Sodboy13

Oh, absolutely. If they had reached out to the state ahead of the land purchase and expressed their intent, things could have been facilitated and wheels could have been greased in a fashion that would have pissed off a minimum of taxpayers. Instead they just up and bought the land, shoved their hands out and said "Stadium, please. 1985!" and for a governor who's priding himself on digging the state out of the financial hole the last one got us into, that simply was not going to work. Ginny McCaskey may think Jim Thompson is still governor, but it don't work that way around here anymore. Mike Madigan isn't governor anymore, either, but the Bears are more than welcome to donate to his legal defense fund and see what that gets them.

The team and the arena manager apparently had a bit of a falling out when the arena management firm expected the team to pay its agreed rent, and the team said "no." https://www.kplctv.com/2024/04/19/louisiana-voodoo-arena-football-team-move-lafayette/ From what I read on AF they have moved to the worst arena in Lafayette, used primarily for horse shows and lacking certain upper-tier luxuries like scoreboards and seat backs.

Governor Pritzker had a few more words to add today after the big showcase for Divine Intervention Stadium. It is bonkers that the guy born into ten-figure generational wealth is better at understanding this than the unionist semi-socialist organizer from the West Side, but here we are.

It almost certainly means a one-hour studio show reviewing the draft that just concluded, three consecutive repeats of that hour, and maybe AFL scores showing up on the bottom crawl once per rotation if the AFL can pay whatever the cost of that scant advertising would be. Anything else and the network would just go ahead and show the full game because they got paid for the time. They aren't going to offer clips or look-ins for free because the AFL couldn't hold up their end of the bargain.

I just checked my program guide on Xfinity, and I think you should know that "NFL Total Access" isn't like a streaming alternate channel or something, it's the name of an NFL Network studio show. The current NFL Network schedule for Sat 4/27: 12 pm ET/11 am CT: 2024 NFL Draft, Rounds 4-7 7 pm ET/6 pm CT: NFL Total Access - Week in Review (1 hour, followed by three repeats of the show) 11 pm ET/10 pm CT: 2024 NFL Draft - Round 1 (repeat) 2:30 am ET/1:30 pm CT: NFL Draft - Rounds 2-3 (repeat)

I would find it far more likely the AFL's scheduled airtime was brokered, so either the check did not clear or the AFL could not sell enough of the ad space to even sniff breaking even.

If you listened closely to Warren yesterday, you could hear that trademark Halas/McCaskey cheapness seeping through all the grandiose promises. Of course the stadium can't have a retractable roof; that would increase the project cost by three to five percent, and they're all about being "fiscally responsible." And yes, this plan needs to be approved within the next month, in the spring session of the state legislature, because construction costs might go up by the fall. Maybe the Bears have a coupon. Really solidifies who's going to be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns. Again, this team would be playing at Wrigley Field to this day had the NFL not forced their hand in 1970.

Boy this is good. Laurence Holmes just lets Brandon Johnson paint himself as the fool and the mark over sixteen minutes without having to deploy a single zinger or gotcha. Halfway in he's talking about the great public benefit being a shiny new place for the high school girls' flag football championship and the Prep Bowl, and by the end our progressive socialist mayor is talking about how proud he is to have the opportunity to align himself with these particular billionaires.

Well at least the PR side of it was effective. Brilliant move to piss everyone off 30 hours before you select your next quarterback of the future to ruin. Scam pastors are having a moment in town after Brandon appointed two to the CTA and RTA boards last week. Maybe Creflo Dollar will do a 20-night residency at the new place if we turn Northerly Island back into an airstrip for his private jet.

This magnificent new lakefront dome would only seat 65,000 instead of Soldier Field's 61,000. It would still be too small for Super Bowls and World Cups and NCAA Final Fours and probably Olympics. This is indescribably stupid! Go away!

