{"id":9904,"date":"2016-01-16T23:41:19","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T06:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=9904"},"modified":"2016-01-20T07:54:46","modified_gmt":"2016-01-20T14:54:46","slug":"prairie-lights-why-cant-we-have-an-nfl-team-in-billings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/01\/prairie-lights-why-cant-we-have-an-nfl-team-in-billings\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: Why can’t we have an NFL team in Billings?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Daylis\"

Photo by Idibri<\/p>

If Wendy’s would come through with a few more donations, there’s no reason Daylis Stadium could not look like this one day soon.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I began reading the Newsweek magazine article<\/a> about moving the St. Louis Rams to Billings, I thought it was a joke.<\/p>\n

But I read on and then read it again and\u2014what the hell? It might still be a joke, but John Walters, who wrote the column for Newsweek’s online edition Friday, did his homework and made a case for Billings that almost sounded convincing.<\/p>\n

Walters’ piece played off the news that the owner of the Rams is moving the franchise back to Los Angeles, which it left 21 years ago.<\/p>\n

The first part of the column reads like a straight-on spoof, saying the move back to L.A. is conservative and uninspired, while the bold move to Billings would be anything but. He also says it would be \u201ctremendous\u201d to rename the team the Billings Bighorns, that fans could tailgate along the Yellowstone River, that young fans could be called Little Bighorns, and that elderly fans could be called, collectively, Old Faithful.<\/p>\n

But Walters also talked to John Brewer, president of the Billings Area Chamber of Commerce, and apparently Brewer\u2019s earnest salesmanship had an effect on the man. Brewer rightly pointed out that \u201cMontana is a fanatical sports state and Billings is a sporting community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brewer even went on to add, according to Walters, that Billings has seven breweries, and he recommended Angry Hank\u2019s Street Fight Imperial Red Ale. Good choice and good point. Appealing to the beer-drinking sensibilities of any journalist, particularly a male sportswriter, is never a bad idea.<\/p>\n

Walters goes on to make a very interesting point of his own: \u201cIf NFL commissioner Roger Goodell were searching a map for the epicenter of the Lower 48 that has yet to be colonized by an NFL franchise, he would place a thumbtack in Billings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>He\u2019s right, of course. Who doesn\u2019t know some Montanans who are rabid fans of the Vikings, the Seahawks or the Broncos, people who think nothing of driving across the frozen tundra for half a day or all day to watch a \u201chome\u201d game?<\/p>\n

Walsh also makes the point that \u201cthe smaller the market, the more promising the fan base.\u201d Green Bay, Wis., population 105,000, had the third-highest average attendance in the NFL last year. And while Walsh rightly says that Green Bay draws fans from Milwaukee and the rest of Wisconsin, he argues that the Billings Bighorns would bring in fans from all over Montana as well as the Dakotas, Wyoming and Idaho, other states bereft of an NFL team.<\/p>\n

It would be galling indeed for residents of Missoula and Bozeman to even consider driving to Billings for a football game, since they\u2019ve had the corner on that market forever, but how could they resist? College football\u2019s a blast and the Cat-Griz game will always be popular, but come on, the NFL?<\/p>\n

They wouldn\u2019t admit that they liked anything else about Billings, bloody snobs that they are, but after a few games, followed by a few meals out, a few visits to those breweries, maybe even a few nights in our swank downtown hotels, maybe they\u2019d finally change their tune.<\/p>\n

Walters says our very remoteness might be a draw for people from around the country, people who would love to come out to watch a pro football game in our exotically isolated burg.<\/p>\n

And this was where Brewer got a bit carried away and said, \u201cFrom Billings, the Little Bighorn battlefield, site of Custer\u2019s Last Stand, is about an hour\u2019s drive. And the entrance to Yellowstone National Park is just 90 minutes away. We\u2019re a tourism mecca.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, no. Mecca is a destination. Maybe we\u2019re a caravanserai on the way to Mecca, but we ain\u2019t no Mecca.<\/p>\n

Walters, for his part, made just one small error in his carefully researched column, when he wrote: \u201cWhat if the team now fleeing St. Louis, the origin point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, had relocated to the town where Captain William Clark once etched his name (on a slab at Pompeys Pillar)?\u201d<\/p>\n

Pompeys Pillar, of course, is almost 30 miles from Billings, and it took Clark and his men nearly a day and a half of canoeing to get from here to there. Still, I suppose it\u2019s close enough.<\/p>\n

Anyway, that reference prompted me to look up Clark\u2019s comments in the expedition\u2019s journals, where he mentions seeing \u201cemence herds of Buffalow, Elk and wolves\u201d from the top of what he called Pompy\u2019s Tower (until some damned editor got his hands on the copy).<\/p>\n

It is not as widely known that Clark went on to write that \u201cthe topmost part of this Tower was covered in tolerably decent Grass, & the men were soon involv\u2019d in a spirrited game of football, for which purpose they had stuffed a Coyote\u2019s bladder with moss from the River.\u201d<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve got history behind the notion, too. Billings, we\u00a0can do this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I began reading the Newsweek magazine article about moving the St. Louis Rams to Billings, I thought it was a joke. But I read on and then read it again and\u2014what the hell? It might still be a joke, but John Walters, who wrote the column for Newsweek’s online edition Friday, did his homework […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3660,3661,626,183,3140,3659],"class_list":["post-9904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-billings-area-chamber-of-commerce","tag-green-bay","tag-john-brewer","tag-metrapark","tag-newsweek","tag-st-louis-rams","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}