Le Tigre

SF will like this: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/52833725 (need a Stevie G thumb-up )

Interesting plan to finish a season: NHL adopts 24-team playoff if season returns The NHL will abandon the rest of the regular season and go straight into the playoffs with 24 teams instead of 16 if it is able to resume play, commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday. The NHL will now move on to a 24-team, conference-based, postseason format that was approved by the NHLPA on Friday by a 29-2 vote, with the Carolina Hurricanes and Tampa Bay Lightning the only teams whose representatives voted against it. The games would be held inside empty arenas at two hub cities, where players, staff and others would be housed during the season restart. Originally, the NHL was seeking four different hubs, but logistics and a refocusing on the 24-team, conference format narrowed that to two. Bettman said Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Edmonton, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Toronto and Vancouver are being considered. The hubs would have secure arenas, hotels and practice facilities, and there would be aggressive COVID-19 testing and protocols at each site. The Canadian government's mandatory 14-day quarantine could force the NHL to pick two U.S. locales. "The interpretation of the quarantine consistent with our players' ability to travel in and not have to do a strict self-quarantine in a hotel room, we won't be in a position to use any of the Canadian cities as a hub city," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said. "We're faced with having to find a solution to that. Hopefully we can." The top four teams in each conference ranked by points percentage -- Boston, Tampa Bay, Washington and Philadelphia in the East and St. Louis, Colorado, Vegas and Dallas in the West -- will play separate round-robin tournaments to determine seeding in the first round. They will be played with regular-season overtime and shootout rules. Those teams will be accumulating points within that round robin, and if there are any ties, they will be broken by which team has a higher regular-season points percentage. As an example: If the Bruins and Lightning both go 2-1 in the round robin, Boston would earn the top seed based on points percentage. The remaining 16 teams, seeded by conference, will play best-of-five play-in series. These games will be played with playoff overtime rules, and these play-in series will determine which teams advance to a traditional 16-team Stanley Cup playoff bracket. In the East, the play-in series matchups would be No. 5 Pittsburgh vs. No. 12 Montreal; No. 6 Carolina vs. No. 11 New York Rangers; No. 7 New York Islanders vs. No. 10 Florida; and No. 8 Toronto vs. No. 9 Columbus. In the West, it would be No. 5 Edmonton vs. No. 12 Chicago; No. 6 Nashville vs. No. 11 Arizona; No. 7 Vancouver vs. No. 10 Minnesota; and No. 8 Calgary vs. No. 9 Winnipeg. https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29225074/nhl-adopts-24-team-playoff-season-returns

That should be OK for Ohio or Texas teams...not so sure for California or New Jersey. Will the league allow some players to report for minis, while others do not? That's the million-dollar question. League execs have spoken extensively about preserving competitive balance across all teams. In short, if one team isn't able to get on the practice field due to local or state law, no NFL team will be able to. With just coaches/staff, it may not meet the same definition. It changes every day, so who knows?

Troy Vincent: “We are planning on full stadiums, until...” It is anyone’s guess, as the NFL still cannot say much concrete—as it simply cannot know at present. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2893145-troy-vincent-nfl-expecting-full-stadiums-until-medical-community-says-otherwise

Bills get a “go” for sort of a camp. As long as... https://sports.yahoo.com/york-approves-opening-training-camps-163415434.html

Reportedly, the elites are out there. Closest I could come to finding was the price:$300+ Have just been casually browsing, so they may be less somewhere else.

