Muda69

13 minutes ago, Bash Riprock said:

First turf fields are unsafe and now they are a waste of taxpayer funds....

I have been making both arguments for years now.  

1 hour ago, Gipper said:

Lowell will travel to West Lafayette on September 6!!!  Should be a great game and one I've been hoping for.

That game needs to be protested by the Catholic Church or something.    A portal to Hell may open on the 50 yard line when two teams of Red Devils take the field.

On to the NIT semi-finals at Hinkle Fieldhouse.  

https://www.tribstar.com/sports/second-half-rally-propels-indiana-state-to-nit-semis/article_6a22fa6a-ebd7-11ee-a129-c774182f982b.html

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Sophomore Robbie Avila hit a 3-pointer at the top of the key with 59.7 seconds left to break a deadlock after Isaiah Swope’s finger-roll layin was long and Julian Larry misfired on a wide-open right-wing triple that Ryan Conwell tracked down.

After a flurry of activity at both ends of Hulman Center on Tuesday night, Indiana State emerged with an 85-81 victory over Cincinnati that propels the Sycamores into the Men’s National Invitation Tournament semifinals next Tuesday at Indianapolis’ Hinkle Fieldhouse.

....

On Tuesday, the Sycamores (31-6) booked passage to the NIT semifinals after a third straight win at Hulman Center. ISU will play the winner of VCU-Utah, who square off Wednesday, on April 2 at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the Butler University campus.

..

Nice that the Sycamores are going to play the entirety of the NIT in Indiana.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2024/03/27/indiana-basketball-will-be-busy-transfer-portal-players-to-know-iu-hoosiers-mike-woodson-roster/73106613007/

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IU basketball has seven open scholarships as of Tuesday, following Kel'el Ware's anticipated decision to enter the NBA draft. Coach Mike Woodson carried an open scholarship in 2023-24 after some swings and misses in the portal.

You'd expect the staff to target shooting, ball-handling, rim protection, perimeter defense and a big man to complement Malik Reneau. That all? Probably not, but Woodson and staff have plenty of roster space to fill.

Here are some interesting names in the transfer portal. Some have been linked with IU, others make sense, while the others are just interesting.

11 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

The GID is clearly your best avenue for addressing your concerns. 

Thank you.  Waste in government education is an important issue.

5 minutes ago, Bash Riprock said:

Never said that at all....just stating that I'm far more concerned about the size of my federal taxes than I am of my local tax.  Far more....

And I never stated that you said that.  Just asking the question.  

I'm concerned about all the taxes I pay; local, state, and federal.   

2 hours ago, Bash Riprock said:

oh yeah...when I am filing my taxes each year, I fixate on that local tax....that one's the killer!!!! 

Seriously, my beef with taxes is the feds....I appreciate not paying additional taxes across the board and not a fan of rising property tax...but the vast majority of my tax dollars isn't consumed at the local level.

So federal tax dollars are being used to build high school turf fields?  That is news to me.

1 minute ago, foxbat said:

Of course, Faith's always been known for soccer around here, so perhaps it's being built as a soccer venue that allows football to be played on the pitch as opposed to the traditional Indiana setup of a football field with the orange and blue spray paint on the gridiron.

Bingo.

19 hours ago, Bobref said:

The NFL Competition Committee has voted to ban the “hip drop” tackle. Can’t wait to hear all the meatheads. “Just make it flag football!” 

It is inevitable.

1 hour ago, Bobref said:

We have been used to TV networks exerting major influence on game times, pace of play, and other aspects of the games. Is the day far off when the large gambling concerns like Bally, Draft Kings, MGM, etc., will have that type of influence?

Like you said, this is inevitable.

Interesting.  So who does this affect onsides kicks?

10 hours ago, foxbat said:

I'm surprised they spent the money on football/soccer stadium; especially given that they are just moving to 11-man.  Then again, Faith has fairly extensive locations around town and gets some community monies tied to providing community services like the skate ramp park over on the east side campus. 

