated that this will be the largest subsidy deal in Texas history, but Taylor Mayor Brandt Rydell responded, “Whether we would end up on some list and wind up being criticized for the project, that is not something we were concerned about.” Damn naysayers, always saying nay! Anyway, hope Taylor residents are okay with paying property taxes while the giant electronics company down the road doesn’t.
  • And finally, your moment of vaportecture:

https://twitter.com/jvhawkins/status/1478777675586101249

 

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Super Bowl foes’ billionaire owners got richer thanks to $468 million in stadium subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

As the proprietor of the world’s most comprehensive site on stadium and arena financing news (the competition is something fierce, let me tell you), I occasionally get requests for research help, and one of those came recently from the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, which were putting together a report on how much richer America’s sports billionaires have gotten during the pandemic. (The total is $98.5 billion, if you were wondering, a rise of 30% in wealth in just one year, enough to pay for $1,400 stimulus checks for almost half of those eligible.) I crunched the numbers on how much the wealth of those owners had been boosted by public stadium and arena subsidies, and the answer is:

Over the past several decades, according to data maintained by Field of Schemes, 28 pro sports teams owned by 26 billionaires have received $9 billion in taxpayer subsidies to help build or update stadiums and arenas and make other investments billionaires could presumably afford on their own. These publicly subsidized team owners have seen their wealth increase $45 billion in the last 10 months.

That public largesse for billionaire sports barons has included both teams in this year’s Super Bowl. The Chiefs received $250 million in taxpayer subsidies for stadium renovations in 2006. Taxpayers provided a total of $218 million in subsidies for construction and renovation of the Buccaneer stadium in 1998 and 2015.

Now, there isn’t a direct link between the stadium subsidies and the billionaires’ wealth boom during the pandemic — most of the benefits from the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers subsidies were absorbed by their billionaire owners years ago. If anything, the surge in concentrated wealth is more a reflection of how during troubled times, the rich generally find a way to get richer, as with Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, whose Quicken Loans empire has sent his personal value soaring 589% to more than $44 billion, thanks to the tanking economy leading to low interest rates and lots of cheap loan refinancing. According to the IPS/ATF report, even Oakland A’s and The Gap owner John Fisher has seen his wealth soar by 34% during the pandemic, despite the advent of Zoom work meaning nobody has had to buy any new pants.

The remedies proposed by the two organizations are to close loopholes that tax income generated by wealth at lower rates than wages — stock dividends and stock gains are currently taxed at a maximum of 20%, a discount that benefits billionaires way more than penny investors, those plucky Redditors notwithstanding — instituting wealth and estate taxes, and restoring the corporate income tax rate to 40% from the 21% that Donald Trump cut it to. Getting rid of stadium subsidies would be a drop in the bucket on top of this, but a $9 billion drop is still nothing to shake a stick at.

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The NFL’s plan is to keep poking at the virus until people start getting sick

access_time personNeil deMause

So this happened:

Before anyone gets too excited and/or horrified, the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Jacksonville Jaguars have all said they’re going to continue to operate at 20-25% capacity for the time being. This was just Gov. Ron DeSantis making clear that he lifted all restrictions on outdoor sporting events two weeks ago, when he also prohibited local governments from enforcing tougher restrictions or even fining people for not wearing masks. (If you’re wondering how that’s working out, virus rates in Florida haven’t surged so far, staying fairly level — though still high — but then, it generally takes more than two weeks for a surge to take hold, and also when you’re dealing mostly with stochastic spread via superspreader events, there is a lot of randomness involved as to whether and when a surge kicks in.)

So, props to the NFL for not immediately opening the fan floodgates in Florida, sure. But that’s hardly an indicator of a league that is concerned with safety above else. As we’ve seen this week — and as Barry Petchesky adeptly recounted yesterday at Defector — the league is currently dealing with a cascade of outbreaks on teams that has now caused a couple of games to be postponed, and could end up with even more. And, writes Petchesky, it was all totally predictable:

We don’t know a lot about COVID-19, but we know a few things about sports. We know bubbles, deployed by the NBA and NHL, and by MLB for its postseason, can work. We know that not-bubbling, like MLB tried for its abbreviated regular season, doesn’t work, at least not if your goal is to avoid having to cancel or postpone games. We know the NFL, due to the sheer size of its rosters and the massive logistical undertaking that staging a football game requires, probably can’t enter a bubble. We also know that it can’t afford to postpone many more games before a backlog pushes the Super Bowl into June.