No, because that would require the Bears to actually build something on their own dime. So they'll stay in Soldier Field, sell the Arlington land at a loss, and occasionally mention that Soldier Field is no longer the smallest NFL stadium because the Bills' new one only holds 58,000. That's the ideal outcome, anyway.

Here's what I can offer: Your average citizen has no interest in going into the weeds on political horse trading or finance structures. What they do know is that this is billions of dollars promised to a team that hasn't done dick-and-a-half for most, if not all, of their entire lifetimes. The last time the city did this for the same team, the end result was a concrete dump nobody likes that went way over budget. And meanwhile, they're reading about all this while they wait for an 'L' train or a bus that was supposed to be here 20 minutes ago and has since disappeared from the tracker, and in that time they also read the story about another robbery crew making a run around town with no chance of getting apprehended. Now public sentiment may not matter much when it comes billions in public money to billionaires, but like I said earlier, the politicians actually in charge of the purse strings here have expressed a profound disinterest. It ain't the '80s or the '90s anymore and enough of the public has gotten wise to these scams that it's trickled up to a good number of the officials dependent on their votes.

Red Stars.

Publicly funded stadiums are politics. So here are some more words from politicians who are not Brandon Johnson, courtesy of https://capitolfax.com/2024/04/24/pritzker-says-he-remains-skeptical-about-bears-proposal-im-not-sure-that-this-is-among-the-highest-priorities-for-taxpayers/ …Adding… House Speaker Chris Welch… Welch also told reporters today that if he put this plan on the big board today it would fail miserably.

Kevin Warren wants to bring the Olympics to Chicago and says the new $4.7 billion stadium will be a fixed dome because a retractable one would cost a couple hundred million more and he wants to be "fiscally responsible." In other news i smell toast burning fjshfbfzjskzhbr

From me on Monday afternoon: The nonsense state agency that was created to give Jerry Reinsdorf a free ballpark and later financed the Soldier Field renovations, both of which are still not paid off, is called the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority. Not the Chicago Sports Facilities Authority. It was created by the state legislature and governor. Unless Brand-o can magically make the money appear on his own, and he can't because he's the most impotent Chicago mayor since Eugene Sawyer, he needs the state support. And the governor, the state Senate leader, and the state House leader have all been pretty explicit "no"s on these public funding schemes floated by the Bears and White Sox. I'm sure the TV news will show some lovely renderings though. EDIT: Oh, buddy.

In this case it's also on the pants, so we're officially at a 1995 Carolina Panthers level of redundancy.

Wait until I tell you where the Utah Grizzlies came from.

If you go "Black Diamonds" and work off Smith's color scheme remarks, there's something to be made of purple, sky blue, black, and sparkle silver. Maybe you could ape the '90s Jazz a little and make the hem striping evoke a mountain range and... Crap, I just realized I'm making the Colorado Avalanche on a bad monitor.

Sweet Lordy Jesus on a flaky biscuit, what is that. Pants stripes aren't meant to be on the inner thighs, gang. Also, what are your team's colors besides "yes?"

Ah, so the arena plans will get up and running properly once he brings on Jerry Falwell Jr. as an investor.

The Chicago Tribune has some details. After the White Sox said they needed $2 billion in public funding to build their ballpark and got a rather frosty reception to the idea, the Bears realized they'd need to temper their request a bit to make it palatable and -- ahhhh, I'm just yankin' your chain, they want $2.3 billion in public money.for whatever $4.6 billion piece of garbage they want to plunk on the lakefront. From the Tribune article, I give you the hero America needs, sports economist J.C. Bradbury:

The white stripe makes it look like a curving road. I like it in theory, but it doesn't work for me in practice.

Sure would like to know where everyone is going to park, then. Maybe you can utilize McCormick Place and the giant underground garages at Grant and Millennium, but those are already used to an extent for Bears games and I don't know how much more capacity they have.

That's a funny and apt year to pick, because 2002 was when the NFL went from having a whole bunch of different companies on field to giving the exclusive rights leaguewide to Reebok.