NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay

[tBBP]

1 hour ago, neo_prankster said:

Do you really want people in Jacksonville to be mad at the NFL like Baltimore was back in the Eighties?

 

In fairness, on top of having won a few championships, the Colts were in one of America's legacy cities at the time, neither of which can be said about Jacksonville, so yes, even though the 60 or so people (61 if you count me--which these days even I have a hard time with) who would care about the Jaguars pulling up stakes might well be mad at the NFL, I doubt the league would care anywhere near as much as it did about Baltimore (and then Cleveland).

 

1 hour ago, SFGiants58 said:

Jacksonville was a mistake of an expansion. A bunch of NFL execs got wooed by the promise of the expansion committee, not seeing the issues with the place. Green Bay comparisons and the WFL/USFL support does not exactly translate to NFL prominence.

 

The only way Green Bay relates to Jacksonville is in terms of media market size; that's where the similarities end. At the time the franchise was awarded to Jville, the whole South was growing and expanding, and the league (shoot, all of them at the time) banked on that to draw in new fans (read: more $). I remind, though, that the only reason J. Wayne Weaver even won his bid is because another bid fell apart ahead of it--but if I remember right, that wasn't even the first time Jacksonville was brought up in expansion/relocation talks. All that said, the Jaguars started strong out of the blocks...and had they not fallen off a cliff after about '08, chances are they'd still have fairly decent fan support at the gates.  As it is, though, it got so apathetic down there that until they drafted Trevor Lawrence, you would have been hard-pressed to find Jags merch at Wal-Mart.  (That's not hyperbole; that was my actual observation.) Meanwhile, their expansion brethren done been to the Super Bowl twice and are now property of the league's richest owner...tsk tsk tsk. 

 

1 hour ago, neo_prankster said:

Wasn't Bezos rumored to be interested in the Broncos not too long ago?

 

He still is, especially since the Bowlen estate is in such disarray right now. 

[monkeypower]

57 minutes ago, tBBP said:

In fairness, on top of having won a few championships, the Colts were in one of America's legacy cities at the time, neither of which can be said about Jacksonville, so yes, even though the 60 or so people (61 if you count me--which these days even I have a hard time with) who would care about the Jaguars pulling up stakes might well be mad at the NFL, I doubt the league would care anywhere near as much as it did about Baltimore (and then Cleveland).

 

Baltimore cared so much about the move that the CFL team was going to be called the "Baltimore CFL Colts" until like hours before they kicked off when the NFL  got an injunction (at least according to Wikipedia) against them using Colts (they played their first season as the Baltimore CFL's/Baltimore Football Club (BFC WFT) and their second as the Stallions, which I do know is true and not just from Wikipedia) and they were drawing huge attendance numbers with lots of local support, partially out of spite to the NFL. However, the announcement of the Browns move to Baltimore killed the franchise and was the death blow for the CFL American expansion.

 

Fun bit of trivia, Baltimore is the only city to have won both a Super Bowl and a Grey Cup.

[The_Admiral]

37 minutes ago, tBBP said:

The only way Green Bay relates to Jacksonville is in terms of media market size; that's where the similarities end. At the time the franchise was awarded to Jville, the whole South was growing and expanding, and the league (shoot, all of them at the time) banked on that to draw in new fans (read: more $).

 

There was some talk of Jacksonville being "the Green Bay of the South" in that the team would become embedded in the cultural fabric of the town and punch above the weight of the media market. What they really thought was that Jacksonville would grow the same way Charlotte did. It didn't. Nashville did instead. Sometimes you gamble and lose.

[tBBP]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

 

There was some talk of Jacksonville being "the Green Bay of the South" in that the team would become embedded in the cultural fabric of the town and punch above the weight of the media market. What they really thought was that Jacksonville would grow the same way Charlotte did. It didn't. Nashville did instead. Sometimes you gamble and lose.

 

That bit.

