Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! I hope you enjoyed your fair share of 1.5 billion chicken wings this weekend—I think I left about 1 billion for the rest of you.

Before we slide into the NFL offseason, let’s get one last football-filled newsletter in the books. Next week I’ll have plenty of Olympics content for you.

Locker Room Links

• Thanks a lot, NFL: Players on the Seahawks and Patriots face a huge tax bill for the week they spent in California leading up to the Super Bowl.
• “What the Bills Mafia Teaches Us About Resilience,” authored by my friend Carolyn Gorman.
• The medals at the Olympics keep breaking. “Don’t jump in them….It broke.”
• The NBA is “likely” to vote on expansion this summer, with Las Vegas and Seattle the most “favored” cities to get new teams.
• Athletes are always innovating and trying to find new ways to win within the rules—but ski jumping’s “Crotch-gate” goes too far.
• Nordic combined (ski jumping combined with cross-country skiing) has been in the Olympics for over a century, but still doesn’t allow female athletes for some reason.
• Vice President J.D. Vance was briefly booed at the Olympics opening ceremony, but the U.S. team got loud cheers.
• Elsewhere in Reason: “San Francisco Public Schoolteachers Make $79,468 for 184 Days of Work. Now They’re Striking for Even More.“
• Why do Olympians keep getting asked how they feel about Trump? Because you keep reading about their answers.
  

  the athletes are being asked political questions by the press because reporters know whichever way the athletes answer, people will be furious, and so they will click. this is not the athletes’ fault. this is the press’s fault. and your fault for clicking.

  — Mike Solana (@micsolana) February 8, 2026

Coaching Carousel Quotas

In the afterglow of the Super Bowl, the NFL’s annual head coaching carousel came to a stop when Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak confirmed that he would be taking the helm of the Las Vegas Raiders, the final vacancy.

Nearly a third of the league’s teams got new head coaches this offseason. It was, as ESPN’s Dan Graziano noted, “Not the *greatest* year the Rooney Rule has ever had.” None of the 10 new coaches is black, despite about 70 percent of the league’s players being black. Of the NFL’s 32 coaches, only three are black (Aaron Glenn, DeMeco Ryans, and Todd Bowles). For what it’s worth, new Tennessee Titans coach Robert Saleh is considered a minority by the NFL, because his parents are Lebanese.

The Rooney Rule, more than two decades old, has noble intentions: In the NFL’s words, it “encourages hiring best practices to foster and provide opportunity to diverse leadership throughout the NFL.” The rule at first required teams with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one minority candidate for the job. But this has led to some awkward situations, especially when teams start a coaching search with a particular coach in mind.

In 2003, for example, it was widely reported that Steve Mariucci was the top candidate for the Lions head coaching position. No one who would have fulfilled the Rooney Rule’s requirements was interested in wasting their time interviewing for a job they thought was already filled. The league fined the Lions $200,000 for failing to comply. Two decades later, Brian Flores sued the league for racial discrimination, claiming he was given multiple sham interviews where teams interviewed him for head coaching jobs without genuine interest in hiring him. (You may recall this lawsuit resulted from texts sent by Bill Belichick congratulating the wrong Brian.)

Yet after two decades of the Rooney Rule’s failure to bring about their racial utopia, the NFL doubled down. The league now requires teams to interview two minority candidates before hiring a head coach, general manager, or coordinator position (a quarterback coach requires just one minority candidate interview). Also, every team must have on staff one offensive assistant who is “female or minority.”

This year, John Harbaugh was obviously the hottest name on the coaching market. But before hiring him, the Giants still had to interview minority candidates to satisfy the Rooney Rule (they interviewed two: Raheem Morris and Antonio Pierce). In theory, those minority candidates could have wowed Giants leadership with their preparation and charisma. In reality, they stood no chance against Harbaugh’s résumé. (One wonders how much interviews really influence hiring decisions over a coach’s résumé in the NFL.)

I’m sure in a league as large as the NFL, there’s some racial discrimination in hiring—sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle. But competition can be the solution: If bad teams are discriminating against minorities, inclusive teams will win more often by just being open to the best talent. The Rooney Rule, with its good intentions, certainly isn’t fixing the problem. Instead, it leaves minority coaching candidates feeling like pawns.