Faith has money to burn, what with it's large size and somewhat militant approach to tithing for its members. Mr. Viars runs that organization with an iron fist, and he wasn't shy several years ago about making sure Faith could use the  power of local government to get his hands on that sweet, sweet bond money:  https://www.purdueexponent.org/city/article_76f488fe-ad76-543f-8a67-148430583373.html

Mr. Neddenriep from the Indianapolis Star's take: https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/high-school/2024/03/24/indiana-high-school-football-coaches-dont-get-wish-on-tournament-seeding-ifca-proposal-ihsaa/73085086007/

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I wish Michael Kelly the best of luck.

The Indiana High School Athletic Association clearly has no interest in seeding the high school football tournament, a reality that hit me six years ago when proposal from the Indiana Football Coaches Association was shelved before it could even really get off the ground after some nudging from the IHSAA.

I gave up on the idea it would ever happen, going about with my life. Fine. The football season is great, could be made better with a little elbow grease, but hey, I’m not going to write about the potential for seeding the tournament every week when I know it’s not going to happen.

Then I heard there was potential again for seeding, this time coming from the Class 6A coaches. The idea, with 80% of the 6A coaches in support, was to seed the north and south from No. 1 through 16 by the Sagarin Ratings. A two-year pilot program was the idea, just to see how seeing the tournament might look. I got my hopes up.

 

Again, it never got off the ground. The IFCA was more than 70% in support of moving forward with a proposal, according to IFCA executive director Bob Gaddis, but there were concerns (including travel, seeding by Sagarin) in conversation with the IFCA membership, Indiana Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association and IHSAA that led to an altered proposal. That proposal, which called for the seeding at the regional level with two eight-team quadrants in the north and two in the south with the top four teams seeded and the other four selected by a blind draw, fell flat (79% of the IIAAA board voted against).

“We felt we had a solid, professional, well thought out proposal and had a good discussion with their board,” Gaddis said. “We received good feedback from the IIAAA and IHSAA, but we did not receive the needed support to officially present to the IHSAA.”

I was not surprised. Even though 49 other states have some sort of seeding for its football tournament, we seem to be forever mired in Ping Pong Ball, USA.

“There’s a reason we’re the only state that does it this way,” said former Westfield coach Jake Gilbert, now the defensive coordinator/coach-in-waiting at Wabash College. “And it’s not because we’re smarter than everyone else.”

Gilbert was directly involved with the seeding proposal six years ago and again this time around. Life goes on. There are certainly worse problems. But I am hopeful Kelly, the Hamilton Southeastern coach, and some of his fellow coaches are fired up on this topic.

“It’s disappointing that the IIAAA and the IHSAA aren’t interested in working with the coaches in moving the tournament forward,” Kelly said. “To think we can’t make any adjustments in 40 years of the tournament is baffling, to say the least.”

One of the points raised by former IHSAA commissioner Bobby Cox and current IHSAA commissioner Paul Neidig on seeding: The blind draw gives teams with poor records a chance to play somebody they could possibly beat in the first round. Neidig recently used the example of Knightstown in 2022. That team was 1-8 in the regular season, won two games in the sectional and reached the sectional championship game.

I don’t argue that’s great for Knightstown and certainly a positive for teams that have no real chance of beating a No. 1 seed barring a massive upset. But as Gilbert points out, why does that team matter more than the team that is state-ranked and has to play another state-ranked team in the first round? Gilbert used the example of No. 3 Ben Davis and No. 1 Brownsburg playing in the first round of the 6A sectional last season (a game Ben Davis won with a furious fourth-quarter comeback on the way to a state championship). Kelly used the example of Peru, after a 9-0 regular season, drawing 7-2 Guerin Catholic in the first round of the 3A sectional.

