It'll be interesting to see all the details unfold. I don't want to get my hopes up, but if Seattle and St. Louis aren't at the top of the list I'm not sure what they're doing. As a lifelong season ticket holder, I had so much fun at all two games and would love to get back at it.
No word on what this means for St. Louis...but it sounds like they intend to relaunch the league.
For the rock-bottom price the league sold for, Dwayne Johnson could have bought it himself. I'm pretty sure the dude's houses are worth more than what was just spent to buy the XFL.
Great news! I wish we could have played that last game against LA before Covid hit. That would have been awesome! In a few short months, we showed the country that STL is a football town!
The announced this am that the convention center and the league have opened discussion. I am very thrilled to see them return. While I like having the team play in a different venue, I do wonder if they thought about the new MLS stadium at all.
^ They'd definitely sell out the MLS stadium. But I'm not opposed to having some more action at the Dome, especially if it leads to any kind of improvements. Not to mention the few extra days a year to help businesses in the immediate area.
EssTeeEll wrote:^ They'd definitely sell out the MLS stadium. But I'm not opposed to having some more action at the Dome, especially if it leads to any kind of improvements. Not to mention the few extra days a year to help businesses in the immediate area.
What would it cost to mount hundreds tv screens on the ceiling of the dome & stitch together a giant image of the sky outside? (Or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel if the Pope visits again.)
Okay, time for some napkin grade math. You figure the span is several hundred feet, even in the narrower dimension. The cheapest way to do it would almost certainly be some kind of projection screen, and to my knowledge no one has ever built a projection screen of that size before. A video wall would be brighter, but even more expensive. This should be a low light environment, so projection might work. Maybe. If you can find a way to mount the projectors, that is. And that's going to be mucho hard.
Let's guess it'll be a 200 by 500 foot thing, more or less, to expand out over the seats some. And honestly, that's probably too conservative if you really want to get a good wall to wall experience. That's already a hundred thousand square feet of screen. That's ten or fifteen drive in theatres. Since the throw will be short, I'd guess you're talking between fifty and a hundred projectors, not ten or fifteen. At twenty grand a pop. So . . . you're talking a cool million in projection alone, not counting installation or programming. It's hard for me to price the screen, since that's going to be a custom build job. But I can't believe it would be less than several million, when you add in all the specialized infrastructure to hold it in place. Let's guess you're talking five million in parts, since you'll also need many miles of data cable. Maybe that much again in labor. So I'd be mighty surprised if it came in under ten. Just a guesstimate, mind. Back of the napkin grade.
And now it gets complicated. Because we've got to make this work, while still allowing events that want to hang things from the ceiling. After all, you still want concerts in here right? So all of this needs to be kind of removable. At the Hearnes Center there was a solid steel deck between the roof truss and the floor. No matter how hard we tried to work around it, and even after all the concerts before, we still ended up cutting new holes in the thing maybe every second or third show. Now try to imagine if that deck is a projection screen.
The best plan I can think would be to have the screen mounted on removable panels. Maybe individual sections fold up, accessed from catwalks behind them. Which means you now need a whole maze of catwalks. The dome doesn't really have the structure in place for that right now. So . . . . best add another couple of million to that figure for the steelworkers. And of course we still need to figure out how to hang projectors. This will need to be extremely short throw, fish eye, front projection weirdness, as there's just no way you'll be able to get shadow-free sightlines from behind. I'm guessing you'd have a cluster in the middle around a scoreboard and a ring of them surrounding the edges. I'm honestly not even a hundred percent sure the optics exist to make this work, as the angle of incidence between projector and screen will be absolutely absurdly low. So the difference in throw between the near edge and far edge will be . . . stupid. Probably impossible. And we're already looking at many millions of dollars for something that's probably still too small and which honestly won't work.
So . . . maybe you need that jumbotron after all. But that. That's going to be REALLY expensive. You figure scoreboards are already many hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and they're tiny by comparison. So . . . I love the idea. But I don't think it's going to work. Fun to think about, though.
Thanks for the analysis. You’ve taken this way beyond where I thought anyone had the patience to go.
I was just thinking you could have a virtual version of what Kroenke has in LA if you were stuck with one channel showing grey all day. But you could switch to other channels.