Annual Outrage

The halftime show seems to spur a lot of right-wing complaints in recent history. With Spanish-speaking artist Bad Bunny’s history of anti-Donald Trump activism (he recently used one of his Grammy acceptance speeches to say “ICE out,” a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement), most of the outrage at this year’s halftime show felt preplanned.

Maybe Trump was expecting an “ICE out” t-shirt or some other kind of anti-Trump message from Bad Bunny, but in the end there was nothing overtly political, just a football that said “Together, we are America.”

Trump complained anyway, writing on Truth Social that the halftime show was “one of the worst, EVER!” and calling it “an affront to the Greatness of America.”

As Reason‘s Eric Boehm points out: “Over the past 20 years, the Super Bowl halftime show has featured performances by the Rolling Stones, the Who, Coldplay, Shakira, and Rihanna. Unlike Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop star who drew a record audience for his performance at Sunday’s Super Bowl LX, none of those performers are American citizens. Yet the conservative outrage machine cranked itself into high gear on social media to denounce Bad Bunny, ostensibly because he is somehow undeserving or insufficiently American.”

In Monday’s Reason Roundup, Christian Britschgi notes that: “It’s probably not a great signal for the health of the discourse if the country even threatens to split into red-team/blue-team Super Bowl halftime shows. The endless partisanship and culture-war bickering is tiresome.”

Eric wisely pointed out that the game itself isn’t about race or politics—just raw competition.

“The Super Bowl is a color-blind celebration of excellence,” he writes. “It is the exact opposite of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts that the Trump coalition opposes. [Kenneth] Walker did not win MVP because he’s black, and the Seahawks did not win the championship because they had a roster with a bureaucrat-approved mix of races. They won because they are very good at their jobs.” (As a Seahawks fan, Eric is a bit biased, though.) Between that and the Super Bowl being an awesome celebration of capitalism, conservatives should be embracing the event instead of complaining.

Super Bummer

Besides Bad Bunny, I have a lot of Super Bowl thoughts that don’t really form a cohesive narrative, so here’s a brain dump.

This year’s game was the worst Super Bowl since the Patriots beat the Rams 13–3 in Super Bowl LIII. That game was at least tied after three quarters, I suppose, whereas the Seahawks’ 12–0 lead after three quarters felt fairly insurmountable for the tepid Patriots offense (although the Pats scored 13 points in the fourth quarter, so I guess not!). Four touchdowns in the fourth quarter still saved this game from being even worse.

Maybe because they missed the playoffs last year and only barely won their division this year, the narrative seems to be that the Seahawks weren’t actually that great (they only beat Philip Rivers and the Colts by two points back in December!). But various analytics dudes show the Seahawks were clearly the best team this year, and possibly one of the best NFL teams in recent history (in spite of, not because of, Sam Darnold).

It was a shame that fans couldn’t vote for special teams players like Seahawks kicker Jason Myers for MVP. He had 17 points in the game, more than the entire Patriots team. Punter Michael Dickson would have been another worthy candidate, too. Last week I said, as a Michigan State fan, that “Walker winning MVP is probably my best-case scenario,” so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

The ’90s nostalgia of the “Good Will Dunkin'” commercial was probably my favorite, although it didn’t make me any more likely to go find a Dunkin’ store. I was surprised by the heart-wrenching Lay’s potato chip ad—most snacks do comedic angles. There were plenty of commercials to not like, but I’ll award “least favorite” to the singing toilets that came on while I was trying to scarf down some wings. Some of my favorites of all-time remain the “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign from 2018 and Michael Cera’s CeraVe ad from two years ago.

I’m feeling chatty about the whole event, so feel free to send your thoughts about the game, halftime show, or commercials at freeagent@reason.com.

Replay of the Week

Defense won the day for the Seahawks, so it was nice to see them get a touchdown (even if it was probably a lucky deflection).

SEAHAWKS DEFENSIVE TOUCHDOWN FOR UCHENNA NWOSU OMG

Super Bowl LX on NBC
Stream on @NFLPlus + Peacock pic.twitter.com/9FPzCiciQt

— NFL (@NFL) February 9, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the weekend, the men’s pursuit race in biathlon (5:15 a.m. Eastern on Sunday). Did you know almost 10 percent of Winter Olympics medals are in biathlon?

