The San Francisco 49ers will be playing in a brand new stadium next season but no matter how well the team performs on the field it looks unlikely that it will have any home games broadcast for Monday Night Football, at least for the first season.
The soon to be finished facility — in Santa Clara, Calif., well south of the team’s namesake city — does not have enough of its own parking spaces and is planning to use neighboring office lots for its weekend games but these spaces are in use when the fans start to arrive for the games on weekdays. According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News the team isn’t asking for any of the sought-after prime-time MNF games or the Thursday night games until it can figure out how to fit all the fans’ cars in lots jammed by the folks who work in Silicon Valley.
One option the team is now considering is asking its neighbors to change their work hours to accommodate the team. Wonder what Marissa Mayer thinks about that idea?
BlackBerry history
If you are one of the few, the proud, the remaining BlackBerry users this is a pretty interesting read from Bloomberg. It is an oral history of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, a device that probably did more than any other to kill the pager and usher in the age of smartphones.
Bloomberg conducted dozens of interviews to get a good picture about the rise of the platform and then its sad decline. Interesting to see if any of the current tech behemoths will follow the same path.
Google Glass takes another hit
Google Glass may be banned in another state as Illinois is now considering banning drivers from using the wearable computing devices, joining Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia and Great Britain as well as sundry businesses and bars.
Mobile Marketer makes a spirited defense of the technology but it seems to me that they missed the point in a few places: they are not the same as a security camera and does anybody honestly believe that having a second image in front of a driver’s eye will make them safer?
A Heisman tale
As the college football season winds down the talk about who deserves the Heisman always starts coming to the forefront. Should they look at more than just offensive players, did so and so’s stats really put him in the race.
Well the Washington Post has taken a different tack and did a very interesting piece on the history of the first 78 trophies, where they are now and how they got there. It’s a fun read.
NBA to embrace its inner geek
Baseball in the last decade or so has undergone a revolution in the way that stats are looked at, with the time honored numbers such as RBIs, Wins and HRs getting re-evaluated in terms of how they relate to the team and individuals performance.
Football is also undergoing that same revolution to a smaller extent and now the NBA has joined the fun with the launch of NBA.com/stats web page that will feature detailed box scores and video from all of its games.
Super Bowl will be no walk in the park
The rules for parking, tailgating and generally schmoozing at the upcoming Super Bowl in New Jersey are out and it looks like if you are attending you had better leave the house early if you don’t want to miss the game.
No walking through the parking lots, you must either drive or take mass transit, no tailgating or BBQs allowed and a host of other restrictions. Who says that NFL stands for No Fun League?