From a week or so ago, however this is one of the better analysis regarding the financial impacts of "No Fan Games": https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/no-fans-allowed-what-empty-stadiums-would-cost-nfl-teams-and-how-theyre-trying-to-solve-the-financial-strain/ Two things caught my eye: Estimating losses Games without fans would cost $70 million in gate receipts per team — as a conservative estimate. Count the 10 games (two exhibitions) at a stadium and multiply by $7 million, which several sources indicated would be a fair average across the league. And while you'd save on expenses like event staffing, you'd still lose out on millions in concession sales and parking. The NFL has long had revenue sharing in place, and the bulk of the money pool comes from television contracts. But TV contracts are not the entire pie, and with those numbers already locked in for this season, the expectation is total revenue takes a big hit. And even though the NFL has enjoyed all-time revenue highs this century, teams still amazingly see small profit margins. At least that's the case for the Green Bay Packers, whose standing as a publicly owned corporation allows for a peak behind the NFL curtain. Here's a look at their public statement of revenue from the past two years (keep in mind all of the dollar values are in thousands): (See graph in article) As the adage goes, you make a lot of money and spend a lot of money. The Packers, who I'm told are at the high-end of local revenue generation among NFL teams, netted an operating profit of about $724,000. Circumstances like Aaron Rodgers's record-breaking contract, deals for a new coaching staff and concussion settlement payments accounted for such a small margin. Last year's financials show the team may have been getting too fat in the belly. The $724,000 in operating profit from 2019 is a sharp decline from the reported $34 million operating profit the year before. That was down from $65.3 million the year before that, and down even more from $75 million in 2016. A loss of local revenue in the tens of millions will significantly impact operations for each team in the NFL, and it will especially harm the teams who have been nearing the edge. As teams begin to count the money that won't be coming in this fall, they're focused even more on making sure more doesn't go out the door. "Way, way, way more energy is being spent on preserving the revenue that we have than replacing what we're going to lose," one team executive says. Socially-distant fans in stadiums? Last Monday, Dolphins president/CEO Tom Garfinkel announced a plan for an NFL game to take place with socially-distant fans in the Hard Rock Stadium stands. Certain fans would enter at designated times through designated gates, sit spaced out in the stands and exit "much like a church environment." The Dolphins would be able to get about 15,000 fans in their 65,000-seat stadium. But one NFL team executive indicated to me that other teams weren't pleased that the Dolphins' so proudly unveiled their working plan. The question coming from fans of other teams was, Where's your plan? The truth is, a plan involving social distance options for all NFL stadiums is 1) not easy to concoct and 2) not really feasible for some stadiums. Even the plan Garfinkel announced begs for more clarity on key issues. First, though, the advantages for home teams are obvious. You have a semblance of a home crowd and you get a portion of the gate receipts, concessions and parking you'd otherwise lose. You can get stadium workers back to work and make money in the process. But whoa, Nelly, are there challenges. Do teams want to take on that liability? Mobile ticketing would be almost necessary, and some teams don't have that in place and certainly can't get that infrastructure ready in time. Venues that are cashless would operate better than those still stuck in the last decade, but good luck having a decent line of people standing 6 feet apart in the Superdome concourses. Even better luck ensuring restrooms are sanitary over the course of three-plus hours. And you'd better hope the fixtures are touchless and motion-activated. Where would you seat people? That can be figured out with a rather elementary algorithm. There's no real problem asking a computer to figure out how to safely place people 6-or-more feet away from each other in your home stadium. But who sits where is another issue entirely. Sources agree that season-ticket holders will likely get first dibs on tickets. "No one is more valuable than the PSL (permanent seat license) owners," one executive told me. "[They represent] long-term commitment, buy the bigger ticket and least often default." If a team has, say, 45,000 season-ticket holders but only 15,000 get to go to one game, you'd likely have to hold a lottery. Your most valued customer would get to go to at least two home regular-season games and possibly more in this scenario. There'd be no single-game tickets to non-season ticket holders -- an understandable function of this -- and it's possible there'd be no allotment for visiting team fans. But as one source pointed out, the long-time season-ticket holder who makes a mid-six figure salary who has seats on the eighth row may not appreciate sitting in Section 517, Row M, Seat 12. Ultimately, is it worth it? Sources differ on that answer. But all recognize that in this fight to claw back as many dollars as possible this NFL season, there won't be a one-size-fits-all policy across the league. That may be unfair, but there's money to be made. Or, rather, money to not be lost.

Good fellow, our Chadwick.

Have had business dealings as a fringe participant, with Mike in the room. He is, as you say, a very pleasant man. He is also one of the greatest negotiators—this side of his daughter—I have ever seen.

Not a surprising conclusion: https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/05/19/nfl-doctor-coronavirus-return-tests And, regarding “competitive deficiencies” "Competitive issues are always important and they always are considered in a way to try to preserve equitable treatment of all 32 clubs," he said, per the NFL Network. "And certainly, our goal will be to have all 32 clubs operating on a consistent basis." But with uncertainty looming over the possibility of playing games without fans, the MMQB's Albert Breer noted Monday that, "at least a couple teams that are facing the possibility of playing in empty stadiums in the fall would rather do that at home, than play their home games in someone else's city." (This was in reference to the possibility of CA teams needing to play in non-lockdown states or localities.)

It’s an old subject: there are multiple threads, with multiple explanations for who Tibor is. But, for the millionth time, I know him, and he’s not who everyone thinks he is. But, then again,

Would be interesting with away scores involved though.

I was there. For a few moments, we all thought he may have died (seriously). Then, Gary gets up and starts running and jumping around. He was greeted heartily by Bengal linemen, but unfortunately the refs got mixed into it too soon.

And, as you know, there are already screams/laments from Euro footy teams of “competitive disadvantage” because of erratic training schedule issues and team roster subtraction from sick or refusing to participate players. One could envision multiple complaints along those lines—as in the delay of team practices impacting the 49ers (above).

Anything is possible in theory. Then there are the ground-level applications—and the inevitable allowances, or lack thereof: https://ninerswire.usatoday.com/2020/05/17/san-francisco-49ers-return-reopening-covid-19/