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NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay


duma

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I don't doubt your reasoning, DP, I just am not sure about Kroenke's priorities.

Does he want to go to LA so badly that he'd cut such a deal? Or is part of the reason he wants to be in LA because of the control he envisions having there?

I'm not saying he'd balk and choose to make good in St. Louis, either. So I guess I don't have a more likely alternative, but playing ball with Spanos doesn't quite feel like him.

But I've been wrong about Mr. Kroenke many times before.

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It does seem unlikely.

And if LA fans are trying to take up all the St. Louis tickets, that's really uncool. It doesn't have to pit different fanbases against each other.

Taking up tickets is crossing the line regardless, but the crappy thing about this is that it does kind of have to pit fanbases against each other. There's no way around it.

It's Los Angeles vs. St. Louis vs. San Diego vs. Oakland.

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I don't doubt your reasoning, DP, I just am not sure about Kroenke's priorities.

Does he want to go to LA so badly that he'd cut such a deal? Or is part of the reason he wants to be in LA because of the control he envisions having there?

I'm not saying he'd balk and choose to make good in St. Louis, either. So I guess I don't have a more likely alternative, but playing ball with Spanos doesn't quite feel like him.

But I've been wrong about Mr. Kroenke many times before.

Oh mine's nothing more than a semi-educated guess. But either way, Kroenke's in a no-lose situation: if he has to co-own the Carson site with the Chargers, he then has all that land in Inglewood he can develop. Even if the league chooses the Chargers and Raiders, they could mandate that Carson be ditched in favor of Inglewood, giving Kroenke a nice payday as well. He definitely set himself up well.

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Even absolute worst case to Kroenke (in his opinion) is still a pretty sweet deal. He'll either get a brand new stadium here for just $250 million or stay in a still adequate stadium with a pro-owner lease and maintain his year to year flexibility. And not just that, by being the LA "loser" there might be some sense that the league "owes him one."

So yeah, he's set himself up well.

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It's actually going to get pretty interesting.

The comptroller has come out as still believing the newest plan involves too much public money from the city. The Board of Alderman will now begin formally vetting and considering the plan.

There are two big variables in play here. The first is how much tax revenue will be generated on game days.

The payment formula annually (disregarding some minor fluctuations in some years) will be $6 million to pay off bonds and 50% to payoff the Rams/NFL for utilizing the naming rights money to issue new bonds (rather than giving it directly to the team/league). But what the net financial impact on the city is depends entirely on what that gameday tax revenue is.

Right now that number is $4.2 million. So subtract that from the $6 million that the city pays every year and you're left with a $1.8 million loss. Not awesome. Not awful either. But if that number stays the same, now $2.1 million of that money would be going to the team or league, so the city would be down $3.1 million every year.

Chances are the tax revenue will grow and it won't be that bad. But until they put together firm projections, it's hard to judge.

And then there's the other variable which is the NFL's absurd stance on the already absurd issue of corporate welfare. Seeing as they view the naming rights money as theirs (something the task force seems okay with since they're trying to pay that money back) AND they see all the tax revenue as theirs, the plan essentially calls for the city to pay the league back with the league's money.

As we've discussed, that's borderline unreal. But that's their stance. And as their stance, that means they're viewing that entire line of funding as private contribution, not public. That shifts the ledger, and that means whether the Board of Alderman approve the deal or not, things may not get the NFL stamp of approval.

One thing I'd look out for is the possibility that St. Louis County re-enters the funding picture. I think the task force made a crucial mistake in letting them out of the financing because they said they wanted a public vote. (A mistake that was compounded by suing the city to deny those residents a public vote.) Had the task force EMBRACED the idea of a public vote, they probably could have campaigned for it and passed it in both St. Louis City and St. Louis County and then had a wider range of funds to draw from.

It was a big misplay, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're pushing the county hard behind the scenes to re-enter the picture somehow.

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They obviously felt that a vote would go against them, be it city or county. Better to face the bad PR of suing to invalidate the law than lose a public vote.

They were afraid that would be the outcome. But I'm pretty confident they were wrong.

If it was just an issue of PR, I wouldn't call it a strategic error, though.

The strategic error was that they let the County off the hook when they wanted a vote and then sued the city to bypass the vote. What that set up is a lack of a large financial base to draw from and extra scrutiny from the one base you left.

Looking to be a big mistake.

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I'll post more on it later, but from the "NFL city" standpoint, I'd say St. Louis did a wonderful job tonight. I think the representatives from the NFL would and did agree.

Did attendance at Sunday's game come up?

That probably tells the league as much about St. Louis as an "NFL city" as a free-to-attend town hall meeting.

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
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Wouldn't surprise me at all if St. Louis can Whoville their way into keeping their team at this point. bawwww middle america

And here's an accurate recap of NFL Public Input Meeting to Save Face Number 1:

A fan is a fan, no matter how...impartial? :/ :shrug:

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I'll post more on it later, but from the "NFL city" standpoint, I'd say St. Louis did a wonderful job tonight. I think the representatives from the NFL would and did agree.

Did attendance at Sunday's game come up?

That probably tells the league as much about St. Louis as an "NFL city" as a free-to-attend town hall meeting.

The fact that crowd noise impacted the Browns offense did. (I know, I know.)

The panel was blown away by the support.

Cynthia Hogan, a public policy senior vice president of the league, said, “It’s hard for me to imagine there’s a city in the United States that has a better fan base.”

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/professional/emotional-rams-fans-plead-their-case-to-nfl/article_aae2a5fc-cbab-51e0-a875-d3e29d6024d3.html

As Grubman pointed out frequently, they are not the ones deciding the outcome, of course.

But I do look forward to your next potshot at the market, Rams80. Make it a good one.

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At the same time though, a room full of 1,500 passionate fans doesn't necessarily correlate to a consistently-filled 50,000 seat stadium. Everyone in attendance was an outlier to the average.

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