“The gift to (the 1-8 team) is that they get in the tournament,” Gilbert said. “In a lot of other states, they don’t get in at all. Why are those kids more important than the kid on the Brownsburg team that has to play the one team better than them in the state in the first round?  How is that fair to them? What if the NFL ran its playoffs that way? When you say, ‘Well, the right team still made the state finals,’ I’m not disagreeing but that’s a slap in the face to the kids who had their season cut short because they had to play the No. 1 team because of a blind draw in the first round. When you are in it, extending the season one more week matters a ton. Why do we think it’s important in one example (the team with a losing record) and not another? You telling me, with the magic Brownsburg had this season, that they wouldn’t have loved another week together? Why does it matter for Knightstown’s kids and not theirs?”

That’s a long quote, but I wanted to use it all because I think Gilbert explains it better than I can, and he’s been invested in this world personally as a high school coach for a long time. I have always wondered, too, why the explanation for the blind draw caters to the 1-8 team and not the 8-1 team.

Gilbert and former Ben Davis coach Jason Simmons, now an assistant at Miami of Ohio, headed the proposal for seeding several years ago. That idea was to combine two four-team sectional groups into eight teams and seed the top two by Sagarin Ratings. The rest would be determined by blind draw. In Class 4A and below, the top two teams were to be seeded by Sagarin with the rest determined by blind draw. The IFCA wanted one pilot year for Class 6A and 2A in 2018 to collect data.

“We had 70% of coaches and administrators on board,” Gilbert said. “What killed it is it dragged on so long, coaches and administrators changed. It started to become about all these other factors, like neutral sites. We lost momentum. The simplicity of seeding on some level had enough support, it was ‘What tool to you use for seeding?’ and ‘Does the lower seed automatically host?’ and those details that people got caught up on. When it was simpler and more about common sense, we had more support.”

The current format, with every team making the tournament, has been in place since 1985. When the football tournament began in 1973, that was not the case. The playoff system continued to expand, then went to a cluster system in 1983 and ’84, which had some proponents but not nearly enough. When the playoffs started, teams were allowed entry through a points system (it expanded from 12 teams in three classes to 24 teams in 1975 to 48 teams in 1980). The IHSAA went to the cluster system in 1983 and ’84 and added a fourth class with 64 teams reaching the playoffs based on their record against their three cluster opponents.

Ron Lemasters, the longtime sports editor of the Muncie Star, wrote this in 1985, the first year of the all-in tournament:

“There is a strong sentiment for a seeding of the top teams in each of the five classes. In Class AAA Saturday night, No. 1 Roncalli plays No. 3 Cathedral in Indianapolis. It’s a meeting both schools would like to see somewhere farther down the tourney trail, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that someone will challenge such pairings in court.”

 

So yeah, even when “Back to the Future” was still raking in cash at the box office, there was talk about seeding. The time seemed right, almost 40 years later, to try something different, especially with more than 80% of 6A coaches in favor.

Kelly, who helped get the proposal off the ground for the IFCA, said he is disappointed “with the integrity of the process.” The IFCA had 70% of coaches in support of a further discussion on seeding the entire tournament and 70% in favor of a two-year pilot program for seeding Class 6A by February. But after the IFCA coaches clinic two weeks ago in Indianapolis, where coaches drove from all over the state to meet, the IFCA was told travel would be an issue under a 1 through 16 format for the north and south. The IFCA basically had a week to restructure its proposal before it went to the IIAAA and was dismissed on Thursday.

“We did a bunch of work and everything changed at the 11^th hour,” Kelly said. “It would have been nice to know three months ago it wasn’t going to be considered.”

Now what? This reporter here is tired of beating his head against the wall for something I think could really benefit the football tournament but appears to have little chance of ever happening. Maybe it is instructive to remember that for many years, the decision-makers found reasons not to have a football tournament at all (the weather, delaying basketball season, etc.).

It will be another two years before another proposal could come to a vote.

“I’m not a quitter,” Kelly said. “I’m extremely frustrated but I think we need more answers. Trust is important and I’m not sure there is a lot of that with the IIAAA or the IHSAA right now.”

Forget the NFL draft machinations and the NCAA basketball tournaments, this was the most important story in sports over this weekend:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/us/barkley-marathons-jasmin-paris.html

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The runner Jasmin Paris became on Friday the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons, an extreme footrace that requires participants in rural Tennessee to navigate 100 miles of rugged terrain in no more than 60 hours.

