Sodboy13

Had The Score on as I drove my car to the repair shop (the boys were listening to baseball as I drove yesterday.) I was subjected to five minutes of Mully and Haugh (wait it gets worse) hosting an "expert" on the business of stadiums who immediately started blaming "these corrupt politicians in Cook County and Illinois who can't get out of their own way" and described the Bears getting billions in free money as "this gift they were going to give to the northern suburbs." I detest driving downtown for work, but for a moment I was more than willing to gun it down to Two Prudential with a cast iron skillet in hand.

Capitol Fax is a state politics blog with some relatively connected commenters, and one pointed out how the Bears immediately stepped on a rake with this. What they should have done was publicly express interest in buying the land "under the right conditions," and working with the state and other necessary entities to do so. Instead, the six-billion-dollar mom-and-pop shop thought they could bigfoot everyone because they're the indispensable Bears, bought the land, and then held out their hands saying "One stadium village, please." Now they're getting clowned by the governor, the state legislature, even the local school districts. As for the county assessor, he's run two successful campaigns on "I'm not a corrupt jag who rolls over for rich property owners at the expense of poor ones like the last guy," so he went ahead and said the property the Bears paid $197 million for was worth, oh, about $197 million. Now the Bears are left to blubber about what the land is actually worth without having much of an explanation of why they'd overpay by $150 million for it, and at the same time trying to explain why they're the sort of smart and savvy business whose wise financial decisions are worth a couple billion in tax breaks and state money. So now they're going to try to charm Naperville's new failson mayor, who definitely does not have ten figures on hand to give, nor the juice to get it. Naperville's got plenty of square mileage, but it's all been turned into lawns and strip malls for the last two decades, so good luck finding land cheap enough to make up for having to sell Arlington at a significant loss. The time to do this all was 25 years ago when nearly no one was wise to the stadium scam and the linemen from the '85 Bears could still actually remember playing in the Super Bowl. Instead, the Bears went cheap, as they have since time immemorial, put themselves at the mercy of the Park District and a city that views the Soldier Field renovation as another massive Daley can-kicking that's still biting them in the collective ass. Other potential municipalities for the Bears to explore: - Rockford, which a local state rep has already thrown in on. Well, maybe not Rockford proper, too big, too pricey. The Bears can buy the Stellantis property in Belvidere. - DeKalb, where the Bears can add 40,000 in temporary bleachers to Huskie Stadium while positioning themselves as the secondary tenant in a new facility built for NIU's move up to the Big XII. - Peotone, just as soon as the airport opens.

Yes. GOD, YES.

I recommend reading this part over and over again until the "NO" in your head is so loud you can actually feel it exert a slight pressure on your brain. Kicked my workweek off right.

Yeah, I think that was for the first couple of games because the NHL-grade facilities weren't going to be ready until like November/December. So they had massive road trips, but to keep things juuuuuuuust on this side of the insanity of a two-month road trip to open the the season, they dropped in a handful of home games with the Ikea setup you see pictured. This was the plan all along from when they announced the move to Mullett, by the way. Which tells you a fair bit about the plan.

I said upthread that we would see a lot of cities line up with cockamamie proposals between now and the end of the Coyotes' Mullett days in 2026. The week isn't even out and we're already into head injury territory. Omaha or Des Moines would make more sense than Hartford. At least their venues are newer. (please note that neither Omaha nor Des Moines would make sense, good God)

Clayton Keller reportedly wants out, and Craig Morgan was talking this afternoon that a top Yotes prospect (Logan something?) probably being perfectly happy to park himself at U of Minnesota for another year than having to subject himself to the NHL's Mystery Box. This franchise is well past the point of looking to ice a successful team, anyway. Just name Sam Hinkie GM or something. This thread is hot now for obvious reasons, but I am going to remind everyone that the Coyotes have the option to play at the Mullett for three more seasons, the league dropped $20 million of actual money upfront for getting facilities up to NHL standards there, and if one city in Arizona can launch a cockamamie proposal to bring the team there two days after the votes failed, imagine how many more are going to come to the table between now and 2026.

Is Patrick paying? Is Jake from State Farm paying? No? Next.

