It doesn’t much matter who buys the naming rights to the new Giants and Jets stadium. Doesn’t matter if it’s named Maxwell House or the Air-Wick Bowl, er, Oval.
What matters is what you call it. And if you want to send a gut-shot message to those sportsmen who have abused you like a rube who won the lottery, you’d be best served calling it by its legit name: PSL Stadium.
PSL Stadium. Make it stick; embarrass the NFL; make it so the next team that tries to pull this on its best customers does so at its peril, not yours. Say it with me: PSL Stadium.
Sunday, Giants Stadium, just 33 years old and still perfectly suited for football, closed. And for the same reason a new one’s coming: colossal greed, the kind that has laid the country low, the kind that was supposed to teach us about avarice, the hardest way.
Sunday’s Bengals-Jets game logically should have kicked off at 1 p.m., in sunlight. But TV money moved it to 8:30. So the last game in Giants Stadium began at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday in January, wind chill 7 degrees. The NFL tacked a “Kick Me, Hard” sign to every frostbitten schmoe in the house.
Then the Bengals tanked, thus NBC also got a kick in the fanny for its flex money. What a sendoff!
Although mistreatment of longtime customers has become the NFL’s standard, the Jets and Giants, with the NFL’s encouragement, have taken it further. In just months, both clubs have eaten through 20-plus years of ticket waiting lists by demanding PSL fees — thousands per seat beyond the whacked up cost of mere tickets. Hmmm, it looks like extortion, walks like extortion, quacks like extortion …
It wasn’t enough to annually demand payment for two exhibition games, and assign the Jets and Giants, in the nation’s No. 1 TV market, lots of Sunday-, Monday- and Thursday-nighters. Next, friends of the NFL, came PSLs. Ah, but the PSLs made it easy to say no.
Presto, change-o! In a flash, the toughest season tickets became bountiful, all you want. Just pay a team’s mortgages on a new, unwanted stadium, and you’re in.
But the Yankees and Mets beat them to the sucker punch. The last game in “old” Yankee Stadium was moved to a Sunday night for TV cash, then the Yankees and Mets slid into new, taxpayer-funded parks attached to such sick ticket-pricing that an impossibility broke out: Neither team could come close to selling out in their first season in a new park, and one won the World Series!
As Bob Murphy used to enthuse, here’s the happy recap: Over consecutive years, the New York area will have opened three big league parks, housing four teams. At the same time, tens of thousands of those teams’ steadiest customers will have been forced out because ticket pricing jumped from costly to insane. And seats that used to be filled will continue to go empty.
This is the biggest story of the New York sports decade. The four biggest franchises in sports’ largest city have seized America’s most numerous, most generous, multiple-generation customer-base — seized it by the neck and wallet — and shot it to pieces.
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Fat chance, but the Jets and Giants have provided TV and radio “experts” with an invite to reconsider the statistics they habitually advance as significant.
For decades we’ve been told that a good defense and running game are what it takes to rule. The Jets, as we’re daily reminded, ranked first in defense and in rushing. So shouldn’t they have been 16-0, no worse than 15-1, instead of 9-7? If you watched the Jets you understood that circumstances determined their record.
Eli Manning had his first 4,000-yard passing season. That was reported as a “Good for him!” But was it? Why then were the Giants 8-8? Because throwing for lots of yardage often means you were forced to throw, to play catch-up. The Giants were outscored by 20 or more points five times.
Listen to CBS’s Phil Simms, Sunday, on Ravens-Patriots. Beyond the score, he doesn’t lean on stat sheets to tell him about any game you’re watching with him. That’s because he doesn’t want to mislead himself or you. He’s selfish, that way.
Several bowl games were ripped silly by the indiscriminant use of the replay rule. The Outback Bowl between Northwestern and Auburn, ran 4:05, not so much because it was high-scoring and went to overtime, but because seven replay stoppages totaled roughly 25 minutes.