 

The crazy thing is that had the Jaguars kept up the success they started out with, they were well on their way to embedding themselves into the local fabric. Shoot, those first 10 or 12 years were good ones (even if they never could get past Tennessee)...but somewhere after '08, it just went poof. Team turned horrible, Team changed uniforms, Team got worse, Team changed uniforms again, team was sold to the Super Mario brother they don't talk about, Team changed uniforms again, team began flirting with London, team teased fans with one fluke season a la the '03 Marlins minus the title--then backslid so fast it wasn't even funny. Now it's become a comedy show of errors (oh--and they changed their uniforms AGAIN).   Meanwhile, up in Charlotte...

 

...And speaking of Nashville, good GOD did it grow, and still is. It's outta control now.  And I do remember the quiet whispers about that team also potentially abandoning Tennessee if they couldn't get things turned around after Steve McNair and Eddie George moved on. Well obviously, they did (and CJ2K had a big hand in helping sustain what of the fanbase stuck around during the height of his fame there, because Lord knows they ain't have anybody else worth mentioning at the time--Vince Young wasn't there long enough to matter).

[neo_prankster]

2 hours ago, tBBP said:

 

That bit.

 

The crazy thing is that had the Jaguars kept up the success they started out with, they were well on their way to embedding themselves into the local fabric. Shoot, those first 10 or 12 years were good ones (even if they never could get past Tennessee)...but somewhere after '08, it just went poof. Team turned horrible, Team changed uniforms, Team got worse, Team changed uniforms again, team was sold to the Super Mario brother they don't talk about, Team changed uniforms again, team began flirting with London, team teased fans with one fluke season a la the '03 Marlins minus the title--then backslid so fast it wasn't even funny. Now it's become a comedy show of errors (oh--and they changed their uniforms AGAIN).   Meanwhile, up in Charlotte...

 

...And speaking of Nashville, good GOD did it grow, and still is. It's outta control now.  And I do remember the quiet whispers about that team also potentially abandoning Tennessee if they couldn't get things turned around after Steve McNair and Eddie George moved on. Well obviously, they did (and CJ2K had a big hand in helping sustain what of the fanbase stuck around during the height of his fame there, because Lord knows they ain't have anybody else worth mentioning at the time--Vince Young wasn't there long enough to matter).

 

So how come Nashville grew and Jacksonville didn't?

[dont care]

28 minutes ago, neo_prankster said:

 

So how come Nashville grew and Jacksonville didn't?

Jacksonville has nothing but the football team and a navy base, and a good port for shipping, Nashville actually has attractions outside of the football team.

[tBBP]

6 hours ago, neo_prankster said:

 

So how come Nashville grew and Jacksonville didn't?

 

Three words:  GRAND OLE OPRY.  

 

Nashville was already on the upswing in the late '90s and early 2000s, but by 2012 or so it REALLY started to blow up. But Nashville's profile rose on the back of country music and the music business as a whole (never mind the fact that had NOTHING to do with how Nashville originally got the nickname "Music City"--but we'll let folk keep thinking that for now!).  Landing first the Predators and then the Titans sorta made Nashville (think it was) big-time, and then the people started moving in en masse.  The more the word got out, the more people flocked and then packed in.

 

Now, that isn't the only reason: the other one is that Tennessee is a very business-friendly state, being that there's no state tax (but they WILL get you on the sales tax; last I knew Nashville-Davidson county was at 9.8%), and Middle Tennessee also being quite scenic attracted more and more people--and business.  (Quiet is as kept, the medical industry is actually Nashville's biggest economic driver, not the music.) That plus being the state capital plus two successive mayors who were hellbent on turning Nashville into either Seattle or Atlanta Lite (which sent the city into a $34M deficit by 2018--but we'll look past that too for now) drew in more and more.  Oh and then of course there's Lower Broad aka Honky-Tonk Central aka Tourist Trap #1.  

