Sodboy13

On 4/21/2024 at 1:25 PM, Sodboy13 said:

I am not exaggerating when I say, outside of the fan seating, our kids have a better setup for indoor flag football at the local rec center.

 

If anyone want to set a line on how many teams finish the season I'm all ears. Right now I'm seeing two in Salem and Louisiana that I'm not sure will even start it.

"Philadelphia," which is operating as a full-time road team, is number three on the list now. We're two days out from the season starting... or are we?

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.

On 4/19/2024 at 12:43 PM, Dilbert said:

Now about a week before the season starts, the Louisiana VooDoo have moved from Lake Charles to Lafayette.

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.

Quote

Oh, it is more than what they put forward. I think all of you are starting to report on that. I mean, they want infrastructure dollars on top of what they’re asking for in funding.

 

They’re asking to keep all of the revenue from other events that might take place at the stadium. You know, if there’s a Beyoncé concert, they want all of that revenue too, and everything else that might happen there. So yeah, I mean, there are aspects of this that are, you know, probably non-starters.

 

Having said that, you know, always open to a conversation but as I’ve said, the priorities of the people of Illinois are not building stadiums, right?

 

It’s really about for example, birth equity and building birth centers for people in Black and Brown communities, just as one example. But we have important things we need to invest in for the future of the state and again, stadiums in my mind don’t rank up in the top tier of those.

 

[Asked about state revenues for other purposes being used for the stadium]

 

You’re saying dollars that would come into the state of Illinois for other purposes and kind of making sure that those go to this? No. I mean, the truth is that if we have dollars coming in to support parks, for example, in Chicago or in the state of Illinois, it strikes me that it wasn’t contemplated that those dollars would go to a ballpark [chuckles], but rather parks for children and families and neighborhoods and making sure that the city of Chicago has beautiful places for people to go and enjoy themselves without having to spend hundreds of dollars on tickets and and other things.

 

[Asked about whether it would be preferable to use revenues rather than borrowing]

 

You mean if like manna from Heaven, a check arrived and it said ‘Give this to the Chicago Bears’ would I want to do that, is that your…?

 

[If there happened to be one of those funds, would that be preferable to borrowing money]

 

I’m unaware. If you know of one of those funds, yeah, let me know. I’m unaware of one.

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.

8 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

Ah.  Well, a post at 5:37pm EDT yesterday in this thread reads: "Update - all games this weekend are off the NFLN schedule".  A later post in that thread at 7:37 says that the Sling schedule shows that the Saturday game has been moved to NFL Total Access.

 

So, let's see what happens!

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)

28 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

According to posts in the ArenaFan message board, the games that were to have been carried by the NFL Network are now off that channel's schedule.

It is entirely a matter of speculation whether someone at the AFL didn't make a payment, or whether the NFL Network was scared off by the Iowa Rampage's preseason game that was shown on YouTube and/or by the pictures of the Oregon Blackbears' preseason game that that team shared.

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.

3 hours ago, CS85 said:

 As others have said and will continue to say, this is not going to happen, and if it does, it certainly won't be anything like this.  

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!

8 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

So when this all blows up in Kevin Warren's face, do they go back to Arlington Heights?

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.

29 minutes ago, CS85 said:

 

@Sodboy13 (quoted above) and @The_Admiral can opine with more clarity on the politics and local points

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/

Quote

Adding… Gov. Pritzker just pointed out during another press conference that three professional sports teams are hoping to build new stadiums, but the Bears plan uses all the available bonding authority for this project, leaving nothing for the other two.

…Adding… Isabel just asked how the capital plan will be funded. “There are dollars that we believe exist at the state level, at the potentially federal level, [and] at the city level,” CEO Williams said. So, he didn’t answer the question.

Isabel asked a follow-up about specific funding from the state, but Williams would only say “We do look forward to having some detailed conversations with the state here in the near future.”

…Adding… Senate President Harmon react…

Senate President Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) issued the following statement regarding the Chicago Bears’ stadium proposal unveiled Wednesday:

“At first glance, more than $2 billion in private funding is better than zero and a more credible opening offer. But there’s an obvious, substantial gap remaining, and I echo the governor’s skepticism.”

…Adding… House Speaker Chris Welch…

The Speaker is happy to continue engaging in conversations regarding the future of our Chicago teams, and is encouraged by the private investments being proposed. In the current legislative environment, with many important budget pressures, there hasn’t been a strong appetite for these projects. Environments can and do often change in Springfield, but the Speaker’s priority is to stay focused on passing a balanced budget and continuing the positive outlook we saw announced by Moody’s yesterday.

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

1 hour ago, GDAWG said:

 

From me on Monday afternoon:

Quote

A meeting with "city officials and stakeholders" means no county or state ones want anything to do with this still. 

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.

7 hours ago, 655321 said:

It's always so silly when a team puts the same logo on their helmet and their sleeves. It's just so redundant and lazy.

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

26 minutes ago, The_Admiral said:

 

Utah has a long tradition of borrowing from Denver on the NBA side of things, so I guess it's just as well that they start doing it with hockey and the perils of snow-covered mountains, too.

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?"

1 hour ago, The_Admiral said:

Yes! He has "observer status"!

 

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:

Quote

Sports economist J.C. Bradbury, voicing a common concern among economists, said whatever public money is earmarked for the stadium would be better spent on other public projects, or returned to taxpayers.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Bradbury said. “The Bears aren’t going to leave one of the most iconic football markets in the country. Tell the Bears to pay for their own damn stadium, and if they don’t like it, to go jump in Lake Michigan.”

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

3 hours ago, McCall said:

I thought the plan was to build the new stadium south of Soldier Field, which would allow them to continue using it. Then demolish the "stadium" portion of Soldier Field once the new stadium is completed, while incorporating the protected exterior into a museum. Or did I misread that?

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.