The post The NFL's Rooney Rule Is a Well-Intended Failure appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! It’s a tough week, but try your best, even when the odds aren’t in your favor.

Let’s talk about golf today, and how the Trump administration got ahead of itself in its plans to take over three golf courses in Washington, D.C. Then we’ll talk about college football bowl season, and why you should thank capitalism for it.

Locker Room Links

• Rory McIlroy seems open to letting LIV Golf players back on the PGA Tour: “They’ve already paid their consequences.”
• Mark Cuban says the NBA loosened enforcement of the travel rule for “no good reason other than they didn’t want to call so many travels.”
• A personal example of how the new tax law is much, much worse for sports bettors.
• The U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team is getting its first black player.
• Elsewhere in Reason: “What Does It Mean To ‘Run’ Venezuela“
• Everything has a local angle!
  
  

  Oh great! #TexasTech is screwed! pic.twitter.com/OnvW4lqlXL

  — Message Board Geniuses (@BoardGeniuses) January 4, 2026

Trump Invades

The Trump administration took unprecedented action last week to oust the leadership of a once-great place that’s been struggling in recent years. Now locals are left shaken and confused, unsure who’s really running the place, wondering what the plan for the future is, questioning whether the changes will make things better or worse, and thinking about how involved Tiger Woods is.

No, Tiger wasn’t involved in the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro—I’m talking about the Trump administration’s takeover of a few golf courses in Washington, D.C.

The National Park Service (NPS) owns five golf courses across three properties in the nation’s capital: East Potomac Park Golf Course (home to three courses), Langston Golf Course, and Rock Creek Park Golf Course. If that seems like a weird thing for the federal government to do, you’re right—but it’s common in the D.C. area, where the NPS might also own your favorite concert venue or theater, parkways on your commute, your marina, or the park in the traffic circle a block from your office.

All that federal control means the president might suddenly take an interest in, and mess with, your favorite hobby.

In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the NPS signed a 50-year lease with the nonprofit National Links Trust, which was basically created just to manage long-term upgrades that would restore and elevate the historic nature of the early 20th century course designs. East Potomac, for example, was inspired by the Old Course at St. Andrews and is supposed to be reversible. The group was just five years into that lease when the Interior Department, which oversees NPS, told National Links Trust they were in default for not making enough progress. Then National Links Trust was supposed to submit a “cure proposal” to the Interior Department outlining how they planned to fix the problems mentioned in that October 2025 letter—which would have been difficult, considering the letter was just two sentences and lacked details of the alleged problems.

The long-term process of restoring golf courses on federal lands was always going to involve “years of environmental review, historic preservation, permitting, and community engagement,” writes Alex Dickson of Beltway Golfer. “It was slow by design, and necessary by law.”

Still, on December 31, the Interior Department terminated the lease.

“National Links Trust has done everything it promised, and the Trump administration isn’t retaking control of D.C.’s public golf courses to make them nicer and more affordable for taxpayers,” according to sports business writer Joe Pompliano, who reviewed the lease. “They are doing it to create an upscale venue that can host a Ryder Cup, replacing the promise of affordable golf with prices most taxpayers cannot afford.”

In short, the government said it needed help fixing the golf courses. National Links Trust got a 50-year lease to do so. Government red tape made it hard to do the work quickly. Then the Trump administration had a shiny (possibly far-fetched) idea, blamed National Links Trust for not going fast enough, and cut off the lease. That’s not exactly going to encourage more nonprofits or private contractors to work with the administration, or possibly with the government in general.

I unknowingly stumbled across this story on a warm October Saturday when I was golfing on East Potomac’s executive-style White Course with my Reason colleague Robby Soave and another friend of ours. After sinking my bogey putt on the fifth hole, we walked around a small frontloader that was starting to lay out a dirt path from the road to a closed-off area. On the ninth tee box, as we tried to concentrate on our drives, the frontloader loudly beeped and worked away just a few feet from us (and I personally blame President Donald Trump himself for my awful wedge play that resulted in a 10 on that hole). We had no idea what was going on, but our journalistic alarm bells should have been going off: Days later it came out that the dirt was coming from Trump’s East Wing renovation project, with no known plan for what it was doing there.

