Big Ben is walking around in the boot this week, so less scary.
At least he’s not riding around on a motorcycle with it.
Yeah my takes were against the spread. Pats beat the Texans 27-0 in week 3 of the regular season but I still think 16 points is a ridiculous spread in the post-season. The Pats are going to win, but are they going to win by more than 16? They might, but I think Texans +16 is a strong play.
As I said before, I liked all the favorites in the wild card weekend, I like all the dogs in the divisional round.
Oh, I agree completely that 16 is a ridiculous spread in the NFL, whether postseason or regular season. But if anyone was going to cover that, it would be the Pats this weekend.
Chargers to announce they’re moving to Los Angeles.
That’s not good for the Rams. They were already having trouble filling the stadium in their initial season.
It’s actually exactly what the Rams and the NFL have wanted all along, since at least 2012.
First of all, the stadium the Rams are having trouble filling isn’t their permanent home. When construction is finally complete on the new stadium, look for the Rams and Chargers to share it. Spanos may come in with some equity investment, but will also pay a lease.
Which was always the plan. Because of the cost of doing business in Los Angeles, the NFL and Rams owner Satan Kroenke always believed that the best plan going forward was to have two teams in Los Angeles to help defray maintenance and operating expenses of the new stadium facility.
And, it bears repeating one more time: none of this is really about attendance anyway. It is about TV ad revenue, pure and simple. Everything else is just noise fodder for NFL media reporters.
That was happening near the end of the season because the Rams were so bad. They were filling it at the beginning. But it shows that they can’t keep getting full crowds just by being there. If they suck then people won’t come which is why a suspect the owner finally fired Fischer. He realizes they actually have to put out some level of quality product.
Attendance numbers per game don’t matter from a revenue perspective, but luxury suite sales do. Those are usually purchased by corporations and trade associations though, and as long as those are sold out and they’re getting revenue from naming rights and such, the actual gate count doesn’t matter. Art Modell ran into trouble in Cleveland when the luxury box holders abandoned the old stadium, which he held the lease to, for the new baseball stadium.
Selling the luxury boxes and whatnot in LA for a guy like Satan Kroenke isn’t be a problem…but it really doesn’t matter that much. It certainly doesn’t matter as much now as it did 25 years ago.
You’re talking about an NFL situation from a generation ago, too. The NFL’s modern TV contracts with Fox, CBS, NBC, and ESPN/ABC mean that an NFL team in a large media market could play in front of completely empty stadia these days and still turn a black ink profit on the back page. That wasn’t the case 35 years ago.
To be completely clear, a team owner WANTS to sell those luxury boxes. That means that the stadium upkeep and maintenance and operating costs are self-sustaining, and they’re not having to dip into their personal Scrooge McDuck gold vaults from their vast shares of TV money for that. But these days when an owner mewls about needing a modern facility and luxury boxes, they’re blowing smoke. Those TV contracts now exceed everything other revenue source the team has, by geometric magnitudes. They are the only thing that really matters.
Again, this move was all a lovely ballroom dance from the get-go. The NFL desperately wanted at least one team in the Los Angeles DMA. That allows them to get more money (as in LOTS more) from their network broadcast partners. Crazy stat: until this past season, the NFL had gotten the same amount of money per TV set in Los Angeles that it got from Butte, Montana (that rate was probably about $0.25 per set). Now, I’m sure that Butte is lovely and a fine place to live, but for the NFL that represented a tremendous loss of unrealized revenue. Now, with a team in the Los Angeles DMA, the NFL can charge their network broadcast partners $1.50 - 2.00 per TV set for every TV set in the LA DMA.
Satan Kroenke represented an ideal person for the NFL to get back into LA. He could get a stadium built with mostly private money there. The only problem was the relocation fee the NFL would have to charge him, and the high dollar operating cost within Los Angeles. Solution: get Kroenke and his Rams a partner to share occupancy of Satan’s new stadium in Inglewood. That allows him to recoup his costs within 10 years.
Thus:
The NFL and all its owners are getting more money
The owners of the two teams are getting more money
Everything else – fan outrage, disappointment, attendance drops – is just noise; it’s the cost of doing business to get more money.
Fans look at football as a sport that they own. In truth its a sport that owns them. From a business standpoint it is not a sport, it is entertainment. As Triggercut pointed out, in the end the concerns of the fans are meaningless as long as the revenue stream is secure.
The TV ratings in LA were also down from 2015, which is surprising given LA finally got a team again. A lot of that had to do with the play of the team. If you add the Chargers, who were 5-11, now you have two bad teams monopolizing the Sunday TV time. Out of the four games shown in the LA market the Rams game usually was third-most watched or last.
I think Kroenke was surprised at how short the LA honeymoon was. I think if actual attendance had been better he might have given Fisher another year. The Rams were a really bad team this year. And while I agree it’s about the luxury boxes and TV revenue, Kroenke wants to sell $10k and $20k PSLs. People who are going to spend that much for personal entertainment need to have hope of improvement.
HOLY SHIT, not only are they moving, but they’re going to play in the StubHub Center for the next two years.
The StubHub Center is the home for the LA Galaxy. It’s an MLS stadium. It only seats 30,000 people. 30,000.
That makes it, by far, the smallest stadium in the NFL. It’s half the capacity of the next smallest stadium.
Apparently we’re going to need puppets and flipcharts to show that this isn’t about attendance at games…;)
Actually, even back then a lot of it was blowing smoke. For all of Art Modell’s carping about needing a new facility, etc., etc., he was third in the league in stadium revenue even at the old Cleveland Stadium. No one involved would admit it then, and if you watch the ESPN 30 for 30 “Believeland” they still don’t admit it, Modell’s move to Baltimore was all about estate taxes. He had bled himself dry holding on to the old stadium after the Indians moved to their shiny new park and by making horrificly bad, expensive signings (Andre Rison) and he needed lots of cash soonest if the family was going to hold onto to the team after he passed and they paid the estate tax. So he made himself perhaps the most hated man in the history of the City of Cleveland and made the Baltimore deal. But it turned out to be a true faustian bargain, because he still didn’t realize enough to keep the team.
The same thing happened with the Rams. The heirs weren’t all that interested in running a team and would have had a hard time paying the estate taxes. So when they sold Kroenke exercised his option and took control of the team.
I will be very curious to see what happens to TV ratings in LA. And in San Diego, too.
As an LA area resident, my takeaway from all this is -> oh great, more Sunday traffic.
I look forward to seeing your presentation.
An additional little bit of evidence: The NFL lifted the local blackout on the Packers/Giants game before it was sold out. The media played it up as some kind of magnanimous, weather-related gesture by the league. Yeah, right. Maintaining high TV ratings (even as slight a spike as it would have been given the small size of the Packers’ market) was a bigger consideration than a few unsold seats (which, of course, sold out anyway).
Hah! I like the LAme one particularly.