Something visual like that would definitely be welcome. And as was mentioned, sometimes concerts are held there, too. Could lead to some cool effects for those. But all I'm expecting in that immediate area is the Convention Center expansion at this time.
I do wonder if material advancements might make an ETFE roof feasible on the Dome now. It wouldn't need to be the whole roof, just a rectangle over the field. I have no idea how much that would cost, how the CVC would pay for it, or how one would go about installing it, though. I don't recall that option ever being discussed in the renovation proposal.
But a more pressing concern: if the XFL continues to play in the Dome, they need to do something about the artificial turf. Maybe it just needs to be power-washed, but it really looked bad on TV. I was surprised the broadcasters didn't mention it.
Edit: ETFE, not neoprene. Don't know where I got neoprene, unless someone's making clear neoprene now...
Thanks for the analysis. You’ve taken this way beyond where I thought anyone had the patience to go.
I was just thinking you could have a virtual version of what Kroenke has in LA if you were stuck with one channel showing grey all day. But you could switch to other channels.
Hanging heavy stuff is but one of the services I have, over my oddball theatrical career, provided. Done a lot of A/V install work too. It's a darned interesting idea to contemplate. I'm not really the guy that gets paid to design the rigs, but I have helped hang more than a few of them. They are interesting to me. And yeah, it would be wicked cool if you could make it work. Sort of an "atmospheric" theatre writ large. Or a super-planetarium. I finally saw the new projector at the McDonnell Planetarium a couple of months back. That thing is . . . stunning. I was quite gob-smacked by it.
IMHO, St. Louis must be part of the third version of the XFL. We had great crowds and a great fan base this last time around. If the Battlehawks come back, the fan base is there and we'll have even bigger crowds.
Gerry Cardinale has ties to the NFL, specifically Jerry Jones/Legends Hospitality (the Steinbrenner family are also partners).
I suspect this will become a development league for the NFL, with some kind of reality show TV or cable broadcast component run by The Rock and his ex. Will St. Louis fans (not to mention all the potential XFL expansion cities also burned by the NFL) show up for something like that...?
Gerry Cardinale has ties to the NFL, specifically Jerry Jones/Legends Hospitality (the Steinbrenner family are also partners).
I suspect this will become a development league for the NFL, with some kind of reality show TV or cable broadcast component run by The Rock and his ex. Will St. Louis fans (not to mention all the potential XFL expansion cities also burned by the NFL) show up for something like that...?
I think they already building some fan base with the half season this year helps with buy in. Lots of interest/gear sold already.
Gerry Cardinale has ties to the NFL, specifically Jerry Jones/Legends Hospitality (the Steinbrenner family are also partners).
I suspect this will become a development league for the NFL, with some kind of reality show TV or cable broadcast component run by The Rock and his ex. Will St. Louis fans (not to mention all the potential XFL expansion cities also burned by the NFL) show up for something like that...?
I think they already building some fan base with the half season this year helps with buy in. Lots of interest/gear sold already.
No doubt. But the question is: if the NFL is involved, will the goodwill generated by the BattleHawks overcome St. Louis' hatred of the NFL (and vice versa)?
Here's an interview with Dany Garcia, co-owner of the XFL, during today's Yahoo All Market's Summit. There's also featured shots of The BattleHawks, the St. Louis game crowd, and the Dome.
^I'm not sure I noticed featured shots of any other team. When they showed the football it said "Battlehawks" on the side. I'm not absolutely positive, but I think the XFL logo in the middle of the playing field might have been on top of a Rams logo.
. . . I think they like us!
(And they want us to like them.)
Go Danny! Make it work. Glad to see you're excited about this nifty thing you bought. And while you're at it . . . Beat the pants off the NFL!!!
(That last one might take a little time and a lot of luck, but hey, I hope.)
So...obviously nobody wants to discuss the recent XFL developments. That's interesting.
It sure has the Canadians in a tizzy...
Has their been anything new since XFL announced its suspending the 2022 season as it holds talk with the Canadians
Nope, nothing official, just a lot of commentary, along with a bunch of speculation and rumors in the Canadian press. Barely a mention in the US though.
