When you weren’t working over the weekend, and in turn weren’t reading about sports on work time, Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the NFL could breaks its stadium logjam in L.A. by building its own building.
The full story merits a careful read, because it contains plenty of interesting nuggets. At one point, Farmer suggests that a new L.A. stadium could be one of the anchors of a Super Bowl rotation that would allow the league to sell Personal Seat Licenses for the league’s championship game.
“For instance, if L.A. were promised four Super Bowls in 20 years, the league could tell fans, ‘Pay X-thousand dollars now, and you will have the right to buy a face-value ticket for this seat for all four of those Super Bowls,’” Farmer writes. “You may not like it, and it’s going to be pricey, but there’s a good chance that’s eventually going to happen.”
The news comes at a time when the notion of a Super Bowl rotation has diminished. Over the last 10 years, the game has gone from Jacksonville to Detroit to Miami to Arizona to Tampa to Miami to Dallas to Indianapolis to New Orleans to New York. This year, it’s back to Arizona, then to San Francisco (Santa Clara), Houston, and Minneapolis.
A set rotation makes it harder to squeeze the best possible deal out of each and every host city that competes with other cities for the privilege of hosting the game and in turn giving the owners all sorts of free stuff. The best approach could be to pit L.A., Miami, Arizona, and New Orleans against each other for that guaranteed four Super Bowls in 20 years, prompting each of them to go all in for the ability to avoid having to throw elbows with cities that get Super Bowls as payback for taxpayer-funded stadiums or locations willing to go ridiculously all-in for the chance to host an open-air, cold-weather game.
Regardless, it looks like the NFL has found yet another revenue stream onto which the league eventually will be dropping a big-ass boat.