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Pastimes : Football Forum (NFL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Redhook who wrote (1505)	12/3/1998 9:27:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45644

Have you noticed how the Broncos are the same team with Bubby or Elway? Elway is better now than when he was younger, but he still makes a lot of dumb throws. I was absolutely wincing during the Chargers game last Sunday night. Fact: as many bad reads by Elway in that game as Chandler has had all year. Favre's INT #s speak for themselves. I wouldn't rather have Chandler, because staying free from injuries is a crucial attribute in the NFL. John Offerdahl was a great LB, but he was worthless because he could not stay healthy. Plus, Favre has some great intangibles. However, I would rather have Bobby Hebert, Joe Montana, or Boomer Esiason than either Elway or Favre. QB is an art form, and I'm a connoisseur. Tom

To: Redhook who wrote (1505)	12/3/1998 11:25:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45644

forbes.com Most team owners claim to be losing money. Depends on how you count. Selective Accounting By Michael K. Ozanian PROFESSIONAL TEAM OWNERS are crying big-time poverty. The National Basketball Association claims more than half of its teams suffered operating losses last season and that the league as a whole posted negative cash flow. A casual reader might think the owners of most sports teams were all headed for Chapter 11. Baseball owners say most of their teams are in the red. By some accounts, as many as 20 hockey teams are losing money. Even as they pocket an $18 billion TV deal, many football team owners cry poor mouth. Alleged villains: greedy players and their agents. Team owners plead for more fixing of salaries at a percentage of each league's revenues. The National Football League has won a 63% salary cap. Baseball and hockey don't have true caps, but Major League Baseball imposes a luxury tax on owners that pay beyond a specified threshold. The National Hockey League has rules that restrict players leaving one team from signing with another. The current basketball lockout came to pass because owners want the players to cap their salaries at 50% of league revenues. Mind you, it's hard to find much sympathy either for billionaire club owners or for multimillionaire sports stars, but fairness requires us to point out that the owners, in their haste to cry poverty, are taking some liberties with the statistics. At left are the teams worth the most. To the right are those with the most operating income. No surprise that both tables are dominated by teams that play in new venues-or will soon. Yankee Stadium was built in 1923, but the Bronx Bombers rake in $70 million in media revenues, far more than any other team. An exhaustive analysis performed by FORBES shows that team owners have exaggerated their penury. When it comes to how bloody their balance sheets are, owners talk a big game. But only a few teams were willing to provide us with figures. So how did we calculate our figures? Some data, such as national television contracts, players' salaries and stadium rent, were obtained easily through the league offices, players' unions and publicly available leases. But for other information, such as what it cost for Wayne Huizenga to operate his privately owned Pro Player Stadium, FORBES had to rely on the best estimates of consultants, investment bankers, stadium operators and trade publications. In short, many of the numbers used in our calculations are solid estimates. The 113 professional teams we surveyed generated $479 million in operating income (earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation) last year on revenues of $7.9 billion. That's just a shade over 6% of revenues—and a rather slim figure. Some teams, such as the Seattle Seahawks, Carolina Hurricanes, Atlanta Hawks and Cincinnati Reds, posted operating losses above $9 million. But that's not the full story. Our figures show only 10 of the NBA's 29 teams lost money, not 16 as the owners claim. It all comes down to how you define revenues. Owners exclude most of the revenues from stadium naming rights and advertising, luxury suites and team merchandise stores. Add back these revenues and the profits they produce and suddenly six NBA teams emerge from red ink to black. Although not as big a piece of the revenue pie as television fees and tickets, these ancillary revenues are highly profitable—and growing fast. What is more, the team owners have saddled taxpayers with much of the capital costs for new stadiums, making the ancillary revenue even more profitable. Says Andrew Zimbalist, who teaches sports economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.: "One of the major motivations in each of the sports for going into new stadiums is because most of those revenue sources are not shared with the players." Take the world champion Chicago Bulls. The team plays in the state-of-the-art United Center, which has 216 luxury suites. Those suites raked in $12.7 million in revenues for the Bulls last year. But under the last collective bargaining agreement, team owner Jerry Reinsdorf gets to exclude 60%, or $7.6 million of that amount, from what the NBA calls "basketball-related income." Corporate sponsorship is another rapidly growing revenue source for owners. Over one-third of the teams we analyzed now carry a corporate logo. James L. Dolan, whose Cablevision Systems owns Madison Square Garden and the building's two tenants, the Knicks and the Rangers, recently inked a multimillion-dollar deal with Kodak to advertise and sponsor events inside the Garden. Only a fraction of this gets factored into so-called basketball-related income. Football owners are supposed to include proceeds from luxury suites as part of the league's revenue-sharing agreement with players. But Wayne Huizenga found a way around this agreement at his Pro Player Stadium and for his Miami Dolphins, the resident football team. All suite revenues go to Pro Player Stadium and none to the home team. In Los Angeles, billionaire Philip Anschutz is building an ultramodern arena that will house his hockey team, the Kings, as well as the city's two basketball clubs, the Lakers and Clippers. Anschutz has lined up big ancillary revenues. Office supplier Staples is paying Anschutz more than $100 million over 20 years to put its name on the building. The 160 suites in the building should generate $40 million a year. Advertising inside the facility should bring in well over $5 million a year. Guess what: more than half of these revenues will be credited to Staples Center, owned by Anschutz, and not to the teams. Spoiled brats many of the players may be, but, hey—they are still entitled to an honest count.