That caveat re: MLB’s non-bubble is important: If the goal of “let’s let baseball teams all play in the home stadiums while still seeing their families and going to the grocery store and whatnot” was to keep anyone from getting infected, yeah, it was a disaster. But if the goal was to find a way to limp through a season with lots of postponements and makeup doubleheaders because players weren’t willing to be separated from their families for three months — the NBA and NHL were already up to playoff season, so their bubbles didn’t have to last as long — then it worked exactly as planned.

The NFL, of course, can’t stage doubleheaders, and can’t easily reschedule too many games without adding additional weeks to the season. And with 64-player rosters (48 active, 16 on a practice squad), plus a sport that involved a lot more contact than baseball (though we’re still not clear whether that’s the main risk or it’s just gathering indoors in clubhouses that mostly spreads the coronavirus), that’s a lot more dice being rolled every week than for other sports, so it’s absolutely no surprise that we’re seeing outbreaks.

Unlike MLB, though, which after some initial stumbles realized that you need to quarantine entire teams for a week or more after each new case turns up, the NFL seems to be charging ahead on a policy of Well, hopefully nobody else caught it. After New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton tested positive on Friday, Sunday’s scheduled game between the Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs was delayed — all the way to Monday night. But it can take four or more days for an infected person to test positive, while they become infectious in as little as 48 hours. So even if Patriots players all tested negative before their Monday night game, someone on the team could easily have still been incubating the virus, and spreading it to their teammates. Which may in fact have happened.

The NFL has already been heavily invested in hygiene theater, touting its disinfecting drones and temperature checks for fans, even though neither does much at all to protect anyone from Covid. (All evidence is that the virus doesn’t spread much via surfaces, and while most people with Covid symptoms run a fever, nearly half of infected people don’t have any symptoms.) Hygiene theater is based on the idea that the easier something is to do, the more one should focus on it; the decision to hold the Pats-Chiefs game on Monday after just a 24-hour delay seems to have been the inverse: If it’s too hard to do, let’s decide it doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately, in a sport where doing much of anything to combat the spread of the coronavirus among players is really hard, that’s a recipe for, if not necessarily disaster, a whole lot of extremely risky behavior. And the NFL has another decision coming up that is going to be equally hard, if only for economic reasons: The Super Bowl is scheduled to be held on February 7 in Tampa, and DeSantis has now said that it’s okay by him if they sell out the place, and that would be worth tens of millions of dollars to the league. Even if the image of a packed Super Bowl that turns into another biological bomb may give league planners second thoughts, you know that somewhere in the league offices they’re wondering: Could we get away with 30% capacity? 40%? What if we have disinfecting drones hovering over every fan? How close can we get to the precipice of a superspreader event without going over?

And that appears to be the NFL’s policy, really: Keep inching up to the limits of what’s considered safe, see who gets sick, then inch up a little further if it’s not too embarrassing a number. As I’ve noted before, this makes for a very useful experiment about how many fans can be in one place outdoors before disaster strikes — if the NFL really wanted to do it right, it should dictate that some teams allow more fans and others allow fewer, to see what the threshold is for sparking outbreaks — but it’s an experiment with human lives, which when conducted without the humans involved knowing the risks and consenting to them is generally considered a crime against humanity. But then, playing with human lives is pretty much the NFL’s jam, so why quit now while you’re massively ahead?

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Buccaneers’ $10m stadium subsidy is part of billions in CARES Act money no one is tracking

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the problems with keeping track of sports and other subsidies during a pandemic is that a national crisis isn’t really a great time for accountability. At a time when the priority is — rightly — on getting money into people’s hands as fast as possible, laws tend to be passed willy-nilly with little oversight; that’s doubly true with an administration in Washington that seems determined to merge the two opposite meanings of “oversight.” And even if it’s a small percentage of people who take advantage, when you’re talking about a couple trillion dollars in spending, a billion here, a billion there, it starts to add up.

