Next city to get an NFL team

[tBBP]

4 hours ago, BBTV said:

The date thing blows my mind.  Thats just sheer American defiance.  Small-Medium-Large (dd/mm/yy) just makes too much sense.  I hate when I'm anywhere else in the world and get confused when I see a date because we do things differently just because.

 

 

 

 

QFT. Even the American military (and, as a result, I) formats the date as DD MM YY (or DD MM YYYY).

 

And... @Red Wolf, that may be the first time in my 38 years on this plane of existence that I've seen or heard anyone refer to Florida as "stereotypically American", so I'm curious as what you're seeing that I either can't or don't. 

[Red Wolf]

3 hours ago, Buc said:

 

QFT. Even the American military (and, as a result, I) formats the date as DD MM YY (or DD MM YYYY).

 

And... @Red Wolf, that may be the first time in my 38 years on this plane of existence that I've seen or heard anyone refer to Florida as "stereotypically American", so I'm curious as what you're seeing that I either can't or don't. 

Florida has this image of bluster and sweatiness that I think aligns closely with what people see when they think of certain stereotypes of Americans at large. 

[orangefaniniowa]

What about Oklahoma City?  Or Omaha?  Both great college football cities it could do wonders with NFL.

[AnPheitseog]

I've started to prefer using the long form of 2 October 2020, or shorten it down to 2 Oct 2020.

[BBTV]

18 hours ago, orangefaniniowa said:

What about Oklahoma City?  Or Omaha?  Both great college football cities it could do wonders with NFL.

 

Omaha has a metro population of less than a million, doesn't have the corporate presence needed to support the NFL, can't put up a billion-dollar stadium (though the costs would likely be a lot less there), and would in no way be able to fill it with 70k people at an average of >$100/tic.  Omaha is a non starter.

 

OKC is also likely too small to be considered.  It's also fair to say that college fans aren't necessarily pro fans, and it's certainly not fair to assume that they'll be able to support both.  Look at Jacksonville.  The Jags are pretty much a disaster, even with their recent improvements.

[tBBP]

2 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

Omaha has a metro population of less than a million, doesn't have the corporate presence needed to support the NFL, can't put up a billion-dollar stadium (though the costs would likely be a lot less there), and would in no way be able to fill it with 70k people at an average of >$100/tic.  Omaha is a non starter.

 

OKC is also likely too small to be considered.  It's also fair to say that college fans aren't necessarily pro fans, and it's certainly not fair to assume that they'll be able to support both.  Look at Jacksonville.  The Jags are pretty much a disaster, even with their recent improvements.

 

I agree with pretty much everything here--except for one small part (which in and of itself doesn't negate any of the above; just an alternate viewpoint).  It is true that a hotbed of college fandom doesn't necessarily (if at all) translate to a successful pro fanbase.  I look no further than sweet ol' Alabama as case evidence of that: just about every alternate pro football league has placed a franchise in Birmingham, to capitalize off the BAMA market, with varying degrees of success-or lack thereof, depending on who you talk to.  (And before anyone mentions it, there was one other factor involved that likely contributed to the lack of turned stiles at the gate with the AAF's Iron: I-20/59 into and through downtown was, at that time undergoing MASSIVE reconstruction, along with the rest of the 20/59 @ 65 interchange, that had traffic flow through Birmingham eighteen kinds of jacked up, to the point of three-mile-out-the-way detours, and as most of the wealth of Bham is down south of "the ridge"--itself down south of downtown--wasn't nobody trying to fight through all that to get to a stadium "in the 'hood", so there you go.)  I've been to and through Oklahoma plenty of times and it's likely the same scenario there (minus the ate-up traffic flow, at least until you reach Edmond at present)--Sooner hotbed, but would all those people turn out for a "Wranglers" vs, oh, say, Lions game?  I'd venture most of the state is solidly Cowboys fans--with an odd contingent of Seahawks fans up in Tulsa for some strange reason--so they would turn up for that.  (Which brings up another point: OKC is barely 3 hours north of Arlington Dallas on a good traffic day, so there's that, too.)