 

Meanwhile, Jacksonville (which, like Nashville and Indianapolis, is merged with its county and, like Nashville, is also in a business-friendly state with no state tax) didn't and still doesn't have any of that high- or even medium-profile corporate presence (though there certainly is a lot of commercial enterprise there); basically Jacksonville is a big ol' spread out trailer park with some houses and navy bases. There's definitely nice areas, like San Marco, Orange Park, Yulee and such, but it ain't anywhere close to Nashville even on its best day--in fact, Indianapolis probably has a higher profile than does Jacksonville, and other than the fact that one's in the middle of Indiana and the other is near the east coast of Florida, the two places are actually quite similar (to include the flat-as-a-pancake topography).

 

TL; DR: Nashville got more glitz n' glamour than does Jacksonville, and we all know how people get attracted to shiny new things, so...yeah, that.

[Brian in Boston]

22 hours ago, monkeypower said:

Baltimore cared so much about the move that the CFL team was... drawing huge attendance numbers with lots of local support, partially out of spite to the NFL.

Certainly "huge attendance numbers" by CFL standards of the time. The Baltimore Football Club's average attendance of  37,347 fans per game in 1994 was good enough to top the CFL's second-best draw - Edmonton, with a 29,867 average - by nearly 7,500 fans per game. Edmonton exacted a measure of revenge in 1995, pulling in an average home crowd of  31,455 fans, which outpaced  the renamed Baltimore Stallions (30,112 avg.) by 1,343 per game.  

[B-Rich]

On 9/24/2021 at 8:59 PM, neo_prankster said:

 

So how come Nashville grew and Jacksonville didn't?

 

Adding on to what dont care and tBBP accurately stated, from a planning perspective...

 

To first grow, you have to have your base economic engine-- in the old days it was often geographically based:  a port, a major rail terminal or crossroads,  or especially the intersection of different forms of transportation (rail/highway with port).   Over the last couple of centuries, it has had a lot to do with business sectors and major employers -- Dallas/Houston with oil,  Detroit with the auto industry,  Pittsburgh with steel,  NY with finance,  Orlando and Las Vegas with  tourism. 

 

But what I learned in planning school was once you get to a certain point of growth, it just feeds upon itself.   For example, a  family moves into Atlanta or Nashville  for a new job ( originally, it may have been in the base business sector, but later it doesn't matter).  To serve that new family and the other new families moving in, you need  new  houses, which means construction jobs.  To feed these new families you need a new supermarket..  a new  franchise  of McDonald's.. you need a new dry cleaner...  for their kids, you need a new school.  All of those things need new employees, teachers, workers, etc.  who bring in their own families, which then engenders the need for even more workers and people. Growth feeding upon growth. 

 

About the only thing that can stop such unbridled growth is severe curtailing of a prime sector-- this has happened in places like Detroit (auto industry) and New Orleans (oil sector jobs and port business). 

[The_Admiral]

 

The dumbest people I know are so happy about this. I hope it never happens.

[Red Comet]

13 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

The dumbest people I know are so happy about this. I hope it never happens.

I’ll bite: How could Arlington Park be worse than the Millennium Falcon crash landing on the Parthenon aftermath they play in now?

[The_Admiral]

It'll probably be a huge drain on Arlington Heights, for one thing. It'll be another grand plan of building a lifestyle mall around a stadium that no one will go to for the other 350 days. Corporatizing Wrigleyville to that end was a pretty big failure, and Patriot Place, which I think is a more apt comparison, has not been a rousing success, to my knowledge. We already have enough malls that we don't go to anymore.

 

As I've said before in this thread (somewhere in here -- the impending relocation of the Chicago Bears seems to get lost in the shuffle of the relocation thread behind, I dunno, what we ate for breakfast), the infrastructure surrounding Arlington Park is not ideal for getting to and from football games. The roads around it will be very hard to widen, and the vaunted train station from the city is not that important because I'm pretty sure most season ticketholders are not in the city but rather on the North Shore or in southern DuPage County. Chicago's expressways and railroads are about sending everyone downtown. Commuting around the suburbs is a huge pain, especially getting from the North Shore to the NW burbs, where you pretty much have to putter down surface roads with lots of stop lights. Palatine Road from Northbrook to Arl.Hts. is an expressway with stop lights. I don't get it either.

