NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay

[Brian in Boston]

1 hour ago, gosioux76 said:

I agree with this, and you showed some really great examples. But, for the sake of argument, let me ask this: Do we — and I mean the collective "we" — overstate the value of professional sports franchises to the cities in which they reside? In other words, you can argue that the state and county are ascribing more value to the Buffalo Bills as a community asset than they are, say, Oliver's restaurant. Is it fair or logical to do so? And by that same logic, is it fair to suggest the loss of the Bills would be greater than the loss of Oliver's restaurant? 

 

I completely understand the idea of this as an obvious double standard. And I'm no fan of corporate welfare. I do, however, wonder what a Buffalo without the Bills or a Jacksonville without the Jaguars would look like. I feel as if cities in this predicament are guided by a  fear of losing an already tenuous grip on stature, and that sitting idle while their NFL team, the one thing keeping them part of a national conversation, shuffled off to a new city would just expedite their descent into irrelevancy. 

 

It kind of calls into question the future of American cities and how we define their success. Is there a model for an aging Rust Belt city to reinvent itself for a new era without sports? My guess is "no," which is why the politicians are pushing all these chips onto the table. 

My answer to the question of whether we overstate the value of professional sports to cities In which they're located is a resounding, "YES!"

Look, I'm a passionate sports fan. I spent a portion of my career working in sports media. That said, I'd be the first person to tell you that the percentage of our collective societal mindset that's focused on professional and so-called "big time" college sports is seriously out of whack. The very positing of the notion that a municipality's best - or, God forbid - only way to "reinvent itself for a new era" is by landing/maintaining a major professional sports team strikes me as proof of the fact that we - the collective "we" - have lost the plot when it comes to accurately prioritizing what grants a city "stature".

To my mind, before a city, county, or state starts worrying about attaining/maintaining a hold upon major pro sports, it needs to make sure that it is delivering the services it is bound to provide its populace... preferably, at an optimal level. Government officials need to honestly assess whether the needs of their residents are being met in such areas as public safety (police, fire, emergency medical treatment), public works (establishment and maintenance of streets, sidewalks, sewers, etc.), public transportation, public education, etc. before even contemplating subsidizing the construction and/or upkeep of stadia to house privately-held, for-profit, professional sports franchises.

Publicly-funded construction and/or maintenance of stadia to benefit privately-held, for-profit sports franchises? I'm tremendously skeptical of such expenditures.  I can see such governmental assistance as public spending on infrastructure improvements - linkage to roadways, connection to public utilities, construction of public transit spurs/stops, etc. - servicing privately-financed arenas, ballparks, and stadiums. Even then, I'd prefer a pathway to full repayment of said public investment over a period of years once the facility had opened. 

For what it's worth, I agree with you: it can be a tremendously difficult undertaking for the psyche - whether that be the individual psyche of an elected official in a once-large/proud and now shrinking/struggling city, or the collective psyche of said municipality's populace - to accept the need to reinvent a community's place in the world.



   

 

[PrimalCookie]

I think there is value in a city's first big league team. Speaking from the perspective of Orlando, prior to the Magic's arrival Orlando was a mid size city that people only knew as "where Disney is." The theme parks are still the primary reason people know Orlando, but getting the Magic was huge for its legitimacy as an "actual city," if you know what I mean. There's got to be more than just Disney there, they have an NBA team! Other random towns with nothing but Disney and Universal don't get sports teams, just ask Ana... oh. :censored:, that doesn't support my narrative. 

 

It's kind of hard to quantify how cities' perceptions can change with the addition of big league sports, but this is the best way I can think. The following cities all have metro populations of 1.8m to 1.3m - a difference of 500,000, but generally not that large on this scale.

- Jacksonville

- Memphis

- Virginia Beach

- Milwaukee

- Raleigh

- Richmond

- Oklahoma City

- Providence

Of those, which ones have the largest profile? Which ones are popularly classified as "mid size cities" and which aren't? Virginia Beach and Providence have the 2 largest populations of this group. Why aren't they on the same pedestal as cities like Jacksonville and Milwaukee? The answer is sports.

