JAX

Jacksonville, Florida. Largest city in Florida by population, believe it or not. Almost twice the population of Miami. So why can't they fill the stadium up? I mean, they are first rate! As PFT states:

As the Jaguars try to recover from a season that featured home crowds in the lower reaches of 40,000, owner Wayne Weaver said at the annual meetings in Orlando that he is encouraged by the early sales for 2010, in the wake of last week's initial deadline for season-ticket renewals.

"I think it came in really well," Weaver said Monday, per Michael C. Wright of the Florida Times-Union.  "Our renewal rate is going to be way up compared to the past.  We've got a long way to go, but it's moving well."

As Wright explains it, Friday's deadline applied to the eight-month payment plan, which includes eligibility for various prizes, like a trip to one of the team's road games, where fans might be able to experience the thrill of a full NFL stadium.  (Unless the game is in Tampa.)

The team's official web site currently shows that 16,242 season tickets have been renewed, and that 29,418 tickets per game must be sold to avoid local blackouts.  Last season, only one of ten home games met the minimum threshold for sales, permitting the contest to be televised locally.

I've been to Jacksonville Municipal Stadium for a couple of Gator Bowls, and it's a first-rate facility.  Jacksonville also is, in our view, a first-rate town.  So we continue to be flummoxed by the failure of the locals to fill the place up.  It's NFL football, folks -- and with another year or two of 40,000 fans per game, it won't be NFL football for much longer.

It seems a lot of people don't understand the demographics of Jacksonville that clearly. Sure, it has a population of 800,000. That's almost three times that of Buffalo and over twice that of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, three places that have no problems filling up a stadium. And two of those places have terrible teams. Much worse than the Jaguars have been over the past few years. The Jags won a playoff game as recently as 2007. So why can't these people go to the game?

Because those numbers are misleading. Jacksonville has an area about 15 TIMES that of Miami.

Take a look at Jacksonville. It's the largest city in the lower-48 by terms of land area. It takes up almost the ENTIRE COUNTY. The metro area that has 1.3 million people in it takes up like, 5 counties. It's the fourth largest in the state...behind Orlando. Not even taking into account the economic depression in the area...it's just not that big.

Let's look at NFL cities and their metro areas:


New York 19.0
Chicago 9.6
Dallas 6.3
Philadelphia 5.8
Houston 5.7
Miami 5.4
Atlanta 5.4
Washington D.C. 5.4
Boston  4.5
Detroit 4.4
Phoenix 4.3
San Francisco/Oakland 4.3
Seattle 3.3
Minneapolis 3.2
San Diego 3.0
St. Louis 2.8
Tampa Bay 2.7
Baltimore 2.7
Denver 2.5
Pittsburgh 2.4
Cincinnati 2.2
Cleveland 2.1
Kansas City 2.0
Indianapolis 1.7
Charlotte 1.7
Nashville 1.6
Jacksonville 1.3
New Orleans 1.1
Buffalo 1.1
Green Bay 0.3  (112 miles north of Milwaukee 1.5 M)


Jacksonville is right at the bottom. I'm not even going to count Green Bay here because they are such an anomaly. And they have, like, a history. I guess both teams share Mark Brunell.

Jacksonville's metro area takes up 3,700 square miles. Buffalo's takes up 1,600. New Orleans has a comparable area, however, the city itself is about a fifth the area of Jacksonville's. Basically, there just aren't that many people living near Jacksonville's stadium. Combined with the fact that they don't have that much money and that the team is relatively new...I can understand that they can't get 70,000 people to the stadium. That's one-tenth of their people. And I'm not even taking age into account. If New York put one-tenth of their people into the stadium, they'd have to sit about 30 to a seat. Pittsburgh would fill their stadium to almost 4 times it's capacity. 


What I'm saying is...there probably shouldn't be an NFL team in Jacksonville.

Urban Meyer just wins games!

 

Since I usually spend most of my posting efforts disagreeing with Mike Florio, I may as well mention some of the times where I do actually agree with him.

