Out the door

I still don't know what blogger.com has done to screw up the sidebar/main text interaction on their templates, but they did. No articles out of the Albuquerque Journal today. Perhaps tomorrow. The deal to keep the Roadrunners in Santa Fe should be signed tomorrow. There is a bit of a post mortem this morning in the San Angelo Standard-Times. I'm not sure McEnrue or the city understand just how expensive the lease terms are to prospective franchises. I wonder if when calculating city "losses" attributable to "hockey operations" McEnrue is placing too much of the everyday operational overhead on the hockey side of the ledger, when the real problem may be not booking enough non-hockey (or ice-related) events to generate the neccessary revenues required for a facility of that size. I think the city needs to examine Kay Yeager Coliseum in Wichita Falls. It's slightly larger (they can squeeze about 7,800 in there), but it's had a junior hockey team for three seasons, most recently averaging 1,948. It's probably the most costly arena in the league averaged out per fan, though Deja Blue (seating 4,000 in Frisco) and The Metra in Billings probably come close (Billings is reportedly building their own 3,200 seat facility to be ready in 2006-07). I'd say the situation in Wichita Falls (in terms of market size, facility size, and fanbase) is pretty comparable. Look there to see how it's done, folks. To borrow from Dennis Miller... I am outta here!