Sodboy13

Quote

A big part of what excites many Bears fans is the thought that moving them out of Chicago punishes and hurts black people there.

You hit a bullseye here, and you've no doubt seen and understood that in the fifteen years since Obama got elected, the right-wing provocateurs have done a hell of a job in turning "Chicago" into "the N-word you can say out loud in any crowd, make sure the contempt drips off your lips when you pronounce it." I thought Darren Bailey might cross this line when he kept calling Chicago a "hellhole" from his rented condo in the Hancock building, because he's a very dumb man, but even he just tiptoed up to it .

Hell of a letter there. And the CTA's decline over the last three years really bears that Lightfoot hallmark of "How can anybody something up this badly without it being intentional?" Dorval Carter needs to be forced out naked on a platform in February for a Brown Lune train that never arrives.

So not only do we get the Oregon-esque shoulder "oars," we also get a boat oar pants stripe, and a numeral font that tries to make a standard block font proprietary by randomly adding and removing serifs and diagonal cuts.

Really reinforcing the stereotype that Canadian pop culture is 10-15 years behind American at all times, here. This set cannot get gone soon enough.

I thought Brian Woods left the USFL to spend more time with his family. Turns out he'd rather spend his time with other people's kids.

This reads like someone wants to make a full league out of Bishop Sycamores, which I guess could be lucrative until enough people catch on. Or maybe Brian still has the right phone numbers to loosen the purse strings at Fox.

It's also worth remembering that the Bears did not move to Soldier Field until 1970, when pretty much all of the transit rail track currently in use was already built out. Up until then, they played at Wrigley, the 'L' was right there, no worries, and Soldier Field was a desolate 100,000-capacity bleacher cavern whose main draw at the time was the Prep Bowl.

Curse the NFL-AFL merger and the subsequent demand on George Halas to put his team in a venue bigger than 35,000, and with lights.

There is a transit issue that is hard to rectify by virtue of most games being on Sundays, when public transit schedules are always going to be lightest, and most of the Bears' ticket buyers being in the suburbs. Plenty of them want to drive anyway, so they can pay the extra $50 surcharge on top of parking to tailgate in the designated area with their repainted school bus full of gas grills or whatever. As for those who would want to commute, most Metra lines only run hourly or every two hours on Sunday, and their downtown stations are mainly west of the Loop, whereas Soldier Field is well east of it. The Electric Line and the South Shore stop right by Soldier Field, but they serve the South Side, South Suburbs, and Northwest Indiana, aka where the money isn't. Moving to a different location won't solve any of this problem, it will merely change the distance from it.

The Arlington Heights location does have a Metra stop right there. Running adequate service and coordinating bus shuttles with it on game days would almost certainly require the Bears paying for the increased service. The Bears paying for anything that does not directly make them money is a non-starter.

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.

On 6/2/2023 at 5:23 PM, the admiral said:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/naperville-sun/ct-nvs-naperville-chicago-bears-mayor-wehrli-st-0603-20230602-lukfvexmn5eetmvapyxncgkbxi-story.html

 

 

To get you up to speed, the McCaskeys got caught with their pants down when the Cook County assessor played some dirty politics and nearly sextupled the property tax assessment for Arlington Park, which had the McCaskeys sputtering about how they couldn't afford this, which then raised the question, well, if you can't afford this in-the-grand-scheme-of-things small inconvenience, how can you afford the entire project?, which, obviously, they can't. Now they're playing zero-dimensional chess and trying to negotiate with DuPage County instead. I don't think they end up moving anywhere.

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.

8 hours ago, VampyrRabbit said:

How about Meruelo buys Phoenix Rising instead and finds the money to build a stadium and enter MLS, finally letting the NHL take the Coyotes behind the toolshed? Is there any chance of that happening?

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.

5 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Is that just a curtained off part of the arena?  Not even a separate-private room?

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.

3 hours ago, BrySmalls said:

Move the Yotes to Hartford?

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)

2 hours ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

The actual Coyote players have to think this is all absurd, right? Imagine being a superstar kid in youth and junior hockey your whole childhood, get drafted to the pinnacle of your profession, only to end up in a smaller arena than you've ever played in with your team under constant threat of relocation.

 

Must be a total mind screw.

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.

16 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

There was rampant speculation that new Montreal Alouettes owner Pierre Karl Peladeau (who's a controversial figure in Canada) was going to play a role in bringing the NHL back to Quebec City when he bought the Alouettes.  

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

2 minutes ago, IceCap said:

Quebec City's junior team, the Remparts, are in the QMJHL finals and in their two home games thus far they had a combined 36,518 in attendance.

 

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.

On 5/2/2023 at 11:10 PM, habsfan1 said:

The Good News: Joe Pavelski is having an incredible 4 goal night.

 

The Bad News: He's the only one who showed up.

3 hours ago, Cruhawk7975 said:

I personally think the Gamblers will be rebranded and moved to a different market ahead of season 3 for that reason. (My money is on either Tulsa as a revived "Oklahoma Outlaws", or a revival of the Tampa Bay Bandits if they can get a deal to play at Raymond James field), but I listed them here to illustrate the point. But the others do have realistic venue options: 

• NOLA can play at either Yulman Stadium (Tulane), or just the lower bowl at the Superdome with dimmed lighting/tarps on the upper levels. 
• Philly could go to either Franklin Field or Subaru park (assuming the Union are open to it) 
• NJ can go to SHI Stadium (Rutgers) or Red Bull Arena (again assuming RBNY would be open to it). 
• PITT can do either lower bowl only at Heinz field, or rebrand/relocate to another market (think Columbus could be one to keep an eye on at (fka) Mapfre, or potentially Chicago at Seakgeek Stadium) 

 

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.

18 hours ago, HOOVER said:

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.