Since then, D.C.-area golfers have wondered what the plan is, but the administration has basically said nothing publicly despite lots of media coverage. We have no idea if, in the end, the changes will just entail tinkering around the edges, a name change, and a new coat of paint, or if a grander plan will come to fruition that might mean a fancy course but long-term construction closures, fewer courses, fewer tee times, and higher prices. Tiger Woods is supposedly helping with the renovations at Langston, a course rich with African-American history. Some have speculated that the termination of the National Links Trust lease may lead to a new high-dollar lease agreement with the golf division of The Trump Organization, naturally.

For what it’s worth, I had no reason to doubt National Links Trust’s ability to pull off the long-term renovations, but the day-to-day management of the courses left something to be desired (though this was subcontracted out to Troon, the biggest golf management company in the world). I’ve been in sand traps on the East Potomac Red Course that felt more like concrete and didn’t have a rake in sight. At Rock Creek, tee box markers are often missing or made of rotting wood, and I played a hole with the flag for Langston instead of the course I was on. Having 100 driving range bays with Toptracer ball-tracking technology at East Potomac is a huge asset, but those bays are not as well-maintained as they should be. These aren’t problems that require money, just a staff with an attention to detail and a focus on getting the basics right. Even so, I always jump at the opportunity to play those courses with friends.

In governance, following the proper rules and procedures matters, lest our rulers become unaccountable and legally immune for wrongdoing. With Venezuela, Trump easily could have asked for (and likely received) a broad authorization for the use of military force that would have legally allowed for the boat strikes, Maduro’s capture, and whatever else his administration is scheming. With Washington’s golf courses, the Trump administration could have provided more justification for its actions, more public information on its plans, or instead sought to help the National Links Trust cut through government-imposed red tape. The stakes with the future of Venezuela are obviously higher than for a few regional golf courses—but the law and the process still matter.

The Capitalism Bowl

If you love college football bowl season, you can thank capitalism.

The original postseason game, the Rose Bowl, was supposed to help promote the Rose Parade, whose purpose was to promote the superior weather and living conditions in California. Pretty much every new bowl since then was created to boost tourism and business in the host cities—even while some later bowls were created largely to fill up TV windows with bowl-eligible teams, cities are usually happy to host in hopes of getting a marginal bump in tourism and activity. Now that various bowl games are part of the College Football Playoff, the non–playoff bowls that get the most attention are relying more on nongame action to keep viewers interested—with the Pop-Tarts Bowl as the best example, getting 8.7 million viewers this year.

Thru Dec. 27, @ESPNCFB's non-CFP bowl viewership is up 13%, averaging 2.7M viewers with several games reaching multi-year highs
 
???? @PopTartsBowl | 8.7M viewers⁰???? @PinstripeBowl | 7.6M⁰???? @taxslayerbowl | 6.0M⁰???? @RateBowl | 4.4M⁰???? @LABowlGame | 3.8M⁰???? @FRBowl | 3.1M pic.twitter.com/AH0LfKYINz

— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) January 2, 2026

“The Pop-Tarts Bowl is easily one of my favorite sports events of the year,” as Reason sports fan and staffer Natalie Dowzicky told me.

So whether you just love to watch your own team in a bowl or you love to watch as many bowl games as you can, you should thank capitalism for the blessings of bowl season.

Replay of the Week

A comeback, a blocked extra point in overtime, a fourth-down touchdown reception by a guy named Taco, and the final extra point to win it. FCS football is beautiful chaos.

MONTANA STATE WINS THE FCS CHAMPIONSHIP WITH A 4TH-AND-10 TD AND XP IN OT!

An Illinois State XP attempt was blocked earlier in OT.

Dave Flemming and Brock Osweiler with the call for ESPN. ????????????????️ pic.twitter.com/UuEJxEUUcI

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 6, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Michigan State against Northwestern in basketball (for Amy, who was a huge Spartans fan).

The post How the Trump Administration Quietly and Quickly Took Over 3 Golf Courses in Washington, D.C. appeared first on Reason.com.

Speaking of taxpayer money, let’s talk about stadium subsidies and a few NFL teams who are looking for some help making a buck. Then we’ll talk about good news in the world of refereeing, and end with a little golf.