 

Beyond the logistics of trying to get 80,000 people in and out of a football stadium in the middle of preserved-in-amber 1960s suburbia (Arlington Park is really in Rolling Meadows in all but name), losing the Bears would be a terrible blow to Chicago itself and a victory for some very odious people indeed. Take the temperature of this on Twitter and notice how many holding-a-fish-in-their-twitter-avatar guys are rejoicing in the Bears sticking it to the evil black lesbian mayor who made people wear masks. Everyone did a crappy job renovating Soldier Field, but these psychopaths are talking about it like it's in the projects. The city is already dying because of the pandemic and the riots, State Street and Michigan Avenue are probably dead forever now, losing the Bears on top of that would just be a feather in the cap of people who viscerally hate The City. That's a problem that Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Detroit all have, but I liked to think that greater Chicago was above that. Detroit has all its sporting events along a stretch of Woodward Avenue and everyone's as glad as possible under the circumstances to be there. Congratulations, Chicago will now have a more retrograde approach to urban planning and race relations than Detroit.

[Sport]

Sounds like a Landover, Maryland situation. Don't do it, Bears. 

 

Other than "it looks weird" what is wrong with Soldier Field? 

[leopard88]

1 hour ago, Sport said:

Sounds like a Landover, Maryland situation. Don't do it, Bears. 

 

Other than "it looks weird" what is wrong with Soldier Field? 

 

Besides looking weird, the capacity is really low for an NFL stadium in one of the largest cities in the country.

That said, Arlington Heights sounds slightly better than Landover since there are already at least some roads to get you there.  However, that is very much damning with faint praise.

[heavybass]

Looks like the Bears are ignoring Mayor Lightdork

[Sec19Row53]

4 hours ago, Sport said:

Other than "it looks weird" what is wrong with Soldier Field? 

Because of its physical location, it is too near the water table to build a proper football field. You can't dig it down without hitting water, thus the playing surface will always suck.

 

The old Soldier Field had too many seats that were located in the end zones. The new one doesn't have enough seats.

[The_Admiral]

5 hours ago, Sport said:

Sounds like a Landover, Maryland situation. Don't do it, Bears. 

 

Other than "it looks weird" what is wrong with Soldier Field? 

 

One big problem is that it has insufficient parking but also isn't particularly accessible by rail, either. The closest L station is Roosevelt, and that's still two-thirds of a mile or so away, which is no fun in BEAR WEATHER. It's about two miles from Union and Ogilvie. The electric lines to Millennium Park stop at 18th and the Museum Campus on either end of the field, but unless you're coming from Flossmoor, Hyde Park or Northwest Indiana, that doesn't do you a whole hell of a lot of good (no one is taking the train to Soldier Field from 107th/Cottage or whatever, lol). But again, there being a station at Arlington Park also isn't a miracle solution, because that only helps people on the Northwest Line, and it's the lines to the North Shore and Naperville that would carry the most Bears fans. Everyone will just be driving to the game, and 53, a state route that pretends it's an interstate past where the Eisenhower ends, doesn't have the capacity for that traffic.

 

One of the biggest problems with Soldier Field is an intentional one: its capacity is very low. I think it's the smallest stadium in the league now with the Oakland Coliseum gone and the Chargers no longer borrowing an MLS stadium. But they want it this way--what it lacks in gen-pop seats, it more than makes up for in luxury suites and very expensive seats close to the field. I know I always tease ol' what's-his-name about the Miami Dolphins positioning themselves as a "luxury brand," but I think the Bears, based in Lake Forest, the capital of old Chicago money, really do see themselves as a product for the wealthy. Any suburban stadium will have even less of a democratic spirit than the current Soldier Field does, and that's saying something. The seats for normal fans will be even more compromised by the need to have more and better luxury amenities. 

