I decided to take a look at how the Gophers Football program is doing from an attendance perspective these days. Here’s a look at the annual attendance averages for each season in their new stadium. I’ve averaged the first 6 games of 2012. The data can be found here. They sold out every game the [...]
Paul C. Udstrand wrote up an excellent history of Minnesota sports stadium welfare debacles at Twin Cities Indymedia last month. I’ve pulled a couple highlights below, but the whole thing is worth reading by anyone seriously considering funding yet another professional sports stadium welfare program in the State of Minnesota. The Xcel Energy Center’s failure [...]
In the past 60 days, the StarTribune has published 29 articles and 11 blog posts mentioning “Wilf” and “stadium”: Over that same time period, the StarTribune has published 0 articles and 0 blog posts mentioning “Wilf” and “trial”: Their business appears to be a business of promoting Zygi Wilf’s business. A little something on the [...]
Zygi Wilf had a busy week, splitting his time between trying to convince Minnesotans to give his company hundreds of millions of dollars, while simultaneously appearing in a court case in New Jersey, where he’s being sued for screwing a business partner out of more than $20 million: In between his appearances, he flew to [...]
Paul Merrill broke down the redundancy of Strib comments regarding Vikings stadium talk yesterday, and I thought I’d ad my $0.02 on the ROI of public funding for professional sports entertainment stadiums. This is my Joe 6-Pack perspective: If team owners could make the case that community subsidized stadiums provided a positive return on a [...]
There would be a few changes: 1. The only synchronized sport would be the marathon. Parents could explain to their kids that there used to be other similarly stupid sports – only shorter. 2. The 100m dash finals would have one representative from each country in the entire world run on a track with enough [...]
Google Maps Mania has taken an interesting look at the Olympic Medal Count where they’ve mapped out each nation’s success, then presented alternative views based on medals won per capita or by the GDP of each country. New found respect for Australia and Ukraine.
One of the best ads I’ve seen posted on Craigslist lately: Can Franken knock it out of the park?
My flight from Toronto yesterday afternoon approached MSP over Stillwater, along I-694 to Maple Grove, then made a U-Turn taking things toward the airport from the West starting around Wayzata. While heading East, I grabbed shots of three high schools and their athletic fields: Hopkins: I count 8 tennis courts, eight baseball/softball diamonds, a hockey [...]
Jelly Belly has finally come out with a product for endurance athletes who are trying to prevent bonking on a long run or ride. Sports Beans to the rescue. What makes them different from regular Jelly Belly’s? Well, the colors and flavors are less fun, which is appropriate for serious athletes. Could you take yourself [...]