The Québec City metro area has an estimated population of 840,000-850,000, putting it on par with metropolitan statistical areas like North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, and Columbia, SC. The Hartford MSA is a shade over 1.2 million, by the way. The Canadian Dollar is worth 74 American cents, which oddly, was also the going rate in May of 1995. The American TV partners probably would not be thrilled trading out Market 10 (even given the current l-o-l state of interest in the NHL there) for a foreign country and language, and those deals are worth a whole lot more real money than they used to be. Short of a bulletproof billionaire coming in for QC like one did for Winnipeg, it all seems like a really tough ask, no matter how much the city loves its hockey and misses its team.

P-K Peledeau's bringing back the Nordiques? Holy hell what year is it?

Sounds like a great junior hockey market. Good for them. They can keep getting cheap tickets to watch their beautiful unpaid Francophone boys for years to come. It's no one else's fault they built an NHL arena on spec.

"If I let this team move to Houston and they start selling out every night, the salary cap goes up and you've lost your dumping ground for all your worst contracts" ought to get enough owners back in line.

Fool me fourteen times, shame on me, ya know?

I'll bet you Logan Wade's Shane Doan jersey this team is still in Mullett Arena next season, and if not there, then somewhere else in the state in 2025.

Say hello to Mullett Arena, the new temporary-until-further-notice home of your Arizona Coyotes. They are not leaving the state until Gary Bettman is in the ground, and even then.

Red Bull Arena has two full-time soccer teams - RBNY and Gotham FC - so I can't see them interested in squeezing in five more games of something guaranteed to tear up their pitch. If Pittsburgh moves to Columbus, are they still the Pittsburgh Maulers? Because as others have pointed out, this is the corner the league has backed itself into with legacy identities, and they can't reverse course on it when more than half the league's teams still aren't even playing in their home markets. SeatGeek in Bridgeview has the availability and a team name at the ready, but I highly doubt the interest is there. It's in a thoroughly odd spot that's inconvenient for a lot of people, even more so since the connector buses between the stadium and the Orange Line got discontinued. And historically, the only alt-football that has done well here has been of the arena variety.

ESPN is regarded as the gold standard of sports television, but over the last several years they've been quietly cutting corners in production over all their properties. It's little things like using cheaper cameras or running skeleton crews so the colors or audio aren't balanced properly, or maybe the graphics don't look as great or get wonky sometimes. It's the sort of thing you wouldn't probably pay much mind to, or you'd just assume it's your cable feed or stream being a little off or whatever. But then you get something like the split NHL deal, and you realize that Turner is just putting out a better version of the same product week upon week, when so many people assumed it was the ESPN half of the deal that would make the league look better. At this point, with their focus on acquiring properties and then presenting them on the cheap to the best of their ability, ESPN is a lot like the Fanatics of sports television.

I don't know what to tell ya, man. I'm not clout chasing by tweeting about my 5-year-old extolling the virtues of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or something. We're watching Jets-Knights right now, and he said that Winnipeg should wear their white jerseys at home in the playoffs to match the fans. It's just how he is.

Maybe 300 people watching Breakers-Gamblers in Birmingham right now. The rubber's gotta meet the road on teams playing in their actual markets for season three, and as has been discussed here by others, that is going to be an issue for several of these legacy identities.

Because I am an old crank who has been on this board too long, I needed to get in touch with the coveted youth demographic to see what they thought of these uniforms. So I asked my 9-1/2 year old son, who became a Seahawks fan after seeing them in neon green, and thought the old Cards unis were "trash." His analysis: "Oh, those are even worse than the last ones." "The red jersey needs to go with the white pants. That looks terrible." "Why don't the other ones have the name on the front?" "What is with the black one? Why do they keep on doing that? It doesn't even look like the right team." "The Buccaneers did this a lot better."

CCSLC slashfic

You can see what they were going for here, how they were looking to keep the spirit of this quintessential Cardinals look while applying some updates to it. And you can see how they botched it terribly. Inevitably with every uniform unveiling, the team makes a social media post with a closer look at elements of the getup that says "It's all in the details." Yes, yes it is! And that's why we're making fun of you!

It's "drip" to wear your uniform as tight as possible and a t-shirt that's four sizes too large underneath it to negate all the advantages of a skin-tight uniform.

The most important reveal of the night is that the CCSLC servers have never been stronger.