American Football Spectacular: Your Santa Clara 49ers' Stadium Preview
Welcome to American Football Spectacular for 2006 season. We hope you enjoyed your offseason, and are poised for the joy of our National Football League preseason previews.
This week, after years of dithering, the 49ers announced that there finally is A Stadium Plan. OK. What plan? The Chronicle's Matier & Ross say that gleefully impudent Chron sports columnist Ray Ratto's incisive piece about the team's lack of movement on the stadium put the spurs to the Niners making the conciliatory announcement that they have A Plan and that they are putting a lot of work into The Plan. OK. So, then?
So, The Plan as it was presented was scrutinized. John King, the Chron's urban design writer, summed up the Niners' press presentation as lots of buzzwords and very little actual content. We mean, really, featuring an asymmetrical bowl design touting views of the city? Why would anyone at a American football game be interested in any other view than their own view of the field? We at AFS believe that the design of a stadium should be geared to the enjoyment of the game, period. Recent examples of stadium success include SEA and NE. Chicago's Soldier Field revamp is considered a design failure that sacrificed seating and efficiency for vanity. To quote the band Clutch: "Efficiency is beautiful / efficiency is art!" Everything else is icing. To drop an economic boost into the south-eastern corner of San Francisco would indeed be wonderful.
And there must be no palm trees. They do not belong here. No.
By SFist Christopher Rogers, contributing
Finally, the 49ers are putting forth calmly that if they don't get it done here in SF, that they are setting Santa Clara as Plan B. Santa Clara? How sad. The Niners can't even package a public relations threat to move the team to Los Angeles' vacated media market that would be strong enough to draw litigation from the Raiders. This is a no-brainer from a PR standpoint; despite backlash, the 49ers could glean long-term benefits from their stadium deal wherever they set down stakes. If they really wanted to press San Francisco for a tax/bond package, that'd be the smart and vicious way to curry favor since all the teams that could conceivably move (New Orleans, Minnesota) look at Los Angeles and drool at the opportunity. It's pure business aikido.
Next? Well, now that it has been declared that there is A Plan... heck, AFS doesn't know, nor does anyone else know. We would like nothing more than to see our 49ers succeed at escaping the accrued years of ineptitude and build for themselves a new home; Morabito Field, an icon for all of the Bay Area to be proud of. A place that other franchises will dismay in its glory and yet covet. A place that opposing players will fear, and yet hope to call their home one day. A place to bear the legacy of the 49er franchise. Rather than the beloved letters of gold and crimson on our Niners' helmets ever stray from an S and an F, American Football Spectacular wants to see the 49ers build a stadium that San Francisco can be proud of. A place where the 49ers can reach a new prime.
Next up on your American Football Spectacular: We will spin for you each of the stories of the Raiders' draft picks. We assume they're already working on drills to hate the Broncos.