(Also, I would argue that Raleigh doesn't really get the same boost for having a professional team as others with them on this list did, since the Hurricanes use Carolina as the geographic identifier and most people who don't follow hockey probably assume they're in Charlotte. That's another interesting wrinkle. Would Oklahoma City be viewed the same if the Thunder dropped the City and were just the Oklahoma Thunder, or would they be on the same "tier" as Virginia Beach, Providence, and Richmond?)

[Red Comet]

I think working from home is going to be a great equalizer long-term. People won’t have to work in Seattle or Boston or whatever high-priced locale if they can do the same job with the same efficiency in a place like Buffalo or Pittsburgh instead. My hometown is already proof of that because now $300k isn’t a mansion, it’s an upper-middle class house if that. 
 

And if investing in high-speed Internet will actually deliver prosperity over the promises of welfare bum billionaires, then I really don’t think taxpayer-funded palaces have a future. And that will be better for all of us. 

[gosioux76]

25 minutes ago, Brian in Boston said:

My answer to the question of whether we overstate the value of professional sports to cities In which they're located is a resounding, "YES!"

Look, I'm a passionate sports fan. I spent a portion of my career working in sports media. That said, I'd be the first person to tell you that the percentage of our collective societal mindset that's focused on professional and so-called "big time" college sports is seriously out of whack. The very positing of the notion that a municipality's best - or, God forbid - only way to "reinvent itself for a new era" is by landing/maintaining a major professional sports team strikes me as proof of the fact that we - the collective "we" - have lost the plot when it comes to accurately prioritizing what grants a city "stature".

To my mind, before a city, county, or state starts worrying about attaining/maintaining a hold upon major pro sports, it needs to make sure that it is delivering the services it is bound to provide its populace... preferably, at an optimal level. Government officials need to honestly assess whether the needs of their residents are being met in such areas as public safety (police, fire, emergency medical treatment), public works (establishment and maintenance of streets, sidewalks, sewers, etc.), public transportation, public education, etc. before even contemplating subsidizing the construction and/or upkeep of stadia to house privately-held, for-profit, professional sports franchises.

Publicly-funded construction and/or maintenance of stadia to benefit privately-held, for-profit sports franchises? I'm tremendously skeptical of such expenditures.  I can see such governmental assistance as public spending on infrastructure improvements - linkage to roadways, connection to public utilities, construction of public transit spurs/stops, etc. - servicing privately-financed arenas, ballparks, and stadiums. Even then, I'd prefer a pathway to full repayment of said public investment over a period of years once the facility had opened. 

 

No doubt, that's a pretty spot-on recitation of textbook good governance. Not going to find any argument here. And you also perfectly described the intent of public service, where people are voted in by constituents who entrust them to deploy public resources in a way that benefits their biggest needs.  So in the needs-vs.-wants equation, expenditures on roads, utilities, transit, education, etc., should take priority over arenas, ballparks, stadiums, etc.

 

But the world doesn't run by the textbook, and there are exceedingly few politicians willing to tell people that what they want isn't what they need. And the odds are pretty high that a vast amount of Buffalonians (I'm going to presume that's what they call themselves) have their hearts and minds wrapped so tightly around the Bills that they can't reasonably put a number on the cost of losing them. 

 

I guess my point is that we can preach all day long about whether we should be spending so much public money on for-profit sports enterprises, when we should really be spending our time trying to figure out how we can convince cities that there's much more to their existence than an NFL team.  In this David v.  Goliath narrative, Goliath plays for the Bills. 

 

 

[gosioux76]

12 minutes ago, Red Comet said:

I think working from home is going to be a great equalizer long-term. People won’t have to work in Seattle or Boston or whatever high-priced locale if they can do the same job with the same efficiency in a place like Buffalo or Pittsburgh instead. My hometown is already proof of that because now $300k isn’t a mansion, it’s an upper-middle class house if that now. 
 

And if investing in high-speed Internet will actually deliver prosperity over the promises of welfare bum billionaires, then I really don’t think taxpayer-funded palaces have a future. And that will be better for all of us. 

 

This is a great point. But how do you pick from all of those cities with cheaper real estate? What goes into that equation? Certainly, it might be family connections, like your wife is from there or you visited there for a wedding once. But it's not at random, and cities are now competing against each other for the chance of selling themselves to new residents based upon their low cost of living. 

 

One thing that probably makes a difference? Pro sports. 

