Mayor Dean says the new convention center could get Nashville a Super Bowl

Mayor Karl Dean with the head scratcher during a local radio show:

When you stop and think what we got in Nashville with the convention center, with the Omni coming on line and then you add Gaylord into that too ... we could handle almost any sort of event; and we could handle a Super Bowl .... We could easily handle the Super Bowl.

Cities that "can handle" the Super Bowl get the Super Bowl. I remember reading that Nashville might crack the top 30 of convention cities with the Music City Center (up from 33rd). How is it the deal maker beyond conventions? If such a huge wavy behemoth does not even catapult us to the upper crust of convention cities after it is built, how could it leverage a Super Bowl at LP Field?

Source: Zack Bennett

In honor of today's U2 concert in Nashville

Hear the crickets?

Oh, what could have been if the Titans had been in a giving-back-to-Nashville kind of mood about tonight's big event last year:

It was a golden opportunity for the Tennessee Titans to demonstrate that they can return money to Metro Nashville coffers and have the positive PR of hosting one of the great international pop bands. But instead they denied a request by U2 to play at LP Field next July. According to the Tennessean, LP field would have afforded 28,000 more seats than Vanderbilt Stadium (where the concert will happen), which could have translated to that many more sales taxes for the city.

Vanderbilt's gain.

But each U2 ticket for an LP Field concert would have included a $2 user fee, which would have gone to fund stadium maintenance and upgrades. This loss needs to be thrown back in the Titans face when they come demanding upgrades in the future, which you can bet they will.

LP Field needs to be used every time it can be so that it can pay for itself.

Public parks vs. pro sports stadiums

Charles Maldonado recently wrote one of the more important stories on the Metro budget that you will read from a local news source, but I want to draw one particular lop-sided comparison from his excellent article:

The land under LP Field was valued at $6.3 million at the beginning of the last decade, according to Metro Property Assessor records. It’s gone up to $6.9 million, an increase, but only 10 percent ....

On the other hand, the value of Riverfront Park went from $6.3 million to $23 million between 2005 and 2009. The largest individual infrastructure expense there was the $2.3 million station for the Regional Transit Authority’s commuter rail line the Music City Star, installed there in 2009.

Maintaining and improving public infrastructure that serves the broadest swath of Nashvillians is at least as important as serving the constrained and special interests of pro sports consumers. In this case, sustaining Riverfront Park has been a greater return for Nashville on property value than keeping up LP Field has.

Could Pro Football Even Exist without Car Culture and Sprawl Growth?

A NY Times reporter is not so marveled by the architecture of the new home of the Dallas Cowboys:

Cowboys Stadium suffers from its own form of nostalgia: its enormous retractable roof, acres of parking and cavernous interiors are straight out of Eisenhower’s America, with its embrace of car culture and a grandiose, bigger-is-better mentality. The result is a somewhat crude reworking of old ideas, one that looks especially unoriginal when compared with the sophisticated and often dazzling stadiums that have been built in Europe and the Far East over the last few years. Worse for fans, its lounges and concourses are so sprawling that I suspect more than a few spectators will get lost and miss the second-half kickoff.

Between Young and the Titans, a Texan Fingers the Titans

Largely missed here in Nashville yesterday was Dallas Morning News NFL beat reporter Rick Gosselin's assessment of Vince Young and the Tennessee Titans:

Vince Young was not a polished passer in college, he was not a polished passer as an NFL rookie and he's not a polished passer now. He has the leadership and legs to win in this league, and that's carried him to this point. But he needs the arm to come around to take the next step as a quarterback. His passer efficiency rating is 66.9 is disappointing. That's slightly above the 66.4 of Rex Grossman, and everyone considers him a wash.

But I blame the Titans more than I blame Young. Give him a reason to throw the ball. The team's top three wide receivers in 2006 were gone by the time training camp rolled around in 2007. His best receiver, Roydell Williams, doesn't even rank in the NFL's top 50 in receiving. Give Young a Terrell Owens or an Andre Johnson then judge him.

Can the local sports media ever bring themselves to be this hard nosed about the team? The Tennessean's diagnosis of the Titan's death-bed condition is cruddy:

The Titans were good enough to bolt to a 6-2 record at the season's halfway point. They were fragile enough to lose the next three games by a combined 58 points.