Paris, 40, of Midlothian, Scotland, finished the race with one minute and 39 seconds to spare, making her one of only 20 people to complete the Barkley since it was extended to 100 miles in 1989. She was one of five to finish this year, out of 40 entrants.

At the end of the run, Paris sank to the ground in front of a yellow gate that marks the start and finish of the event, which consists of five roughly 20-mile laps.

“The final minutes were so intense, after all that effort it came down to a sprint uphill, with every fiber of my body screaming at me to stop,” Paris said in an email.

Her legs were covered in cuts and scratches by the time she reached the end of the race, which was the subject of a 2014 documentary, “The Race That Eats Its Young.”

“I didn’t even know if I’d made it when I touched the gate,” she added. “I just gave it everything to get there and then collapsed, gasping for air.”

She attempted the race in 2022 and 2023 and became the first woman to reach the fourth lap since 2001. Though she didn’t complete the event in those years, she said that she felt more confident and experienced going into the race on Friday.

In 2019, Ms. Paris, an ultrarunner and veterinarian, became the first woman to win the Montane Spine Race, a 268-mile ultramarathon in the United Kingdom. She broke the previous course record by 12 hours despite stopping at checkpoints to pump breast milk for her newborn.

The Barkley began in 1986, after its founder, Gary Cantrell, learned about the prison escape of James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ray fled for eight miles over the course of 54 hours through the Tennessee wilderness. Cantrell thought he could fare better himself, and he began to map out routes inside Frozen Head State Park.

The prison has been along the race route, which can change every year and requires athletes to often run through pathless terrain.

The rules for entering the race are cryptic. The Barkley doesn’t advertise. It asks applicants to submit an essay explaining why they wish to compete, in addition to a $1.60 entry fee.

“There is no website, and I don’t publish the race date or explain how to enter,” Mr. Cantrell said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

“Anything that makes it more mentally stressful for the runners is good,” he added.

Nothing about the marathon, which also boasts the equivalent of 60,000 feet of ascent and descent, about twice the elevation of Mount Everest, is straightforward.

On the night before the event, runners must stay alert for the sound of a conch shell that signals one hour until the race begins. When they take their marks, Cantrell signifies the start of the race by lighting a ceremonial cigarette.

As the race advances, runners must find books that are scattered along the course and remove a page that corresponds to their assigned number to prove their progress.

They hand the page from each book to Mr. Cantrell, as they complete each lap. There are no path markers, and runners have to memorize the course before they begin.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Barkley,” Ms. Paris said, “it’s that you never know what you are capable of until you try.”

If you haven't seen the aforementioned documentary I encourage you to watch it.  And congratulations to Mr. Paris on her monumental achievement.

1 hour ago, Rodney said:

Libertarians stand for nothing, and despite all their yapping accomplish much of the same

 

There can be a difference between 'small l' libertarians and 'big L' Libertarians.  And I hear much more political rhetoric spewing from the pieholes of democrats and republicans.

25 minutes ago, Rodney said:

If I wasn't lazy I'd have my own personal news site up and running so I can post links to articles and write whatever I want

 

But alas I get continually sidetracked

Maybe try staying at one school for more than 3-4 years. If you are to be believed you have bounced around to probably half a dozen different jobs in all different corners of this state.

9 hours ago, BTF said:

It's fun to watch as a fan, but the best team doesn't always win in that scenario. I'll take the turf. 

As a taxpayer, I'm all for anything that improves the high school experience for young people.

Then you are welcome to pay my taxes for me.   How many more tax burdens are you willing to take on?

9 hours ago, Indiana Fan said:

The majority of high school AD’s do not have quality or good high school football programs. For those ADs at those schools, it was an easy no brainer vote to turn it down. They prefer the random draw because they do not want to get stuck playing the best seeds and teams each and every year. It’s not right, it’ll be very difficult to ever get past this ancient random draw rule.