 

Again, not a justification for over-investing public money. But it's really difficult to discount the value we assign to pro sports when it comes to making a region stand apart from the rest. 

 

I think @Magic Dynasty's post is a fabulous example of that. As a kid growing up, sports was a geography lesson. I knew places because I knew teams. Out of that list, I'd have presumed Providence and Virginia Beach were the smaller places based on that alone. That sort of impression sticks. 

 

 

[The_Admiral]

59 minutes ago, Red Comet said:

I think working from home is going to be a great equalizer long-term. People won’t have to work in Seattle or Boston or whatever high-priced locale if they can do the same job with the same efficiency in a place like Buffalo or Pittsburgh instead.

 

Everyone can't off to Houston and Raleigh-Durham if gas costs $6 a gallon. Now's the time when people should be living with efficiency.

[Red Comet]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

 

Everyone can't off to Houston and Raleigh-Durham if gas costs $6 a gallon. Now's the time when people should be living with efficiency.

$6? It’s $3.50 where I’m at. So, probably another reason that you’ll see relocation even if said fuel prices will delay that relocation over decades rather than within a decade or two. 

[tBBP]

21 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

I completely understand the idea of this as an obvious double standard. And I'm no fan of corporate welfare. I do, however, wonder what a Buffalo without the Bills or a Jacksonville without the Jaguars would look like. I feel as if cities in this predicament are guided by a  fear of losing an already tenuous grip on stature, and that sitting idle while their NFL team, the one thing keeping them part of a national conversation, shuffled off to a new city would just expedite their descent into irrelevancy. 

 

It kind of calls into question the future of American cities and how we define their success. Is there a model for an aging Rust Belt city to reinvent itself for a new era without sports? My guess is "no," which is why the politicians are pushing all these chips onto the table. 

 

To be real, as one who knows because I grew up down there, Jacksonville really ain't all that different now even with the Jaguars. It wouldn't make a rip of difference if Super Mario pulled up his tent stakes tomorrow and jetted off to London with that franchise. Now Buffalo without the Bills on the other hand...well, with apologies, again, to my alliance brethren @infrared41 look at a place like Toledo OH to get your answer. That said, having been to Buffalo (and much of western NY) many times over, you pull the Bills out of there, that entire region is gonna have the lifeblood sucked right out of it. That said, I am legitimately shocked the state is kicking in so much $ when the state has so many other issues of its own (or is it just the city that has so many issues of its own independent of the state?? ).

 

19 hours ago, Brian in Boston said:

My answer to the question of whether we overstate the value of professional sports to cities In which they're located is a resounding, "YES!"

Look, I'm a passionate sports fan. I spent a portion of my career working in sports media. That said, I'd be the first person to tell you that the percentage of our collective societal mindset that's focused on professional and so-called "big time" college sports is seriously out of whack. The very positing of the notion that a municipality's best - or, God forbid - only way to "reinvent itself for a new era" is by landing/maintaining a major professional sports team strikes me as proof of the fact that we - the collective "we" - have lost the plot when it comes to accurately prioritizing what grants a city "stature".

 

It's all idolatry at the end of the day. And right now Nashville is the best (or perhaps worst?) example of this. By the way, I agree with your assessment on this.

 

19 hours ago, Brian in Boston said:

To my mind, before a city, county, or state starts worrying about attaining/maintaining a hold upon major pro sports, it needs to make sure that it is delivering the services it is bound to provide its populace... preferably, at an optimal level. Government officials need to honestly assess whether the needs of their residents are being met in such areas as public safety (police, fire, emergency medical treatment), public works (establishment and maintenance of streets, sidewalks, sewers, etc.), public transportation, public education, etc. before even contemplating subsidizing the construction and/or upkeep of stadia to house privately-held, for-profit, professional sports franchises.

 

that part.

 

19 hours ago, Magic Dynasty said:

It's kind of hard to quantify how cities' perceptions can change with the addition of big league sports, but this is the best way I can think. The following cities all have metro populations of 1.8m to 1.3m - a difference of 500,000, but generally not that large on this scale.