I'm not sure the Titan's first 8 games were as strong as David Climer--who prefers to see a mystery over attributing blame--suggests. They won squeakers over Atlanta, Houston (the Texans made an amazing 4th quarter comeback after being down by 25 points), and Oakland; they could have just as easily had a 3-5 record then, which would make a dismal 4-9 now.

Perhaps if the local media had spent less time hyping the Titans' playoff chances and more time exhibiting the hard noses of writers elsewhere who look for chinks, then they wouldn't have been fooled by the Titan's collapse. And that collapse falls on the shoulders of the team's management, not on QB Young.

Mainstream Media Football Quote of the Weekend

What struck me, as the Cowboys marched down the field [in a drive to take the lead for the first time and for good with 18 seconds left against the Lions yesterday], was how much it felt like what the Patriots did to the Ravens [the weekend before]. Without the butt-kissing ref calls, of course.

- - Jennifer Floyd Engel, reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, On-line Exclusive

Prince's Performative Enhancement

Failing to see behind Prince's veiled reference:

This Super Bowl was the most kid friendly Super Bowl in years. If there were any advertisements for male sexual enhancement, I didn't notice them. Even Prince's halftime show was family friendly.

- -Jamey Tucker, News 2 Reporter

I believe that kids old enough to follow football would comprehend phallic symbolism in action a lot quicker than they would verbalized technical jargon like "erectile dysfunction."

Professional Football is Perhaps The Crucible of Cultural Extremes

It looks like we have the usual post-Super Bowl culture rows simply because some coaches embraced religion over the other more violent, bad-boy culture of professional football. The NFL--or the most publicized sides of it--seems to be a realm lacking any moderation or equivocation; it requires all or nothing; either you wear a halo or some horns to fill a niche or to please the clientele, who require their crowing points.

That's part of what makes football the modern American religion, supplanting anything that conservative evangelicals might have in store for us with their theocratic visions. Why else would it be so important to keep big-screen Super Bowl parties viable options for evangelical churches, who would otherwise have to close on Super Sunday, even through Snickers commercials with men kissing each other and beer commercials ending with combatants getting knocked in the head with blunt objects?

Gads. Whatever happened to the virtues of moderation and avoidance of the vice of going to extremes? Wasn't the grid iron ever an Aristotelian or Thomistic playground where the adage of "staying within yourself" actually mattered? Is it too much to ask football to attract passable temperates who aren't so drastically bent on jumping off the deep end of the moment?

The Coming Divorce Between the Titans and Nashville Just Leapt Closer

This hastens that fateful day when Tennessee Titans ownership moves the team out of Nashville. It represents the third generation of football stadiums: the largest single span arches in the world, the largest retractable end zone panel in the world, the world's only roof-suspended football scoreboard media panel--600 tons, mind you--that stretches from 20-yard-line to 20-yard-line, and a veritable playground for those with fat wallets. It makes LP Field look more like tinker toys than ever. And it relies on public funding and attracting more superrich into its 15,000 premium club level seats with attached restaurants and bars.

The Cowboys were the trendsetters for the last generation of NFL stadiums, too: they imported the concept of luxury suites and maximized prime seating into the game, unwittingly making the Oilers' move out of Houston and into Nashville years later inevitable. But, as Dallas reporter Michael Granberry observes, that generation of stadiums fundamentally changed the game from a class equalizer (where everyone generally paid the same parking fees and ticket prices and ate the same hot dogs) to a class divider where the gulf between a local community's haves and have-nots widened with the luxurious stadium amenities going to those who could afford them. The sport disconnected from the working class roots of its pool of talent.

The Dallas Cowboys' new $1 billion stadium--to be finished by 2009--is not only "state-of-the-art." While it prises the class gap even farther, it also compresses time for every other city that has a football team: bringing closer that day when owners will begin to hold it up as leverage to get their own. And the Adams Family will be no different. They will want their own $1 billion stadium and they (or whomever they sell to) will come calling on Metropolitan Government again to help finance it, while marketing it to the superrich of Williamson County.

