I Dislike Your Favorite Team

Yahoo has got the quotes, but the underlying facts have been obvious for awhile--at least to those of us who read Field of Schemes.

Says Jason Cole at Yahoo, "While one source said that Goodell was optimistic about many parts of the proposal, it was clear that significant changes must occur before the league would be interested."

Those parts are, most importantly, one part, and it is rather huge--"Wait, you want to charge HOW MUCH to have a NFL team in your stadium?"

Here's the thing--the new wave of $1 Billion Stadiums simply don't make economic sense, unless you can get a LOT of free money, and/or have two teams playing in them. But given the model of a landlord of a stadium to host an NFL team? That just doesn't make sense, and the NFL would rather not that become common knowledge--because you know, there would go the big scary stick the NFL is holding over cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Billion Dollar Stadiums are expensive, and whilst the NFL is popular, and it makes money, stadiums aren't where the money is really at--it is the TV deals that every NFL team makes it money. So it makes no sense to build one. No sense at all. UNLESS!

Unless you can sucker people into believing that $1,000,000,000 is a perfectly acceptable amount to pay for a stadium that gets fully used 8 times a year most years; that the team that gets 60% of the funding from outside sources shouldn't pay back those funding agents. If they are private sector, they can't make that argument; if it is public funds, than they can start talking about tax bases, and economics, and assorted bullshit.

The NFL is not happy with the private Billion Dollar Stadium deal in LA, at least in part, because it highlights what a bad deal a Billion Dollar Stadium is, if the Team in Residence is asked to pay for it.