They haven’t had an expansion franchise since 2002 and it’s unlikely it’ll happen any time in the near future. 32 teams is perfectly balanced - each conference has 16 teams and four divisions. Each division has four teams.

It would also be very expensive.

You’d need a stadium that met the NFL standards. The average stadium costs about $2B. Fortunately for her (and unfortunately for the rest of us), taxpayers on average pay about $1.2B of that. We’ll be very generous and assume they paid even more or she received a substantial loan that will be paid off otherwise, leaving her with about $250M out of pocket.

It should be noted that the opposite is more often true for expansion teams, though. Cities don’t want to pay for the stadium because there’s more risk with new teams. They could decide to leave very quickly, the owners might not have the capital to keep the team afloat, etc. The Texans were the last expansion team and nearly all of the cost for their stadium was privately funded.

Now, the NFL also charges a fee for expansion teams. This mostly has to be a guesstimate because we haven’t seen one in two decades. The Texans paid $700M at the time so we can assume it would be closer to $1.5B now.

After that, you have the practice facilities and offices. Cities don’t usually cover that. You might be able to get away with using local facilities for a couple of years, but that won’t be enough to actually create a competitive team. A safe low-end estimate for this would be $150M. The Cowboys paid $1.5B for their facilities, but other teams have paid as low as $125M.

Finally, the last big cost is payroll. This by itself would sink any chance she has.

The NFL requires all guaranteed contracted salaries to be placed in escrow. I’m not sure where that rule came from, but I can probably guess Al Davis is to blame. A single year’s salary would be $225M for 2023 and around $240M for next season.

However, most of the big name players have guarantees that would destroy that. The most common is a signing bonus. Teams love them because the salary cap rules would allow them to amortize it over the length of the contract, including “void years”. Your QB would receive about $200M immediately upon signing. The expansion draft picks and early draft picks would be another $300-500M likely. In the end, the salary escrow plus bonuses would be about $500M-1B.

So assuming everything goes her way, she’d be on the hook for close to $2.5B immediately plus the reoccurring costs.

It should also be noted that the NFL isn’t really a great way to make money as an owner. It’s really just a long term retirement hobby for billionaires. They could just go invest in companies or whatever, but they buy NFL teams because they like football and it occupies their time. Yeah, they’ll make money, but not as much as they otherwise could. There’s a reason most owners hate the idea of a super-billionaire like Bezos owning a team.

They were doing awful in the first half. Their offense couldn’t get a first down to save their lives. Kelce had one reception for one yard.

She’s still not rich enough to buy the worst team in the NFL. You’d still need about $5-6B just to get interest.

He had one target for one yard in the first half. Travis Kelce is the best TE currently in the NFL and considered to be the third best ever to play the game.

Since all the receivers for the Chiefs are mid at best this year, he’s got some reason to be pissed. One of them, Kadarius Toney, was put on the gameday injury report for the AFCCG as being out for a leg injury and “personal reasons”. He then went public saying his leg was perfectly fine and he had no personal reasons to skip the game… Basically clarifying that the actual reason he wasn’t playing was because he’s ass.

But Travis Kelce was also being guarded by Fred Warner during the first half who is one of the best linebackers in NFL history.

It could be a diva moment, sure. But it’s the Super Bowl. Good teams know that you trust your studs. Romo would throw to Dez in double or triple team coverage, knowing he’d come down with it. Peyton Manning would chuck it at Marvin Harrison no matter who was on him. When someone is that good, all you’ve got to do is get the ball in their vicinity. Either they’ll come down with it or they’ll keep the defenders from getting it.

It’s still stupid to yell at your coach like that and physically push him, but Andy Reid was making a lot of boneheaded decisions in the first. They went into halftime down 10-3. They did change things up during the second half, though. Kelce ended up with 9 receptions for 93 yards while the Chiefs won 25-22 in OT.

Yes and no.

Gold has been used as a currency historically for many reasons. It’s inert. It has a low melting point. It’s malleable and easily divisible. It doesn’t tarnish. A piece of gold from 2,000 years ago will be the same weight today as it was then. It also is attractive, which gives it value for jewelry. And, importantly, it’s predictably rare and can be mined.

Today, it’s also valuable for electronics. Its inability to tarnish makes it fantastic if you need a connection to be corrosion resistant.

There’s a reason gold still holds its value even though it’s not used for currency anymore.

I’m seeing $412K as the average price of a home in 2023, not $495K. And gold was $2,135 in 2023. The price in gold is still higher in 2023, though about 193 bars for a home.

Couple other notes, more related to the post.

1920 is an oddly good year to use. It’s just after WWI. Industrialization and modernization are taking off across the US. Worker’s rights are beginning to take hold and working class people are now able to afford homes. It’s before the Roaring 20s, so you’re not going to get the actual details obscured with the market rush and subsequent depression.

There is a couple important downsides though…

Firstly, mortgages didn’t really exist back then. I mean, they did, but they were horrific. You’d have to go to an insurance company because banks wouldn’t offer them. The terms would give the insurance company full ownership of the property. If you were lucky, it would be a balloon loan - pay only the interest during the 5-10 year term and then pay the entire balance at the end. If you were less lucky, it was a lifelong contract where you only paid the interest plus fees every month.

There was an alternative but most people didn’t have access to it: membership in a Savings and Loan corporation, also known as Building and Loan or thrifts. You’d join as a member and agree to buy X shares every month. If you give a notice (30-90 days usually), you would be allowed to cash out the shares plus interest earned for their actual value. When you wanted to buy a home, you would be allowed to use your shares as collateral. Each monthly payment would pay for the interest and a certain number of shares. Once you had enough shares, you would redeem them to pay off the loan. A bit complicated, but S&Ls were fantastic for the common person. They were owned by the members of your community and all loans went to support said community.

Secondly, kind of related to the first point, there were no 30 year mortgages. Home prices are virtually tied to the monthly payment and a thirty year mortgage allows for lower monthly payments. Prices might get out of line a bit, such as right now, if people believe that interest rates will drop and they can refinance later. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see any drops for at least two years and, even then, we won’t see anything like the 2020-2021 rates unless we experience an economic catastrophe like 2008. You want higher rates when the macro environment is strong and lower rates when it’s weak. Cheap debt in a good economy is basically a handout to the rich - makes you wonder why Trump pushed the Fed to keep them low back in 2018-2019…

If Texas actually tries to secede, it’s likely we’ll see a West Virginia situation where the eastern part of Texas remains with the US because of Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.

By that logic, there either never has been a murder in human history or governments cause people to murder.

Anarchy isn’t some deep philosophy, it’s just a lack of any sort of life experience.

At least for Ubuntu, you do need to set the permissions of the AppImage before it’ll launch.

I still haven’t figured out how to make .desktop files work yet.

Don’t place the blame on us. The British have changed their dialect like twelve times since we were their colony.

A single 1TB drive should be enough for my Plex server, I said.

123TB isn’t enough, I need more 18TB hard drives, I said.

Delicious, savory inner beauty…

It’s a bit of hyperbole, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t far off.

A lot of their users believe that Russia is a communist state, not some crony capitalist society that would make Bezos blush. They also seem to really love Trump for some reason.

It’s always a weird flavor, too. Like “I’m communist but only if I get all the wealth. Also I hate minorities but love the LGBT.”

For some reason it just makes me think of Dennis on 30 Rock. “Fiscally liberal, socially conservative.”