 

That said, there's one thing that Oklahoma doesn't have to deal with that all of Florida (and, for that matter, Nashville, Austin, Denver, and now Indianapolis among others) does: accelerated transient migration.  Good luck finding more than a handful of current Florida residents who are actually natives of that state.  (*Raises hand, although I haven't resided there in over 17 years*)  All that means the transient population (and, in Florida, the "snowbird" populus; in Nashville, the "halfback" populus) tends to take their existing allegiances with them, which is how we see so many different team fan flags flying all over the place in those towns.  Combine all that with a team that hasn't, except for 2017, sniffed success since 2008, after dang-near dominating the league for its first four or five years of existence, and this is what you end up with.  (Unless you get on a hot streak like the Predators did from 2014-2019 and unite an entire town of transients around a single banner--but we won't go there right now. ) All of which is a long-form way of saying that Jacksonville, love it though I do, was never really set up for long-term success from the gate; it just happened to be a "hot" vacation/relocation/escape-the-cold-wildfire-and-ridiculous-taxes location at the time (the same reason every other major pro team in Florida got stood up, really), as well as a hotbed of college football, since Florida, Florida State, Georgia and *ugh* Alabama all kind of intersect there (there's a reason the Gator Bowl was built there in the first place) that somebody banked on as a viable cash cow for the NFL. Welp...

 

Of course...this is all just one man's two-one-hundreds' worth of an opinion from the ground level. Someone with far more business smarts than I have may see far more than I do.  But now that I've seen for myself how the Green Bay Packers operate from a fiscal standpoint...hoo boy.)

[Magnus]

5 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

Omaha has a metro population of less than a million, doesn't have the corporate presence needed to support the NFL, can't put up a billion-dollar stadium (though the costs would likely be a lot less there), and would in no way be able to fill it with 70k people at an average of >$100/tic.  Omaha is a non starter.

 

OKC is also likely too small to be considered.  It's also fair to say that college fans aren't necessarily pro fans, and it's certainly not fair to assume that they'll be able to support both.  Look at Jacksonville.  The Jags are pretty much a disaster, even with their recent improvements.

I can think of one thing in Omaha's favour: Warren Buffett. If he ever expressed interest in a team, he'd have the money to sink into that kind of a pet project - even build another JerryWorld-sized stadium - with boatloads to spare.

[BBTV]

1 hour ago, Magnus said:

I can think of one thing in Omaha's favour: Warren Buffett. If he ever expressed interest in a team, he'd have the money to sink into that kind of a pet project - even build another JerryWorld-sized stadium - with boatloads to spare.

 

So you think that one of the world's smartest investors would spend money on an obviously-poor investment?

 

Warren Buffett isn't Warren Buffett if he drops a billion on a stadium that's almost assured to return far less than pretty much anything else he could invest in.

[GDAWG]

27 minutes ago, BBTV said:

 

So you think that one of the world's smartest investors would spend money on an obviously-poor investment?

 

Warren Buffett isn't Warren Buffett if he drops a billion on a stadium that's almost assured to return far less than pretty much anything else he could invest in.

 

I read somewhere that Buffett is super picky in terms of what he invests in.

[Magnus]

16 hours ago, GDAWG said:

 

I read somewhere that Buffett is super picky in terms of what he invests in.

Like I said, one possible thing in Omaha's favour. But yeah - if it's not a good investment, no go. Agreed.

[Gothamite]

An NFL team is an exceptionally good investment.  
 

TV money means it essentially pays for itself, and the asset appreciates beyond all dreams of inflation.

 

Not that I think Omaha should have a team, or that Buffett thinks in those terms, or that it matters if he does.  But an NFL team is guaranteed gold. 

[BBTV]

9 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

An NFL team is an exceptionally good investment.  
 

TV money means it essentially pays for itself, and the asset appreciates beyond all dreams of inflation.

 

Not that I think Omaha should have a team, or that Buffett thinks in those terms, or that it matters if he does.  But an NFL team is guaranteed gold. 

 

Not talking about the team, but the billion dollar up-front investment in the stadium.  If it was guaranteed money, why wouldn't a guy like Spanos get the loans needed to build it rather than share a (albeit larger) market and pay rent as a tenant in someone else's stadium?  We all understand that NFL teams print money, but how many are printing money while also paying off a billion dollars in loans?

[Gothamite]

26 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Not talking about the team, but the billion dollar up-front investment in the stadium.  If it was guaranteed money, why wouldn't a guy like Spanos get the loans needed to build it rather than share a (albeit larger) market and pay rent as a tenant in someone else's stadium?  We all understand that NFL teams print money, but how many are printing money while also paying off a billion dollars in loans?

Partly because Spanos isn’t rich enough to be in this conversation.  It takes money to make money at this level, and he would never be allowed to invest on his own today.  He has to trade on his father’s investment and family friends in the business.  (Unlike Kroenke, who is a self-made man; he married an heiress without any help.)

 

But in most cases, NFL owners want somebody else to pay for their stadiums in the first place.  Spanos is a tenant in somebody else’s sandbox because he’s not competent enough to swindle a city into paying the check, like everybody else does. 

[Chromatic]

NFL valuations always blow me away for a league that plays a small fraction of games of what the big other leagues do but drastically outpaces them in worth.

 

Say what you want about the league/owners/teams/Goodell but from a pure business perspective they're run brilliantly.