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