So that really says something about the overall quality of Indiana High School football.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/high-school/2024/03/22/indiana-high-school-football-ifca-proposal-to-seed-class-6a-fails-to-pass-athletic-directors-vote/73065072007/

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Those hoping for seeding in the Indiana high school football tournament will have to wait.

The idea for a pilot program to seed Class 6A for a two-year period hit a roadblock Thursday when the Indiana Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association board voted 78.9% against a proposal from the Indiana Football Coaches Association. If the proposal was approved by the IIAAA (at least 50%), it would have moved forward to be voted on by the Indiana High School Athletic Association executive committee in late April.

“We felt we had a solid, professional, well-thought-out proposal and had good discussion with their board,” IFCA executive director Bob Gaddis said in a message he shared with the IFCA coaches and IndyStar. “We received some good feedback from the IIAAA and IHSAA, but we did not receive the needed to support to officially present to the IHSAA.”

The IFCA altered its proposal from the original plan, which was to seed the north and south from No. 1 through 16 in Class 6A for a two-year pilot program. After receiving initial feedback from the IHSAA, it was clear the proposal needed changes to gain any support.

“We decided not to drop it completely,” Gaddis said, “and went to work putting together a proposal that we hoped had a chance.”

The IFCA proposed seeding by the regional format in Class 6A with four quadrants (there are 32 teams in 6A). Those eight teams in each quadrant would seed the top four teams with a blind draw host site, blind draw the remaining four teams and use the same home/away format for the tournament that is currently in place.

“The long-standing, traditional blind draw tournament is unique to Indiana, and many decision-makers are not ready to make that change,” Gaddis wrote. “Thanks to our committee for their work and to all the coaches that let their opinions be known.”

Bummer.  The mostly boomers running the IHSAA hate change.

12 hours ago, Bobref said:

An awful lot of great memories on that field — which was always rock hard by November.

<insert deity here> forbid that teams would have to adapt to differing field conditions.

https://www.windycitygridiron.com/2024/3/21/24107873/chicago-bears-selecting-caleb-williams-1st-overall-pick-in-2024-nfl-draft-99-likely-usc-ryan-poles

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Insert the Steve Carrell GIF from The Office; “Okay, It’s happening!”

The Chicago Bears almost certainly have their man, and that man is USC Quarterback Caleb Williams.

After an extensive visit with Caleb Williams in Los Angeles that included dinner, some whiteboard work and football conversation, as well as some time with Caleb Williams and his teammates, the Chicago Bears topped off their visit with a trip to USC’s Pro Day to watch Caleb Williams perform.

A source told WCG that the evaluation of Williams is now “90% to the finish line” and that with the first overall pick, Caleb Williams is “99% likely he will be the selection.”

This should come as no surprise to any Chicago Bears fan. They have done extensive background work on Williams since the regular season concluded and before the NFL Combine. The Bears brass (George McCaskey, Kevin Warren, Ryan Poles, Matt Eberflus, Shane Waldron, and Kerry Joseph) met with Williams at The Combine in Indianapolis, and with the trade of Justin Fields almost a week ago, it all seemed to be pointing in that direction.

After spending time with him in L.A., it appears the Chicago Bears have zero doubt he will be the first name called after Roger Goodell kicks off the draft.

Why only 99%, then? There would have to be a massive red flag that arises before the NFL Draft for the Bears to pivot, but the source also said that there are zero expectations for that to happen.

So did the Bears perform a detailed evaluation of any other college QB in the draft? What about Mr. Maye, Mr. Penix, Mr. Mccarthy, etc.?

Also I have heard reports that Mr. Williams is really barely 6 feet tall.  

