Sodboy13

Keep going. I'm almost there.

Hey, it worked for the Houston ThunderBears!

lol bet That works out to around $600,000 per owner from the other 31, which I assume will be considered a reasonable price to keep the contract dumping ground alive.

Guess what's going to happen in 3-4 years. Go on, guess. The Coyotes exist to eat unwanted contracts and artificially decrease hockey related revenues. Maybe they can explore the NFT space and become a three-headed scam.

My understanding of the Oakland Seals is that the NHL had its first real American television deal with CBS for 1967-68, and that CBS wanted two teams in California as part of the agreement. The WHL had the San Francisco Seals, the NHL wanted to destroy any aspirations the WHL had of being a rival major league, and the Seals owners had just enough interest and funding to make the jump. It went poorly from there for the Seals, but the league and the network both got what they wanted in the short term. (I thought the previous page was the end of this thread. It was not.)

I think Phoenix is in the Atlanta basket at this point: A large, non-traditional market that could be sustainable and successful with good ownership and a couple of circumstances, but has basically been soured for the foreseeable future because of bad ownership and some bad circumstances. The NBA made itself a global success while also planting a good number of franchises in places they had no or minimal pro competition. To that end, Québec City would seem like a market for the NHL to pursue. But when you consider the league wants to maximize American eyes and dollars, the language issue, and the continued push there for a cultural, if not political, separatism, I get how it becomes a hard sell. Phoenix is a mess in every sense, and the only hope there is a double longshot - a stable, competent owner, and a city willing to ignore the franchise's lengthy track record and plunk down for a new facility. But the NHL may rather give that every last chance of happening before it even considers Saskatoon au Francais.

You can talk Quebec City all you want, but the NHL - and I don't mean just Bettman and Daly - simply does not want to go there. I am beginning to think they'd pull an Arena League and fold the Coyotes rather than sell them to a QC outfit for market price.

How old are you, because I have some news.

At one point, I had all six of the 1995 WLAF replica jerseys.

If you have not read it yet, read The $1 League by Jim Byrne. It's out of print, but I was able to borrow it through our local public library network. Byrne was a USFL executive who wrote this book in 1986, basically right after the antitrust verdict. The book focuses almost entirely on the front office and team ownerships, and fills in a lot of details and background that Small Potatoes and Football for a Buck don't have with their more on-field perspectives.

I've loved and followed the WLAF, the Arena League, the XFL, the UFL, and the XFL again. If I had been old enough when the USFL was around, I would have been all about it, too. I've also read so much about these leagues over the decades, back to the days of Paul Reeths' Geocities page, because I find them fascinating, and their successes are just as illuminating as their failures. Follow it if you want; I am merely stating what this new USFL is going to be - a hustle built by a hustler on the ashes of two previous failed hustles. If it eventually gets to a point where teams not named the Birmingham Stallions are playing home games in the cities they purport to represent and selling tickets to those games, I will be pleasantly shocked.

"Cheaper To Keep Them!"

I like how the writer just assumes the rights fees the league is getting will be bigger than what the XFL got for its Disney/Fox combo platter, without citing a single number along the way. Let's not consider that NBC is shedding non-Olympic sports programming to the point of killing its dedicated sports channel, and likely picked up USFL games because it will fill weekend airtime very cheaply.

You're gonna need to cite some concrete reasons beyond "vibes."

I mean, it's "real," in the sense that the past two seasons of The Spring League got primetime slots on FS1 and FS2, and the FXFL actually existed for a season or two or whatever. That doesn't mean it's worth your time or attention for anything more than a casual flip of the channel to the Birmingham Spring Scrimmage League on a night when the schedules for the other sports leagues are very light.

I had thought it didn't have an ice plant at all, so it surprised me to see that it did. I see it's hosting Disney on Ice, but yeah, there's a big difference between maintaining ice for 3-5 nights as opposed to September through June, I imagine.

That "I'm the head ball coach" quote Lambo cited was just the most perfect, believable, and telling thing he could say about Meyer. After all those years of being the college big shot, he just couldn't process the difference between his old jobs and his current one. In college, the successful head football coach can be a wrathful god-king who commands fealty from his charges, fully dependent on staying in the coach's good graces to maintain their scholarships and their only shot at anything. This is why Dabo Swinney now has a public pants-pissing every week at the mere suggestion of college football players being able to exert minor control over where they play or receiving above-the-table compensation of some variety. In the NFL, the head ball coach - even a winning one - is middle management. Your players are employees, same as you, and they're also adults with things like contracts and legal representation. You are not the highest-paid state employee anymore, and your boss is not some athletic director who cowers at the thought of upsetting you enough to make you leave for Georgia, but an actual billionaire and businessman who could buy and sell you several times over. It is a different game off the field even more than on it, and the power-tripping zealots who think they "earned" $300,000 for their 58-3 win over a McNeese State team that the athletic department paid $400,000 to come to town can't fathom it. I am always here for college coaches effing around and finding out what the true free market and actual expectations entail. I hope Urban finds peace the best way he knows how - sitting on a pile of cash in his den while pounding it raw to his DVD of "The Junction Boys."

Milwaukee requires you to pay the Blackhawks several hundred million for territorial rights. Hartford was a small-time WHA oddity with an arena that sucked 25 years ago and no intention to build a new one. Moving on.

And here comes the novel coronavirus!

Yeah, but they were going to make up for the low prices on volume with their 30,000-seat hockey arena.

Congratulations to Gary Lawless on naming six cities, which is literally all that is.

Back to the grind, Craig Morgan reports the Coyotes are taking a serious look at playing in a 5,000-seat rink where they'd rank below the college team and get cut out of weekend dates, and they'd have to build their own team facilities with their own money which they definitely have. He also gets Bill Daly on the record not dismissing this idea outright, portraying it as the way station between Glendale and the (still not even approved) new rink in Tempe. If it gets that far, the league is going to try to sell it as a Brooklyn Islanders situation, and ooh lordy, it ain't that. https://gophnx.com/2021/12/12/exploring-the-coyotes-interim-arena-options/

Moving off the Coyotes for a moment, I was at Costco this morning, because I hate myself. There was a display of vouchers for the Blackhawks, good for two 100-level seats and $50 food and beverage credit. The package cost $350. So the Hawks realize they may not be that top-level draw that sells itself anymore, but they haven't grasped that being a consistent playoff misser means they can't charge $150 for a seat somewhere in the back of the lower bowl and call it a discount worthy of an impulse buy.

I think I've got it. Coyotes move to Houston, play at the Rockets' arena, purchase Joel Osteen's megachurch on the cheap as he comes under increased legal scrutiny, convert it back into the Summit, and achieve financial stability upon finding untold millions in the walls.