Locker Room Links

• The NFL didn’t require home teams to hold a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk this weekend. Many did anyway (but some conservatives are still mad).
• Elsewhere in Reason: The Reason Roundtable gang discusses Kirk, cancel culture, apocalyptic politics, and more.
• The stadium public address announcer (a dream job of mine) for the Chiefs resigned because the team wouldn’t let him do his famous third-down call anymore—and because he’d have more time to run for county legislator (a nightmare job for me).
• Also, wearing t-shirts in support of your teammate who pled guilty to a hit-and-run street racing crash is a bad idea.
• A bill in Congress to reform college sports might be falling apart.
• New York City mayoral favorite Zohran Mamdani hates FIFA, like everyone else. But his plan to meddle with World Cup ticket prices is just going to make the ticketing process even more random. (Sorry not sorry that prices exist and convey useful information to buyers and sellers.)
• Follow up to last week’s newsletter on Kawhi Leonard: Pablo Torre found more incriminating evidence, and Mark Cuban still doesn’t believe Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is implicated.
• Meanwhile, in England, West Ham United are confiscating commemorative scarves. (This is not, in fact, something we can all get behind.)
  

  Half-and-half scarves, along with any other items featuring the crest of both West Ham and Spurs, will be confiscated and not returned at the London Stadium

  IS THIS SOMETHING WE CAN ALL GET BEHIND? ???? pic.twitter.com/kAUHvcLDoY

  — Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) September 12, 2025

Who’s Taking Your Tax Dollars?

There are three NFL teams trying to take advantage of taxpayer dollars this season, and they all start with the letter B. (Coincidence? Yes.) Remember: There’s no good reason for cities and states to build or subsidize sports stadiums.

We’ll start with the Chicago Bears, since subscriber Steve asked me to look into it (yes, I take requests at freeagent@reason.com). This stadium situation has been in flux for years. But the city owns the stadium, so that puts a damper on the Bears’ revenue. The team’s proposed move to Arlington Heights, Illinois, isn’t about the stadium—it’s about the adjoining development property that every sports team now wants with stadiums to bolster their revenue.

The Bears, naturally, want a cap on how much they’ll have to pay in property taxes on that development. They also have to figure out who’s going to pay potentially billions of dollars to upgrade the infrastructure on the site. The state, for what it’s worth, does not seem willing to play ball, although Arlington Heights is planning to give that property tax break—a political favor that keeps money from the government is better than one that doles out money from the government. No political favor at all would be nice, but it’s not the worst stadium deal around, and politicians in Chicago and at the state level deserve a sliver of credit for not being as bad as other politicians.

Like the ones in Ohio, for example. The Cleveland Browns stand to benefit from a plan so bonkers I can only quote Neil deMause at Field of Schemes: “Remember how the Ohio legislature proposed borrowing $600 million from the state’s unclaimed property fund to use on a new Cleveland Browns stadium and repaying it with money from an omni-TIF collecting all kinds of tax money from in and around the stadium, and then the bill passed and it was described as providing ‘$600 million for the proposed Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park using unclaimed funds,’ and I said it wasn’t really because that was just where Ohio would be borrowing the money from temporarily?”

There’s a lot going on there! But don’t worry, other than that it’s smooth sailing. Here’s deMause again: “The Cleveland Browns owners’ plan for a stadium in Brook Park already survived a battle between the legislature and governor over how $600 million in state money would be raised, and is still facing additional challenges including a potential class action suit over using unclaimed property funds, another city suit over the team violating its lease by negotiating a move, plus the fact that the plan relies on another $600 million in city and county money that hasn’t yet been identified. But on Friday [August 15], the Ohio Department of Transportation added a new, unexpected wrinkle when it denied the team’s request for a construction permit, because the stadium would be so tall that planes could crash into it.” Well, good luck with that!

Our last B-team this week is the Denver Broncos, who have a plan similar to the Bears’ plan. The Broncos, along with city and state leaders, announced their “preferred site” for the new stadium, not that far from the current one. The Broncos’ owners have said they’ll use their own funds to buy the land, build the stadium, and do some surrounding development. So far so good!