 

Renovating Soldier Field turned out to be a huge and costly mistake. It wasn't worth romanticizing in the first place. At the turn of the millennium, there was ample undeveloped land south and west of the Loop that could have fit a new stadium. It's all condos now, of course. Soldier Field could have been downsized to a municipal facility and left alone architecturally.

[The_Admiral]

The "go McCaskeys go!" boosterism has been downright bizarre, by the way, given that no one in the last 30 years has trusted a McCaskey to zip up his fly after taking a leak. If you were wondering what it takes for people to start relentlessly championing the NFL's most abundant and astoundingly incompetent failsons, the answer is "a goofy-looking black lesbian," apparently. 

[Sport]

8 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

One big problem is that it has insufficient parking but also isn't particularly accessible by rail, either. The closest L station is Roosevelt, and that's still two-thirds of a mile or so away, which is no fun in BEAR WEATHER. It's about two miles from Union and Ogilvie. The electric lines to Millennium Park stop at 18th and the Museum Campus on either end of the field, but unless you're coming from Flossmoor, Hyde Park or Northwest Indiana, that doesn't do you a whole hell of a lot of good (no one is taking the train to Soldier Field from 107th/Cottage or whatever, lol). But again, there being a station at Arlington Park also isn't a miracle solution, because that only helps people on the Northwest Line, and it's the lines to the North Shore and Naperville that would carry the most Bears fans. Everyone will just be driving to the game, and 53, a state route that pretends it's an interstate past where the Eisenhower ends, doesn't have the capacity for that traffic.

 

One of the biggest problems with Soldier Field is an intentional one: its capacity is very low. I think it's the smallest stadium in the league now with the Oakland Coliseum gone and the Chargers no longer borrowing an MLS stadium. But they want it this way--what it lacks in gen-pop seats, it more than makes up for in luxury suites and very expensive seats close to the field. I know I always tease ol' what's-his-name about the Miami Dolphins positioning themselves as a "luxury brand," but I think the Bears, based in Lake Forest, the capital of old Chicago money, really do see themselves as a product for the wealthy. Any suburban stadium will have even less of a democratic spirit than the current Soldier Field does, and that's saying something. The seats for normal fans will be even more compromised by the need to have more and better luxury amenities. 

 

Got it. Thanks. 

 

8 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Renovating Soldier Field turned out to be a huge and costly mistake. It wasn't worth romanticizing in the first place. At the turn of the millennium, there was ample undeveloped land south and west of the Loop that could have fit a new stadium. Soldier Field could have been downsized to a municipal facility and left alone architecturally.

 

Thank you for answering what would've been my next question. I've never clocked that the original iteration of the building really meant anything to Bears fans anyway, certainly not in the way that Packers fans feel towards Lambeau Field. It definitely feels like the renovation destroyed most feelings of warmth anyways. It's wild that they took this and thought the best plan was to build inside of the parthenon structures rather than around them.

 

 

Also I just read that it was removed from the Registrar of Historic places because it was deemed to have changed too much even after trying to save the greek columns, which is funny. 

 

I don't have to go to the stadium so I enjoy that a stadium exists that looks like they took a kid's drawing of a football stadium and made it real.

 

 

[The_Admiral]

The Bears played more games at Wrigley Field than Old Soldier Field such that Wrigley Field held the record for most NFL games for an absurdly long time considering the Bears moved right around the time of the AFL merger. And for a lot of years, Soldier Field had the same lousy Astroturf as the Astrodome, a place no one misses for football. A new Bears stadium by rights should have looked the way renovated Lambeau does now. Remember when Lambeau was just a big bowl with aluminum siding like you'd see on a shed? Now it's the monument to football.

 

Sometimes I think if it weren't SOLDIERS FIELD [sic] allowing people to connect football with war and just had a name like "Anton Cermak Memorial Stadium," no one would have insisted that the Bears not leave. No one much liked the idea of the Bears moving to Gary or Schaumburg in years past when Soldier Field sucked even more than it does now, but those relocations didn't present the same opportunity for suburbanites to stick it to The Blacks the way this relocation does, and even being Soldiers Field can't overcome that.