- Jacksonville

- Memphis

- Virginia Beach

- Milwaukee

- Raleigh

- Richmond

- Oklahoma City

- Providence

Of those, which ones have the largest profile? Which ones are popularly classified as "mid size cities" and which aren't? Virginia Beach and Providence have the 2 largest populations of this group. Why aren't they on the same pedestal as cities like Jacksonville and Milwaukee? The answer is sports.

(Also, I would argue that Raleigh doesn't really get the same boost for having a professional team as others with them on this list did, since the Hurricanes use Carolina as the geographic identifier and most people who don't follow hockey probably assume they're in Charlotte. That's another interesting wrinkle. Would Oklahoma City be viewed the same if the Thunder dropped the City and were just the Oklahoma Thunder, or would they be on the same "tier" as Virginia Beach, Providence, and Richmond?)

 

To be fair, and I don't mean this as a shot, but nobody puts Jacksonville on a pedestal. Shoot even Jacksonville doesn't put Jacksonville on a pedestal! (It's kind of a shame, too, because the place has so much undeveloped potential its ridiculous.) But your larger point I believe stands: we can wax altruistic all we want, but the reality is that some cities/metro regions are seen as more, shall we say, "legitimate" due to the presence of a big-league pro team. I mean look at OKC: without the Thunder, what was it? (For that matter, how many people care about it now even with the Thunder? Again, not meant as an insult, but I've been there many times and, well...let's just say that ain't that many people checking for no OKC in the grand scheme of things.) 

 

Nashville is still trying to turn itself into a pro sports hotbed, but I think the example of a city that's made its rep off pro sports is Indianapolis. Granted, they had the Pacers even back in the ABA days, Indiana being the basketball hotbed that it is--but imagine if the Pacers had never made the jump to the NBA after the ABA folded. Would Indy have even seemed like an attractive option to Bob Irsay in the first place? Granted, the city was hellbent on attracting major league sports anyway prior to them putting up money to build the Hoosier Dome as a means of attracting another pro sports team, which in large part is how they landed the Colts. (But to highlight that point, how many people are aware of how close we were to having the Indianapolis Cardinals???) At any rate, all these many years later Indy has the Colts and the Pacers, one of the better AAA baseball teams, the WNBA Fever last I checked, and now a soccer franchise that's angling to get into MLS. (We can argue the legitimacy of MLS as "major league" another day.) But the point is, as @Magic Dynasty said, some cities literally angle to either build or boost their rep on having pro sports in town. And lets be real: the events are fun to attend, provided you can afford the ticket and the travel, so you've got some entertainment value and revenue generation there (in terms of tourism dollars) which in itself increases the city's/region's perceived value. And people will travel to these places to partake in some of that fun and in turn maybe check out some of the city/region itself which also helps increase perceived value. I know I've done it a few times since being out here: trekked four hours up northeast to Minneapolis just to see the Twins play, but in so doing got to exploring more of The Cities, as they call those here, and thus putting more of my money into their revenue stream, than I ever did while actively trucking over the road.

 

Anyway, if you want a good look at that whole perceived value thing, look at the difference between Indianapolis and Louisville KY. They're both about the same size, barely two hours apart, and are dang near similar in terms of cost of living. The difference between the two, aside from Indy being the state capital amd Lousiville being a little hillier? Indy has [major] pro sports and Louisville does not. What if Louisville had the Colts and Pacers (okay, Colonels if you must), and Indianapolis did not? How would that impact the perceived value of the two places? 

 

I'm not saying this to kick dirt in the eye of the very valid stance that public money to finance private business such as pro sports isn't really a great idea; but looking at the bigger picture, if the civic braintrust perceives it to be of enough  value to the area, they'll find way to do it. Not saying it's right, just saying it is. 

 

18 hours ago, the admiral said:

 

Everyone can't off to Houston and Raleigh-Durham if gas costs $6 a gallon. Now's the time when people should be living with efficiency.

 

Or Chicago??? 

 

Meanwhile, here in the relatively unknown yet ever-growing plainsland city Sioux Falls, South Dakota, population approximately 192K (but which itself is exploding in growth and expansion at a rate probably worse than Nashville), 88 octane is currently sitting at $3.90, 87 at $3.86.