The devil is in the details, though, and we don’t have those details yet. Redoing roads in the area will cost $140 million, and Denver voters will get their say. Will the owners pay market price for the land or get a sweetheart deal? Are they going to get property tax breaks on the stadium and the development like the Bears are getting?

There’s also the awkwardness of the state government waving goodbye to its tenant. Mile High is on primo land walking distance from downtown Denver with easy highway access and a nice walking trail along the South Platte River (a trail I can personally recommend). Is the state going to sell the land to developers for high-density housing, or does it have some government boondoggle in mind?

What’s surprising is that all three of these cases involve government-owned stadiums that are between 22 and 26 years old. (Soldier Field is technically much older, but finished a complete renovation in 2003). That’s not that old! If governments are going to own stadiums, they should take better care of them. (Granted, I haven’t been to any of these stadiums and can’t vouch for their quality.)

In fairness to these three B-teams, in all senses of the word, the Bengals also have their own complicated stadium situation, and I’m sure every NFL owner would gladly accept some taxpayer funding for whatever they deem useful. (Don’t get me started on the Kansas City Chiefs, whose stadium debacle I have nothing nice to say about.)

Referee!

After the UFL/XFL inspired kickoff changes in the NFL, it’s now inspiring refereeing changes in college football, too.

Multiple times on Saturday, the ACC gave viewers a live listen-in on what officials were discussing during crucial replay reviews.

This is what it looks and sounds like when an ACC ref talks over a replay review with the ACC Game Day Operations Center. ???????????????? #CFB pic.twitter.com/PxvF2WDksM

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 13, 2025

A look inside the ACC Replay center for a CRUCIAL review of what was initially ruled a 4th quarter game-tying touchdown ????

It was overturned and Clemson would tie the game later on.

Watch the end of No. 12 Clemson-Georgia Tech on ESPN & the ESPN App: https://t.co/Nz7AG4DFyf pic.twitter.com/HDG06KnRZn

— ESPN (@espn) September 13, 2025

This should be a no-brainer for all football games, college and professional. Fans get to look behind the curtain and hear a more complete explanation of what referees are thinking when they look at reviews. Referees get to show off their professionalism, and the transparency of the extended discussions can tamp down some conspiracy theories about conference biases. Broadcasts get to play audio of something more interesting and impactful than their go-to rules analyst’s speculation (as much as I love the rules analyst on each network).

I expect this will eventually become standard in major college conferences and the NFL. The only question is “How quickly?” Hopefully other sports soon follow.

While I’m generally in favor of more plays being reviewable, it’s also important to avoid weird situations like this one that led to a 23-year ACC official to quit. Too bad this one didn’t get the same transparency treatment, because the conversation was probably ridiculous.

Tee It Up

My closing recommendation this week is simple: Go play some golf.

It’s cliché, but if you have a bad round, you’ll want to play again to prove to yourself that you can do better. If you have a great round, you’ll want to play again to prove you can do better. Hit up a driving range (preferably one with Toptracer technology, or Topgolf on a half-off night), then find a cheap public course to play on. (Municipal golf courses shouldn’t exist but you might as well enjoy the subsidized round your tax dollars helped pay for.) Make a group chat with your golf buddies to schedule rounds but don’t be afraid to get paired with strangers when your friends aren’t free. Use ChatGPT to help you figure out what parts of your game to work on and how. Get pumped to watch the Ryder Cup. Realize how much you suck.

Hit personal records anyway. Make a hole-in-one. It’s easy.

Replay of the Week

Not just insane to have this happen on the last play of the game, but it happened in absolutely insane fashion.

This is the greatest cover of all time ???? pic.twitter.com/OqjKIn11hj

— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) September 13, 2025

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, underrated Tulane against overrated Ole Miss on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.

The post The NFL's Fight for Stadium Subsidies Is Heating Up appeared first on Reason.com.

Political activists already treat elections like team sports, fanatically rooting for Team Red or Team Blue regardless of ever-changing ideologies—so why not watch and bet on actual team sports instead?

The stakes are a lot lower in sports. No one gets deported if Michigan beats Ohio State three times in a row (fortunately for head coach Ryan Day). Inflation won’t rise if long-suffering carpetbagger Yankees fans ever get to celebrate another World Series title. Sports don’t really change public policy at all, since the Nashville Metropolitan Council has shown local governments are willing to shell out $1 billion for shiny new stadiums even for hapless teams like the Tennessee Titans.

