With apologies to all my Philly friends, the perfect Sunday is when the Giants win, the Eagles lose a last second heartbreaker, and the sun comes out after days and days of rain.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I don’t feel like that’s a heart felt apology.
You didn’t say the New York football Giants, and that’s good enough for me.
The New York Giants play in San Francisco, but you knew that.
Perfect!
What’s REALLY perfect is when Chicago wins on a 49 Yd FG with 2 sec to go, and when Minnesota ties up Denver with 5 min to go after a Peyton Manning interception toss.
Green Bay won. MN lost, but they made it a game. Chicago wins – amazing.
Congrats on the actual Giants win, Boo.
I was surprised to see that it was such a nice fall day after all that bad weather.
More so when the (Super Bowl bound, according to Philly fans four weeks ago) Iggles play horribly (again) and lose at the last minute to a horrible team and the Giants play stout start to finish again a tough team.
The schadenfreude will be running strong in Philly this week. There is already talk of running their genius coach out of town in feathers.
Michigan won convincingly, Notre Dame lost and Ole Miss got beat like a runaway slave – yesterday was a VERY happy day for me. An Ohio State loss would have made it positively orgasmic…
Somehow, Illinois beat Nebraska. Amazing.
Yep. Trifecta. Not quite a quadagism. 🙂
Chargers win after getting a second chance at a missed field goal with 0 seconds left. Fun game with the lead changing hands about 50 times
We shared a sunny day, Booman, and my Bengals won over Kansas City. So all’s right with my world!
Given the long litany of ways the NFL has severely abused the public and their players, I’m less interested in supporting this ultra-violent sport overseen by sociopaths, even though I’ve been a big fan and follower until now. I failed to kick the habit last year, but I’m closer to making my Sundays less consumed by football now, with the amazingly sudden collapse of the 49ers.
I admit to enjoying the morality play around this collapse: ultra-greedy family owners trolling the entire Bay Area until they found ways to extract the maximum financial theft from the most servile City Council they could find, absurdly calling themselves a San Francisco team even though they no longer play in the metropolitan area, and the forcing out of their combustible but highly successful head coach over a macho public pissing match which did none of them credit.
Now their team is pure, runny shit, and their franchise quarterback is in a sharp, uncontrolled tailspin, a shadow of where he was a year ago and frankly playing below replacement level most of the time now.
At least the owners’ enjoyment of their big piles of money will be mitigated by the people who spit at them on the streets and curse them in the penthouses.
Yeah, I remember Mayor Daley I saying that if the Chicago team went to a stadium in Arlington Heights, they could be the Arlington Heights Bears. What’s with the Mayor of SF? I’d pull that name right back.
I remember Daley (the first one) saying that, too, but he had no legal leg to stand on. However, the Bears were just negotiating to get improvements to Soldier Field, which were forthcoming.
SF actually did pass a measure sometime circa 1997 to fund a new stadium, but it never came to pass. I don’t remember all the reasons why but part of it was when Eddie DeBartelo lost control of the team – the stadium was part of a general commercial development plan for his firm. And then the other part had to be the huge boom in real estate costs at that time, which made giving up that kind of land to a stadium a lot less attractive than other, more profitable ventures. In some cities the mayor would put a lot of effort into forcing a stadium project into reality in spite of that, but it wasn’t a priority for SF, in terms of what the people of the actual city of SF wanted (as opposed to the area around it – remember SF proper isn’t that big in terms of land).
Santa Clara, on the other hand, had a few things going for it. First, they could share a parking lot and a lot of facilities with the Great America amusement park. This is a park which decades ago was nearly torn down to build office space and the city stepped in to stop that – ever since it’s been in a special protected status because the park is seen as some thing that they value as a quality of life thing even though the land itself could be more profitable in other uses. So this meant a BIG savings versus just about anywhere else. Second, the 49ers already owned a lot of the land around there, acquired decades earlier for their training facility, so again a big savings due to land acquisition costs. Third, the whole area around northern Santa Clara was “underdeveloped” relative to most of the south bay area and was ripe for new projects, many of which generated a lot of tax revenue for the city. Today there are dozens of new office buildings, retail, hotels, etc. around there. Finally, there actually is a real demand for the stadium for non-football events, such as concerts. Most stadiums are sold to taxpayers in part based on the anticipated tax revenues from such events, but in most cases they fail to materialize. But the location – in the middle of a large population base that is substantially above the national income average – means that they can support a steady stream of concerts at the venue – which unlike most recent taxpayer-funded stadia actually was designed with concerts in mind.
Of course, none of this means that the taxpayers of Santa Clara weren’t sold a bill of goods in order to get them to pass (barely) the tax measure that funded the last part of the stadium, but they weren’t screwed as badly as, say, the taxpayers in Dallas or Denver were.
Very good summary.
Financial extraction is financial extraction, disloyalty to a fan base is disloyalty to a fan base, bad luck is bad luck, stupid management and personnel moves are…you know.