 

(And did I mention South Dakota has no personal income tax??? )

[infrared41]

42 minutes ago, tBBP said:

To be real, as one who knows because I grew up down there, Jacksonville really ain't all that different now even with the Jaguars. It wouldn't make a rip of difference if Super Mario pulled up his tent stakes tomorrow and jetted off to London with that franchise. Now Buffalo without the Bills on the other hand...well, with apologies, again, to my alliance brethren @infrared41 look at a place like Toledo OH to get your answer. That said, having been to Buffalo (and much of western NY) many times over, you pull the Bills out of there, that entire region is gonna have the lifeblood sucked right out of it. That said, I am legitimately shocked the state is kicking in so much $ when the state has so many other issues of its own (or is it just the city that has so many issues of its own independent of the state?? ).

 

No apology necessary. Your take is right on the money. Toledo is basically what Buffalo would be without the Bills. Being from Toledo and having been to Buffalo many times, the cities are very similar. The only significant difference between the two is Buffalo has two "Big Four" teams and we don't. Buffalo also has Niagara Falls. We got the Maumee* River. Then again, we get maybe 12-24 inches of snow a year. 12-24 inches of snow is an afternoon in Buffalo. But I digress...

 

*For those who are wondering, it's pronounced Maw-Mee,

 

 

[Red Comet]

Chiefs plan on moving to the land of self-righteous cokeheads: Johnson County, Kansas. Or were at least approached about it. Either way, Kansas.

 

Fact is, Arrowhead is now one of the oldest stadiums of the NFL on top of being the loudest. And the very idea of replacing it to me is sacrilege. Especially to another state. 

[dont care]

Jacksonville is probably worse because of the jaguars rather than seeing any benefit, the super bowl just made the city even more of a cesspool.

[Cosmic]

On 3/28/2022 at 2:33 PM, Brian in Boston said:

It is mind-boggling that the State of New York ($600 million) and Erie County ($250 million) are going to be on the hook for just over 60% of the cost of building a facility to house the Pegulas' private, for-profit business entity. 

Oliver's restaurant in Buffalo has been packing-in customers - both locals and visitors - since 1936. Along the way, the business has employed countless workers and generated tax revenue for the City of Buffalo, Erie County, and the State of New York. When the current owner - David Schutte - decided to renovate the eatery in 2016, what would the reaction of local and state pols have been if the restaurateur had asked for public funding for 60% of the reconstruction and redecoration costs for the private, for-profit business?

 

How about the four generations of Salvatore family members who have overseen  the operation of multiple hospitality sector businesses - Italian/Prime,  The Delavan Hotel and Spa,  Chandelier Bar,  Salvatore's Garden Place Hotel amongst them - since their patriarch first launched a restaurant on Buffalo's east side in 1938? How much public money do we think local and state elected officials would have been in favor of investing into their private, for-profit ventures?

Why is it that certain private, for-profit businesses in the entertainment and/or hospitality sector - i.e. multimillion/billion pro sports entities - are showered with publicly-funded largesse, while the very thought of other successful, longstanding, tax-generating businesses receiving such aid would be considered absurd? It is a double-standard that's particularly maddening given the fact that after collecting a healthy amount of public funding for construction of the arenas, ballparks, and stadiums that their teams play in, it isn't long before most pro sports owners are subsequently pestering government entities for breaks on the taxes that their for-profit sports businesses generate. And if the local governments aren't willing to concede to the demands of team ownership at said point? That's when the owners start playing footsie with other municipalities looking to foot-the-stadium construction bill in order to land a  major pro sports team.

The fact of the matter is that many modern pro sports owners wouldn't deign to own a major pro franchise in one of the North American leagues if it weren't for the subsidization that said business entities enjoy, particularly in the area of having public funds build and maintain facilities for the teams.  

Corporate welfare of the most unseemly kind. But, hey... no price too high for our bread and circuses, right?   

The fact is, this IS how many businesses of any appreciable size operate in NY. Businesses that do big new builds or redevelopments get tax credits, PILOTs, low-cost hydropower, etc. all the time. It's gotten better, but IDAs trip over themselves to hand out deals to companies that claim to be looking at moving out of that IDA's little fiefdom, whether town or county. I don't know all of the projects that Schutte has been involved in, but Salvatore was at least an investor in Diamond Hawk that got tax breaks. The state literally gave $750M to Solar City/Tesla in the last five years in a (half-heartedly kept) promise for 1,500 mid-level jobs and a promise to stay for only 10 years.