But if the stakes in team sports are actually too low for you, you might as well put a $5 bet down on a random game to get yourself interested.

Moneyline bets on a game’s outright winner are my preference when betting—it’s good to have the team’s incentives aligned with mine, unlike over/under bets on combined score or player prop bets on individual performances. But layers upon layers of betting options are available if a straight-up bet doesn’t strike your fancy.

You could bet on James Madison University to score in every quarter of its next game. You could bet on Arsenal to score exactly one goal in the first half of their match against Inter Milan. You could bet on a Dylan Larkin hat trick. You could bet on Fremantle to “win the flag” in the Australian Football League (apparently that means to win the championship).

I am absolutely not saying any of those bets will be winners (especially Fremantle, who I picked just because they have a cool name). But winning money off the bets isn’t the point; it’s the enjoyment you get from watching and having a vested interest in the outcome of the bet—winning your money back plus a little extra is just a nice bonus. Wouldn’t it be fun to spend 2025 following Fremantle’s season? Would you do that if you didn’t have a $5 bet on them to win the flag? Wouldn’t your friends think it was cool that you got into a random Aussie rules football team? (OK, some might think it was weird.)

If you’re just betting a little money, a multileg parlay is a fun way to combine action on a few bets in hopes of scoring a bigger payday (but the house’s cut is bigger on parlays, so they’re not a good long-term strategy). Your $5 bet will be a lot more likely to go down the drain, but there’s a small chance for it to be multiplied many times over.

Thankfully, if you do prefer politics to sports, betting on the election is now legal in America—a federal appeals court ruled that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission failed to prove that election betting was a threat to election integrity. Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi offer bets on the Electoral College winner, popular vote winner, the margins of those votes, the balance of power in Congress, and much more, even outside of politics.

Maybe all this sounds like a crazy way to lose money that can only lead to financial ruin. Perhaps that’s true for the rare few who fall into gambling addiction, but even those people are mostly losing their own money. Politicians are addicted to losing billions of dollars of other people’s money every year, and far too few people ever bat an eye at it. Losing $5 on a dumb sports bet pales in comparison to $7.5 billion in government cash building just eight electric vehicle chargers in two and a half years.

Whose bet was worse, that or my $5 bet on Fremantle? (Go Dockers!)

The post To Get Through This Election, Bet on Sports appeared first on Reason.com.

Professional sports team owners are at it again. This time, it’s the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals who want fans—along with their fellow taxpayers who may be indifferent toward sports—to help with their business expenditures. Early voting has already begun as Jackson County prepares to decide whether to partially fund the teams’ stadium plans or potentially lose the teams to another city.

The Chiefs proposed $800 million in renovations to the GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, of which the owners will only pay $300 million. The Royals, meanwhile, announced in February plans for a brand new stadium estimated to cost $2 billion, only half of which is expected to be paid by the Royals in private funds.

The vote, which will conclude April 2, either will have residents opt to get rid of an existing sales tax that pays a portion of stadium operation fees or replace it with a new one—totaling approximately $2 billion and scheduled for over the course of 40 years—in order to pay a portion of the price. Each team would receive $27 million of tax money annually.

So what will happen if voters reject it? “We’d have to look at all our options,” said Mark Donovan, the president of the Chiefs. “I think they’d have to include leaving Kansas City.” His appeal may very well sway voters, considering there is a long history of these threats working in the city.

The Royals echoed Donovan’s thought: “There’s lots of cities that would love to have these franchises,” said John Sherman, the majority owner of the Royals. And the Committee to Keep the Chiefs and Royals in Jackson County noted that “if the vote doesn’t pass, both teams will consider all options.”

But even though they insist these taxes are necessary, it’s difficult not to see their threats as a way to scare voters into coughing up taxpayer dollars so both teams can save private funds. Leaked documents indicate that taxpayers could end up paying up to $5.1 billion over four decades—far more than the teams’ estimate.

The sports giants are in fact so keen to save every penny that a $1 million request by Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. to pay for the elections, in order to avoid taking funds from the city’s emergency reserve, has so far gone ignored by the teams. The initiative “poses a significant dilemma,” said White, “given our commitment to safeguarding the county’s financial stability.”