When it was announced in July that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners were getting $10.4 million in federal CARES Act cash to pay for everything from touchless ticket scanners to new traffic cones so they could host fans at games this fall, I started digging into where exactly the money was coming from. As the CARES Act itself is crazy long and contains dozens upon dozens of spending provisions, I started by setting out to find out which pool of money, exactly, the Bucs’ cash was coming from. My circuitous research route led me to:

  • The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration, which oversees grants to help communities respond to Covid. Got the answer back quickly: Nope, wasn’t them.
  • Hillsborough County, whose press office spent a bunch of time digging into it before confirming that the money came straight from the U.S. Treasury, with no intervening federal agency.
  • This Treasury Department document, which helpfully notes a total of $256,847,065.00 allocated to Hillsborough County (out of a nationwide allocation of more than $130 billion), but no breakdown of individual grants.
  • Back to the county, which informed me that on May 6 the board of commissioners approved CARES Act spending in the amount of: workforce training $30 million; accelerated business recovery $100 million; life/safety programs $145 million; and $10 million in a “contigency” slush fund. The stadium money was included as part of the life/safety spending.

So we’re left with the federal government having sent a quarter of a billion dollars to the county government for pretty much whatever it pleases, and the county saying, Sure, $10 million for a football stadium, that counts as “life/safety.” It’s the sort of thing that normally you’d hope would trigger a bunch of big flashing warning lights, but as Phil Mattera of Good Jobs First, which is tracking Covid spending, notes, “The Trump Administration is paying little attention to how CARES Act funds are being spent or the track record of the companies receiving the aid.”

It’s also the sort of thing that’s only likely to encourage more sports team owners and stadium operators to line up for aid, and oh hey lookit this from yesterday:

The Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners approved over $4 million in Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act funding to add Covid-19 safety procedures at Amalie Arena and George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa.

Life during wartime is rough, but it can also a great time to grab fistfuls of money and run.

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Friday roundup: Deadspin est mort, vive Deadspin (also baseball may be dead again, film at 11)

access_time personNeil deMause

This was another shitty week in what feels like an endless series of shitty weeks, but with one undeniable bright spot: On Tuesday, the former staffers of Deadspin announced the launch of Defector, a new site that will be everything the old Deadspin was — sports and news reporting and commentary “without access, without favor, without discretion” — but this time funded by subscriptions and staff-owned, so safe from the threat of new private-equity owners decreeing that they stop doing everything that made the site both popular and worthwhile. I’ve already explained why I thought Deadspin desperately mattered for anyone who cares about sports’ role in our greater lives, or just likes great writing that makes you both laugh and think; you can read here my own contributions to the old site before its implosion (not sure why the article search function is listing every article as written by Barry Petchesky, who knows what the private-equity people are up to). Needless to say, launching a DIY journalism site in the middle of the collapse of the entire journalism business model is an inherently risky prospect, so if you want to give the Defector team a bit more of a financial foundation to work from, you can subscribe now. I already have.

But enough good news, let’s get on with the parade of sadness and horror:

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Buccaneers could get $10m in federal money to let people go to NFL games in middle of pandemic

access_time personNeil deMause

The Hillsborough County Commission is set to vote tomorrow on spending $10 million in federal CARES Act money to equip the Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium with stuff to make attending games there … the word The Athletic uses is “safer,” but we’ll be the judge of that. Among the stuff that would be paid for with the public funds:

  • Touchless ticket scanners: $502,475
  • A new public-address system in parking lots so that fans can hear when it’s their turn to enter the stadium: $250,000
  • Stanchions and barriers to “set up queuing inside the stadium for escalators, ATMs and other areas”: $225,000
  • 6,600 traffic cones to mark off (socially distanced?) parking spaces: $50,000 (checks out: apparently traffic cones are crazy expensive)
  • Conversion to touch-free toilets, sinks, and soap and paper-towel dispensers: $788,000
  • PPE for stadium staff ($300,000), “employee protection guards” ($550,000), and reconfiguring the press box and other areas to make it easier for people working there to socially distance ($550,000)

So on the one hand, all these seem reasonable things to do if you’re looking to reopen a sports stadium anytime soon, and arguably even good investments for the longer-term future, assuming we’ve all recognized now that everyone communally touching the same items is a vector for all kinds of microbes. And the CARES Act money is earmarked for projects to improve “public safety,” at least according to The Athletic, though I can’t actually find the language in the bill itself. (It’s really long.)