Now the 49’ers get to play in front of a bunch of Silicon Valley tech firm chiefs, venture capitalists, and the executives and politicians they fete in their ultra-luxury boxes. With the gears of the offense fully stripped, these “fans” can now feel free to ignore the game while they’re there and leave in the third quarter. They still won’t beat the traffic, though.
It’s soul work.
It’s funny how often a team has a really good year or two before a new stadium is built. I mean, so funny that it makes it worth considering conspriacy theories. In Denver the vote to replace Mile High came on the heals of back-to-back championships. In Arizona, an unexpected super bowl run helped get people to the polls. I forget which Giants super bowl preceded the New Jersey vote. Atlanta needs a new stadium, supposedly the ancient one built 21 years ago is just too decrepit, and voila, a last-place team is miraculously 4-0.
In the case of SF the vote passed before they hired Harbaugh but not before they were sure it would actually get built.
Ok, so if you examine this too closely you’ll find many exceptions that prove it’s not a rule. Seattle built a new stadium long before they had a competitive team. And if this were really true we’d expect San Diego and Oakland atop the AFC standings now.
And the Cowboys lose a heartbreaker. I will sleep well. The stars are aligned.
Interesting to see there seemed to be as many or more Packers fans in SF, err Santa Clara today as Niner fans. I guess the move pissed off/priced out more than a few loyal Niner fans.
It’s a bit of a haul down to Santa Clara, as I learned when I went from Berkeley down there for the Dead Show.
It really isn’t that unusual that poor teams give up a lot of seats at home games to fans of the visiting teams. Fans of a local team will continue buying the season tickets even in bad seasons because they don’t want to lose their seniority in the ticketing system for when the good years come up. But in bad seasons the season ticket holders will attend less often. The emergence of on-line ticket exchanges has meant they re-sell the tickets a lot more often than before. But even back in the 1980s, for example, Chicago @ Detroit was more of a Chicago home game than a Detroit one.
What is unusual is the degree that some teams have over others in terms of fans who show up to such away games – and the Packers and Steelers are at the top of the list. I’m not 100% sure why. Certainly the fact that both teams have been competitive far more often than not over the recent decades helps, but these two teams come from lower-population areas (Wisconsin + U.P., and western Pennsylvania + some area in adjacent states) and still have the most active fan bases in other cities. Certainly the fact that they were the dominant teams during past eras (1960s and 1970s, respectively) allowed them to build generational followings. But even then you’d think that Dallas (5 super bowl wins in two different eras, consistently the highest number of fans who claim them as a “favorite”), Giants (4 super bowl wins, largest natural population base), Patriots (4 super bowl wins, consistent winner for 14 years, occasional winner before that), or Bears (2nd largest population base, strong for most of the pre-Super Bowl era, one strong era in the 1980s, another briefly in 2000s) would have as many fans at away games. But, nope, the Packers and Steelers lead the way.
SF fans attended the new stadium in droves when it opened early last year. But when it became apparent that the team wasn’t competitive and was pushing out the coach tickets became available.
While Santa Clara is a much longer commute for fans from areas to the north, the center of population in the SF bay area skews to the south. Most of the SF fans actually saw a reduction in commute times with the move to Santa Clara.
The Silicon Valley money was starting to buy up seats and boxes at Candlestick, but that transition wasn’t taking up a majority of seats there. That’s the owner’s propaganda talking.
The 49’ers had a particularly strong and motivated fan base from the North Bay. For example, many Santa Rosa residents made the hour and a half drive down to Candlestick for the games, and the Press-Democrat gives the team home-town coverage.
Now those fans are well and truly screwed by 30 extra miles of driving which can turn into an extra 90 minutes each way with the horrible South Bay traffic.
All for a shitty team owned by a family that acts like they’re morally upright or something. A couple of press conferences during the recent period when many of their players had major arrests for sexual assaults, DUI’s and whatnot were quite the spectacle, with owners talking about preserving the integrity and tradition of the 49’ers as if the owners themselves, during the relatively brief time they’ve controlled the team, had a legacy of behaving well.
This was uncomfortable:
Check out the sanctimony and inappropriate chips on shoulders. These guys and Harbaugh in the same room must have been fun, eh?
The Silicon Valley money was starting to buy up seats and boxes at Candlestick, but that transition wasn’t taking up a majority of seats there. That’s the owner’s propaganda talking.
No, sorry. I can’t remember where I read it but back when there still was no firm plan for replacing Candlestick an analysis of where the attendees of both 49er and Giant games lived found that many more came from points south than points north. Yes, Marin County residents got screwed when the 49ers moved south, but they did enjoy a shorter commute to see the Giants.
The idea that “Silicon Valley money was starting to buy…” implies that Silicon Valley money was new or something. People centered in San Jose, Saratoga, Los Altos, Palo Alto, etc. had been buying up 49er tickets since before Montana was drafted.
I’m not saying this to excuse the ownership or anything. I was visiting friends in Santa Clara when the measures was up for a vote in 2010 (I think) and we all thought then it was a complete rip-off, especially given the recessionary cuts the city was enduring.