The Least Credible Threat to Move a Sports Team in History: https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/kansas-city-chiefs-news-rumors-stadium-move-hunt.html

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The Kansas City Chiefs would appear to be a poor candidate to participate in the stadium financing extortion scheme that characterizes so much of American pro sports. The franchise has been in Kansas City since 1963, shortly after it helped to found the American Football League.* In the more than 60 years since then, the Chiefs have turned a huge swath of the lower Midwest into Chiefs Kingdom (their term) and cultivated fan passion that’s extreme even by the NFL’s standards. They sold out every game from 1990 to 2009, including in a bunch of years when the team was bad. After winning three Super Bowls in the past five seasons, the team is now a legitimate dynasty, and Arrowhead Stadium is not just packed every week but is universally regarded as one of the most raucous stadiums in football. The Chiefs are always in the league’s top 10 in attendance, and that was the case even before Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Andy Reid started winning championships.

 

However, none of this has stopped the team from threatening recently to abandon the city for elsewhere if voters don’t give the team half a billion dollars. The Chiefs are hoping, it seems, that voters are either very dumb or very scared.

The franchise wants to facilitate $800 million in upgrades to Arrowhead Stadium, which would help the Hunt family that owns the team make more money. The Hunts, who are worth at least several billion dollars, say they’ll kick in $300 million. That leaves taxpayers to cover the other $500 million, before any cost overruns. The Chiefs hope that voters will OK a 40-year extension of a three-eighths-of-a-cent sales tax in Jackson County, one that costs a resident 38 cents per every $100 they spend in the county. According to the Kansas City Star, taxpayers are still paying back hundreds of millions of dollars from the last time Kansas City’s football and baseball stadiums were renovated. Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals are also helping to get a new ballpark out of the tax extension.

Chiefs president Mark Donovan told the city’s NBC affiliate last week that if voters didn’t extend the tax, the Chiefs “would just have to look at all our options.” A reporter asked if that meant leaving the city the team has always called home, and Donovan said, “I think they would have to include leaving Kansas City.” He then said the team would be “willing to accept a deal” to stick around its home city.

There is one region in the world where the Chiefs can maximize their business: the one they play in now. They will never, ever—ever, in a zillion years—leave the Kansas City area. They are not the other Missouri franchise, the Rams, that stopped over in St. Louis for 20 years before migrating back to a bigger market, Los Angeles, where it had previously spent half a century. And with the Rams and Chargers both taking up residence in Southern California again and the Raiders in Las Vegas, there just aren’t other American cities that lack an NFL team and would give the Chiefs the level of support they enjoy now. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is a third-generation oil scion who inherited the team. He may or may not have any personal business acumen. But he is smart enough to know he isn’t going anywhere.

The Chiefs are making one of the least credible attempts in the history of stadium strong-arming. Not only are they are not going to leave the Kansas City area; they are unlikely even to leave the site of Arrowhead Stadium, a certainly profitable venue that is already one of the envies of the football world. Jackson County voters should tell the football team to pound sand and pay for the upgrades themselves. The Chiefs have been so successful in their hometown that they will make perfect guinea pigs for a necessary American experiment: Can taxpayers win a game of chicken against a sports team owner who is clearly bluffing?

The bluff’s flaws begin with the fact that there is nowhere in the United States for the Chiefs to go, at least nowhere distant. At most, the franchise could try to find a sugar funding deal a few miles across the border in Kansas, still within KC’s metro area. Other NFL owners are voracious about protecting their territories, and there is not a single swath of American land that does not already have a team (or two) with an entrenched foothold. Other major pro leagues have put successful teams in non-NFL cities like Portland, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Oklahoma City, and San Antonio. But the NBA teams in those cities don’t dominate regional fandom the way, for instance, the Dallas Cowboys do in Texas. And even stepping into another NFL team’s extended turf would be hugely expensive.

The Raiders agreed to pay their fellow NFL owners a nearly $400 million relocation fee to go from Oakland to Vegas. The L.A. teams agreed to pay $645 million. The amount Hunt wants from Jackson County taxpayers is $500 million, and the relocation fee alone would be in that neighborhood. All to move to a less lucrative home for the Chiefs, where he doesn’t have decades of proof that the locals will spend money supporting the team?

Hunt does not have a winning hand. His best hope is that fans who love the Chiefs get scared of an implausible outcome and vote to give him more of their money. Maybe that’s a paradox because less successful franchises than the Chiefs are trying similar moves and have more leverage.