I don't see how Nashville can pay that price again; there was too much acrimony the first time around and too many costs under the bridge since then. And too many Nashvillians cannot even afford to attend games with their families in the cheap seats (an archaic misnomer), let alone walk those lavish, climate-controlled concourses studded with flat panel screen monitors. Even the hallowed "game-day experience," the holiest of holies on autumn Sundays, has become more like the Iroquois Steeplechase and less like a bunch of working stiffs loading up the pick-ups and meeting before the game.

So, I don't see the political will to ante-up in Nashville when the Adams Family comes calling wanting a Texas-sized marvel that will only widen the gap between rich and working classes in Middle Tennessee. Enjoy this little affair with the Titans now, Nashville, because Dallas just guaranteed that we and our tinker-toy field are living on borrowed time.

Bring In the Clowns. Don't Bother. They're Here.

Albert Haynesworth has a character problem, so what does he do? He brings in "image consultants" to help him with public relations. Thus, the misplaced wardrobe change begins. Confusing character with image is a profound part of Albert's problem, no matter how much he is paying marketing pimps to dress him up to look nice. Character, unlike image, cannot be bought and paid for. I hope Albert makes that clear to those vulnerable public housing kids whom he is using as tools on Sunday to kick-start his public relations campaign.

Further Indication That the Local Sports Media Sucks up to the Titans

Yesterday, I argued that the local TV sports reporters generally spoil the Titans instead of hitting them with hard and searching journalism. A comment from former Titans player Justin Harwig in this morning's Nashville City Paper seems to further support my contention of the media's kid-glove approach:

When I was there with [Albert Haynesworth], people in the media would always write stuff about how he had matured and everything, and I would see that and I would just laugh, because I knew he was still the same old guy.

Hartwig is one of those guys who has experienced the business end of Haynesworth's hooligan kicks while laying on the ground.

One is bound to ask: at what point does the local media bear responsibility for enabling bad player behavior with unreasonably positive coverage instead of pounding players and coaches with critical questions about losing and about lapses of character?

Local Sports Reporters are Too Nice for Our Own Good

We need some thugs ... we got too many nice guys

Put aside the obvious irony Pacman's post-game comment in contrast to Albert Haynesworth's ruthless assault on the unprotected face of an opponent as the latter was lying on the ground. It is apparent that the Titans already have quite a lot of brutal thuggery seething just under the surface. And it is only digging them new spider holes: while Haynesworth claims that he is not a dirty player, dirty is as dirty does.

But put the irony aside for a second and reflect on how applicable Pacman's statement is to the local TV sports media, which seems to have become the soft public relations arm of the Tennessee Titans. I have been tuning in to a lot more Titan's coverage than usual lately to see how the local media would be covering their defeated streak. Where I grew up, the media was swarming and undaunted when the local sports team didn't live up to snuff. But I grew up in the Dallas area, where the Cowboys have always been put under unforgiving microscopes and intrepid spotlights. The storied glare of the New York City media is even more harsh on the Yankees, Giants, Jets, and Mets.

So, I have watched with interest the relatively easy ride the Nashville's "nice-guy" sports reporters have given the Tennessee Titans. It is not just listening to local reporters ask players and coaches over and over during the losing streak about finding "silver linings" and "bright spots" (cue News 2). It is not just that the local press did not do rookie quarterback Vince Young any favors by choosing to delay running the news of his start for days to protect him from the pressure of media glare. It is also the obvious lack of critical treatment that they initially gave Haynesworth's gridiron assault of a man lying on the ground. Channel 4's sportscaster initially said of Haynesworth's apology that he "stepped up" to do what he needed to do. Excuse me? That almost sounds like praise for a player who owes a lot more than an apology. And the main criticism that I heard on all three newscasts was that Haynesworth may have cost the Titans a win. 30 stitches precariously close to Andre Gurode's left eye, and the local media's first focus was mainly on the lost possibility of beating the Cowboys. A requisite carry-on for a sports beat should be a moral compass.

The local sportscasters must have listened to the hits Haynesworth's integrity was taking on NBC and ESPN, because since Sunday night's initial soft-peddle of the on-field stabbing (let's call it what it was), they have been willing to use words like "despicable," which only begins to describe the ferocious, criminal attack that we watched on Sunday. I am not suggesting that journalists become thugs like Pacman, but maybe if the local media had put aside their "nice-guy" relationship with the Titans from the beginning, then they wouldn't now be playing catch-up when it comes to proper criticism of the team.