 

I said before the deal was announced that it all felt like Monopoly money, and that's basically how it still feels. I'm glad it's over, but I don't know if we'll ever really know if it was "worth it". I didn't like paying a gazillion dollars to have my roof done this year, but I'm at least going to bask in the after effects now that it's done. You can't deny there are intangibles, but it's hard to really bank on them. I think the "big city club" effect is real. The Buffalo-Niagara MSA is 4% larger than the Rochester MSA down the road... which one has a higher national profile? As far as horrible stadium deals go, I at least take solace in some important protections for taxpayers. The Bills are responsible for cost overruns. There seems to be a pretty strong protection against leaving town before the 30 years is up, although the clawbacks decrease over time and I haven't seen by how much. Selfishly, the county is basically out of the picture after the intial $250M outlay; the stadium will actually be owned by a state corporation, and the state is paying all of the ongoing costs. The county is just acting as a pass-through for ticket fees and the like that they'll collect. The payroll tax and rent from the lease will basically offset the annual maintenance from the state. That leaves $28M per year (intial cost amortized over 30 years)... think of all the sales tax from folding tables sold! Are all the ancillary revenues and intangibles and the "marketing budget" of being a part of the national pastime worth $28M per year? Honestly, I think it probably is. Having the team here actually is creating a sphere of activity that otherwise wouldn't be here. It sucks that taxpayers are expected to do it, but I think it's worth it.*

 

*probably

 

On 3/28/2022 at 4:48 PM, gosioux76 said:

I mean, there are a lot of successful mid-sized cities that are affordable, have character and plenty of amenities. But I can't think of one of those cities that was, at one point, a much bigger metro area. 

Ouch... shots fired. I don't want to derail the thread too much by talking about our Frederick Law Olmsted designed park system, our vibrant theater scene, or our celebrated architectural character, but Buffalo and Erie County are growing again. It's affordable, there's skiing in the winter and beaches in the summer, beautiful hikes nearby, and we'll always help you push your car out of a snow bank.

 

Edit: The ongoing costs will be ~$13M per year for the first 15 years, and $6M per year for the second half of the lease. Plus, the Bills will pay for some operating expenses at the stadium that the state pays for currently. If we assume the payroll tax balances out the $13M per year, then the leftover cost would be $28M per year at the beginning of the lease, and $22M per year at the end.

[gosioux76]

2 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Ouch... shots fired. I don't want to derail the thread too much by talking about our Frederick Law Olmsted designed park system, our vibrant theater scene, or our celebrated architectural character, but Buffalo and Erie County are growing again. It's affordable, there's skiing in the winter and beaches in the summer, beautiful hikes nearby, and we'll always help you push your car out of a snow bank.

 

That's kind of my point. A lot of these older American cities have a lot more going for them than just sports franchises but it becomes really hard for that narrative to overtake the ones that suggest they're withering away.

 

Despite all those qualities you just described,  the Buffalo MSA lost 3,170 people between July 2020 and July 2021, according to new Census data released last week. It's possible that that number represents a significant decline from prior losses. But either way, a loss is a loss, and I have yet to see a city say: "Yeah, we're good with being smaller.  It suits us." 

 

 

[Sport]

5 hours ago, Cosmic said:

it's hard to really bank on them. I think the "big city club" effect is real. The Buffalo-Niagara MSA is 4% larger than the Rochester MSA down the road... which one has a higher national profile?

 

This is always my point too. If your city has pro team(s) then people know your city just because you're on the circuit. My example has always been Cincinnati and Columbus. Our metro has about 90,000 people more than Columbus across their entire metro, a negligible difference, and both can share Dayton and are larger than Cleveland, but just by having NFL and MLB all those years while they had nothing (and then got the Crew and Blue Jackets eventually) we've always been perceived as the bigger deal. What dollar amount that translates to would be really difficult to figure, but I do think there's something to having a team in the same league as New York and LA that makes a city feel like it matters in our dumb monkey brains. 

 

I also read that Cincinnati got hundreds of millions of dollars in free exposure thanks to the Bengals' Super Bowl run. If that nets tourists or future convention bookers then just having any team, let alone a good one, must be a net positive, no?  