On the other hand, the CARES Act money is finite, and Hillsborough County is looking at choosing to spend what cash it has on a publicly owned facility that mostly benefits a private sports business. (The University of South Florida also uses it for college football games, if there are any college football games this year.) Bucs owners the Glazer family stand to make a ton of extra revenue if they’re able to sell tickets this season, but it doesn’t sound like they’ll be on the hook for any spending to allow that to happen.

There’s also some curious information in The Athletic about the timing of the upgrades:

The agenda proposal calls for the first and largest phase of the project to be completed by Oct. 31 (about midway through the NFL season as currently scheduled) and the balance finished by the end of the year.

So at least half the season would be played without all the new fancy sinks and such, and the entire project would be completed just in time for the football season to end. But it would still come in handy for the 2021 season, if an effective vaccine still eludes us by then, and if it turns out to be safe for people to gather together so long as they don’t all touch the same things, which already doesn’t seem to be what science says.

In short: Spending $10 million in public on stadium upgrades to keep football fans (possibly) safer is arguably better than spending it on new clubhouse toasters, but maybe not absolutely the highest priority. And at worst, it can be seen as endorsing social-distancing theater: Should a county government really be spending any money on abetting the reopening of public gathering places in a state that has had more new cases in the last ten days than the entire country of China has since the pandemic began? Tune in tomorrow to see if that question gets raised by the county commission, or if it’s all just Hey, the federal government gave us this money, so it doesn’t really cost us anything, right?

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Friday roundup: I, for one, support our new dancing robot overlords

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! Let’s see what’s going on:

While I’m sorely tempted to stop right there, we do have some other news this week to cover, so let’s continue:

  • Oak View Group, the operator of the New York Islanders‘ new Belmont Park arena currently under construction for a planned opening next year, is reportedly interested in taking over operations of the Nassau Coliseum as well, according to Newsday “sources.” I mean, so would I if the price were right, and given that current operator Mikhail Prokhorov is $2 million behind in rent and threatened with eviction, OVG probably thinks it can get a good deal here, but still it’s hard to see this as anything other than throwing a few pennies at shutting down a rival so as not to risk any competitors making a go of it.
  • Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury has looked at the impact of the new Atlanta Braves stadium that “was intended to serve as an anchor for further economic development in the suburban business district of Cumberland that would ripple throughout the county,” and found that local commercial property values actually went down relative to similar properties elsewhere in the Atlanta metro area. Bradbury theorizes that businesses may not want to locate near all the traffic congestion of a sports stadium, or be scared off by the tax surcharges put in place to help fund the $300 million public cost. “This finding is consistent with the vast literature on the economic impact of sports venues and events,” concludes Bradbury, which is economistese for “We told you so, over and over and over again, but you wouldn’t listen.”
  • Restaurant owners in Edmonton are so desperate for business that one declared himself “super-excited” at the prospect that visiting NHL teams might place some takeout orders, and the Edmonton Journal sports section is so desperate for hockey news that it ran a whole article about it. Wait, that was in the business section? These are not glorious times for journalism.
  • The National Women’s Soccer League used a forgivable loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program to help pay players when its season shut down, which sounds like (and is) a subsidy but is also exactly how the PPP is supposed to work: covering salaries to keep people from being laid off during a pandemic, thus keeping the economy from collapsing even more than it is otherwise. Sure, it would have been nice if the program hadn’t run out of money before most businesses could access it, but given that the maximum player salary in the NWSL is $50,000 a year, it’s hard to complain too much about them being less deserving than anyone else.
  • The way the PPP was not supposed to work was for companies to hold onto employees and then lay them off as soon as they’d certified for the forgivable loans, but that’s what New Era did in Buffalo, and now Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is so mad that he’s refusing to call the Buffalo Bills stadium by its New Era-branded name, which will totally show them.
  • Lots of NFL teams are planning for reduced capacities at games this fall, while the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is preparing for his players to “all get sick, that’s for sure.” And that’s the state of the NFL in a nutshell right now.
  • Hawaii can’t spend $350 million on replacing Aloha Stadium with a new stadium and redeveloping the area around it because somebody made a typo in the legislation and wrote 99-year leases instead of 65-year leases, everybody laugh and point!
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