It’s worth noting that the Hunt family, who owns the Chiefs and whose fortune stems from oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, is worth nearly $25 billion, according to Forbes. Putting aside the questionable ethics of weaponizing local sports enthusiasm to save private funds, there is no clear reason why the owners can’t pay for the renovations themselves.

As for the Royals, the sales tax would cover only one-third of the stadium’s costs. The reason is far from encouraging. Most of the funds would go toward the county’s debts to Truman Sports Complex, as well as interest payments on the team’s construction loan, leaving “somewhere between $250 million and $350 million that can actually be used to cover stadium expenses.”

In other words, the public would be forced to pay the price for a private company’s mismanagement. Also dubious is the claim that the team needs a new stadium at all: A 2022 study concluded that the current Royals home turf, Kauffman Stadium, is in “satisfactory condition.”

Some small business owners are rallying against the stadiums, because, perhaps most infuriatingly, several such enterprises would be razed in the process of building the Royals stadium. “We’re all kind of dumbfounded right now, still, that they did choose this location,” said Matt Adkins, an owner of a wine bar and boutique grocery. “There’s literally something five blocks away [in the East Village] where they’re saying, ‘Please come over here instead.'”

When Donovan was asked about business owners’ apprehension about the effects the stadium reforms would have on the Crossroads district, he responded: “Change is hard, and there’s a lot of information that needs to get out there….We think downtown baseball is right for baseball.” OK. But does that make it right for the city and its residents?

The post Taxpayers Will Soon Find Out if They'll Have To Finance Fancy Stadiums for the Chiefs and the Royals appeared first on Reason.com.

The Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County voted in the wee hours on Wednesday morning to spend $1.26 billion in taxpayer money on a new government-owned stadium. That figure not only puts locals on the hook for more than half of the stadium’s estimated $2.1 billion cost, but it also sets a new record for the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history.

Supporters of the new domed stadium say tourists will pay that money back, not locals. The Tennessean reports that Council Member Zulfat Suara “voted in favor because she prefers tourists to bear the tax burden of stadium construction and upkeep (through sales, ticket and hotel taxes) instead of Davidson County taxpayers.” On top of a 1 percent hotel tax increase, sales taxes paid in and around the stadium (as well as ticket taxes and fees) will be used to repay $500 million in bonds from the state government and $760 million in bonds from Nashville’s Sports Authority.

That logic sounds good until you consider fans of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans presumably live in Tennessee, if not mostly in Nashville and Davidson County. The fees and taxes also drive up costs for business travelers and visitors who aren’t attending stadium events. Meanwhile, several special events are exempt from the new 3-percent ticket fee: Country Music Association events, Academy of Country Music events, the Grammy Awards, and World Wrestling Entertainment events.

The problem with the new stadium, like the current Nissan Stadium, is not just who pays for it, but who owns it, and that’s the The Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County. It’s unclear if the Metropolitan Council ever considered getting out of the stadium business and simply asking the billionaire owner of the Titans to pay for the team’s own upgrade. This is not an impossible task: SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles is the most expensive stadium ever built and reportedly had no direct government subsidies. It’s probably the finest stadium in the world and routinely hosts special events.

Supporters say that with Nashville on the hook for the upkeep of the current stadium, it’s cheaper to start fresh instead of upgrading Nissan Stadium. But the government never really looked into how much an upgrade that fulfilled Nashville’s obligations would cost, only relying on one estimate provided by the Tennessee Titans owner of how much it would cost to build her dream stadium.

It used to be that NFL team owners would threaten to move their teams and local governments would instead open their wallets for a shiny new stadium—now governments are tripping over themselves to give over $1 billion in subsidies to NFL owners who aren’t even threatening to move.

Fans won’t even get a bigger stadium: The new one will seat 60,000 people, which is about 9,000 seats fewer than the current stadium and will be the smallest capacity in the NFL. The city is building a smaller stadium rather than renovating one the state owes money on through 2029.

Nashville’s $1.26 billion football stadium subsidy surpasses the $1 billion taxpayer subsidy for a new Buffalo Bills stadium approved last year. The stadium subsidy arms race never ends.

The post Stadium Subsidy Stupidity Hits New Record appeared first on Reason.com.