Ted Leonsis is angling to move his Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards from D.C. to its Virginia suburbs. Leonsis has run into trouble in the Virginia Legislature, where some powerful lawmakers wonder why the commonwealth’s full faith and credit should go into a bond issuance that benefits one billionaire before anyone else. But Leonsis is likely to succeed in getting a sack of government cash from either D.C. (which is desperate to avoid losing a big downtown attraction amid a post-pandemic malaise) or Virginia (whose governor wants to build Leonsis an arena as a legacy project).

 

John Fisher is trying to move his Oakland Athletics to Vegas, following the Raiders. Fisher has his own funding problems, but he has a significant advantage in Vegas’ current lack of a big-league baseball team and Nevada’s desire to build Vegas into a global sports capital. Some big American cities don’t have MLB teams and could support them at levels acceptable to the league. So Fisher, even as he presides over a dumpster fire of a tanking team, has a good chance of getting the A’s out of the Bay Area.

But the Chiefs have none of these advantages, even as Mahomes and Kelce get ready to try for a fourth Super Bowl win in six years. The organization was too successful at building a fanbase in Kansas City, and other franchises were too good at taking over other regions. No move makes realistic sense for the Chiefs unless Hunt would like to be the man who moves his team to London, Berlin, or Mexico City, where the sport’s audience is growing. But even access to international markets is the subject of intense bargaining among NFL owners.

So where would the Chiefs go? Not far. The only plausible move would be across the border to nearby Kansas, but even interested lawmakers there acknowledge that landing the team is a long shot. Both the Chiefs’ and Royals’ stadiums are in an ocean of parking spaces a few miles outside of downtown. If the teams left, it would not be the same death blow to a cityscape that it might be if Leonsis succeeded in getting his teams out of D.C., so it’s worth less as leverage. And as popular as the Chiefs are, their fans may respond poorly to a move out of an iconic, longtime home to a glitzy but sterile new venue in the same area. Not to mention that building such a stadium would cost its own money and time; it would be much less convenient than renovating the existing building. And if the Chiefs do leave? The team’s Missourian fans might feel any number of ways, but it may well be a better deal to drive a short way across the border for games than to be made to buy a rich guy a stadium renovation over 40 more years. Even if the Chiefs “leave Kansas City,” there’s zero chance they go far.

Stadium funding is often a race to the bottom between local governments eager to give out the most generous tax and bond packages to corporate titans who do not need them. Congress could try to stop that race by passing national restrictions on stadium largesse, but the legislature has shown only glancing interest in the past. That gives Chiefs fans and Jackson County voters a unique opportunity to light the way for the rest of us. Their team is great and has no incentive to ever go anywhere else. No group of football fans has ever had a better chance to respond to fearmongering by pointing and laughing at it.

All true.  KC is going nowhere.

On 3/18/2024 at 9:12 AM, temptation said:

Trump:  If I lose this November, the American auto industry will suffer a “bloodbath” because of Biden pushing Chinese manufactured electronic vehicles.

 

One of Mr. Trump's MAGA mouthpieces, Rep. Jim Banks, just echoed this in an editorial in the the Indianapolis Star:  https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2024/03/20/biden-should-pursue-section-232-investigation-as-step-to-ev-tariffs/73030097007/

I especially like this fear mongering:

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Chinese EV imports are even more dangerous than traditional car imports. In addition to hurting our industrial capacity, they leave Americans vulnerable to Communist Party espionage and our infrastructure vulnerable to sabotage. China’s intelligence agencies could easily snoop on American drivers by pulling data from Chinese EVs. We already know that all EVs produce reams of personal data about their users, their habits, and their whereabouts. An influx of Chinese EV imports, as well as their various tech components, would give the CCP on-demand access to any and all of that.

Umm, so we are ok with American, Japanese, South Korean, and German car companies easily snooping on American drivers driving data, but not just the Chinese?  And here is a newsflash for Mr. Banks;  they can and do pull the exact same "reams of personal data" from non-EV's as well.