And the 'mistreatment' of Tim Tebow is one of those occasions. Take it away, Florio:

As Florida coach Urban Meyer takes his much-hyped leave of absence, we hope that Meyer spends some of his down time reflecting on his biggest failure.

Tim Tebow.

After the Gators won two national championships in three seasons with Tebow at quarterback, Meyer owed a huge debt to Tebow.  And Meyer should have spent all of 2009 attempting to repay it.

He didn't.

So Tebow left Gainseville with a release slower than Byron Leftwich in a vat of molasses, and overall football mechanics far uglier than Vince Young's Uncle Rico sidearm release.

It's therefore no surprise that Tebow is in the process of changing his throwing motion, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN.  What's surprising is that few are calling out Meyer for not doing anything and everything he could in 2009 to help make Tebow into a more marketable NFL quarterback.

Since Tebow isn't injured, he's using the belated effort to become a pro-style quarterback as an excuse not to throw at the Scouting Combine.  The obvious goal for Tebow is to avoid doing more damage to his draft stock -- the obvious response in light of his Senior Bowl-week performance is whether it's possible for any further damage to be done.

Though Tebow seems to be trying hard not to point a finger at Meyer for the quarterback's current predicament, this quote tells us everything we need to know:  "I've never been asked to shorten or quicken my release and not have a loop in it."

As the usually-sunny Joe Theismann said three weeks ago, the situation shows that Meyer and his staff have "no clue" as to the process for preparing a quarterback for the NFL.  And while some of the Florida fans in the crowd might respond by saying that Urban Meyer's only duty is to prepare players to play college football, look for Nick Saban and every other coach in the SEC to take a DVD of Tebow's throwing motion into the homes of every high-end quarterback recruit for as long as Meyer remains the Florida coach.  They'll all be making the case to the kid and his family that, if he hopes to play in the NFL, he'd better not go to Gainseville.

If you don't think that'll eventually impact the performance of Meyer's team, then you simply don't understand how college football actually works.

Meanwhile, Tebow will be left to his own devices to get an education into how pro football actually works.  During his four years with Meyer, Tebow apparently learned absolutely nothing.

The bold in the third-to-last paragraph is for emphasis. Urban Meyer could have kept his same system. He could have still taught Tebow how to take a snap and throw like someone who has played football before and all that jazz, but he didn't. He just didn't bother. In fact, I've read that his mechanics actually regressed at Florida (can't seem to find that link at this point). Urban Meyer rode the Tebow horse as far as he could while standing by idly and watching Timmy forget how to actually throw a ball. Tebow's always been scattershot with his passes...but aside from that annihilation of a stout (that's dripping with sarcasm) Cincinnati defense, he's been even more so this season.

As for the dumbass commenters on PFT...they come out of the woodwork to bash everything on that site with their own personal brand of stupid. "Urban Meyer's job is to win games"...yes. It is. And if he scares off future QB recruits, he's going to have a hell of a time doing that in a couple years. Assuming he's still coaching at that point. As to Florio's contentions that Nick Saban and Co. will send DVDs of Tebow's throwing motions to recruits and explain to the families that Gainesville is not the place to send a young QB with NFL aspirations...well, they don't even have to. ESPN has done that for them in bright fucking neon. Even casual fans seem to know at this point that Urban Meyer's system is not the place for a future pro-QB to ply his trade, regardless of how true or untrue that sentiment actually is. Alex Smith can throw, but nobody really knows about him. But they sure know about Tebow.

Meyer did not have to sacrifice much to prepare Tebow for life after college. But he didn't. Sure, he gets on TV and says "Tim is a winner and a great football player and anyone who can't see that is blind" and all of that good stuff, but pro scouts don't give the slightest of damns about what Urban Meyer thinks. They are more concerned about Tebow's quixotic throwing motion than his "intangibles" and "winniness" and "fuckdominance" and everything else that he used to beat the Citadel. And it can be argued that Meyer has contributed more bad than good.