[Dilbert]

Bengals are now saying they are actively looking to build a new indoor practice facility. The Joe Burrow affect has definitely paid off.

[MJWalker45]

21 minutes ago, Dilbert said:

Bengals are now saying they are actively looking to build a new indoor practice facility. The Joe Burrow affect has definitely paid off.

I think it's getting laughed at for having to borrow Univ. of Cincinnati's facility more than Joe Burrow. But if you expect to be playing for something at the end of the year, how have you not had an indoor facility yet? 

[heavybass]

I mean if they had originally then the Bengals would of beaten the Rams.

[tBBP]

1 hour ago, Sport said:

 I also read that Cincinnati got hundreds of millions of dollars in free exposure thanks to the Bengals' Super Bowl run. If that nets tourists or future convention bookers then just having any team, let alone a good one, must be a net positive, no?  

 

The same was true of Indianapolis for the 2012 Super Bowl (that they hosted, not played in). And since I had feet on the ground in those years, I could speak about the economic windfall the Super Bowl was for Indy--but the far more tangible effect was the fact that the city literally tore up permanent infrastructure to redesign/rebuild it for the Super Bowl Village--and then left it behind as a catalyst for the transformation of downtown, which it most CERTAINLY has done since 2012, based on the last time I was back there two years ago.

 

That whole thing goes back to what I mentioned in my prior post about Indy being more than willing to break itself in the name of boosting its profile via sports, which to its credit its done a heckuva job in doing. Granted, much of it owes to its otherwise central location (there's a reason Indiana is nicknamed "the Crossroads of America"--now if they could just fix those doggone roads right just ONE time...), which I'd probably why the NFL Combine is held there (along with the NCAA headquarters, which used to be in Kansas City).

 

But all that to the side, no doubt the financial gains Indy received just from exposure alone helped boost its image some in the eyes of many more people who otherwise really didn't know anything about it. I'm not there and haven't been in about a year or so, but I'm starting to see the same thing happening with Cincinnati now, and I'm sure that'll be a double-edged sword--the one edge being the increased exposure on what I still feel is the single most underrated city/metro in the entire country, and because of that, the other edge being the increased spotlight meaning its secret is being found out, which as anyone who lives or has lived in a boomtown knows, brings all sorts of problems with it, namely increases in cost of living, one/some of them being what some would call "Californication" (we can discuss that in another forum, haha--but see Nashville, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Boise ID, and shoot even up here in Sioux Falls, at least in part, for examples).

 

But of course at the end of the day, it's the age-old question: do the ends justify the means? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Be your own judge, but it's hard to argue against some of the more tangible benefits pro sports has brought and still brings to certain cities and metro areas.

 

[gosioux76]

This debate also makes me think about some of the notable cities I know that seem to thrive without the presence of big-time sports leagues. It's a pretty short list. I can think of Boise, Madison, perhaps a lot of the cities at the USL Championship level?  

 

I lived in Portland for 10 years, which certainly benefits from being an NBA town. There was a group that emerged a few years ago with what I thought was a pretty flimsy plan to bring Major League Baseball to town. It generated a little buzz, but mostly from the sports radio meatheads whose livelihoods would benefit from having another big-league team to cover. Otherwise, I didn't see a whole lot of excitement for it. Instead, it brought up a lot of questions about use of public resources, gentrification and transit challenges. 

 

This is one reason why I blanche when I see people on these boards toss Portland out there as an NHL or MLB expansion market. It's usually because the city is perceived as big league thanks to the Trail Blazers. But I never really got the sense of underlying demand for anything more than the Blazers, Timbers and Thorns.  Any pain from the loss of AAA baseball 13 years ago faded almost instantly. 

[Red Comet]

You know, it would be one thing if teams asked for the local or state government to help with renovations /maintenance. I’d grumble a bit, but whatever. My problem is when I’m asked to fit the bill for something a billionaire or 30/32 can pay for on their own for a place 90% of people can’t afford to attend more than once or twice a year. My hometown has roads people from the Congo snicker at, a sewage system with large parts of it still remaining from a century ago along with a school system that just now became accredited again. Maybe that’s why I get irate at new stadiums. Or I’m just an old man yelling at the clouds.