Why the Chargers Game May Get Blacked Out: the Longshanks Effect

In the film Braveheart, King Edward's character famously said:

"The problem with Scotland.....is that its FULL of Scots!"

Well this Charger fan will dutifully paraphrase the cruel Longshanks and posit the following:

"The problem with San Diego.....is that its FULL of transplants!"

This ladies and gentlemen is the Longshanks Effect.

I mean that with kindness and absolutely no disrespect to......myself. I am a transplant but I've lived here long enough to know where my bread is buttered and unfortunately I can't say the same for a good many of my neighbors. Because of this indisputable truth we face the possibility of a blackout for Sunday's Chargers/Chiefs game if 1300 tickets aren't sold by tomorrow. San Diego may have a resident pool of over 1 million but that figure does not ring true for the Charger fan base. So what to do? The Union Tribune's Jay Posner proposed the following in his media column this morning:

What better weekend could there be for the Spanos family to buy the remaining tickets, donate them to some worthy causes (military, fire, police, youth groups, etc.) and give all of Southern California a huge thank you for its support over the years? After all, coming off years of ineptitude, the Chargers have sold out every game since 2004 and TV ratings are at their highest point in too many years to count.

I'm sure the Chargers could find a couple of sponsors to join up, and they could hit up KFMB Channel 8, which must be making gobs of money off those huge ratings. But even if they couldn't, so what?

Sure, it's easy for me to spend the Spanoses' money, but we're really not talking about that much cash. To a fan or a sponsor, the cost would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $225,000 — 3,000 tickets at about $75 a pop. But the Chargers' cost wouldn't be nearly that high, because the club wouldn't actually “buy” the tickets. Instead, the Chargers would have to pay only the 34 percent of each ticket that goes into a pool the league later distributes equally to all teams (so they'd get back 1/32nd of the money).

Thirty-four percent of $225,000 is $76,500. But that doesn't factor in that some of those 3,000 extra fans would pay $25 to park, plus all of them would figure to spend at least $10 — and probably much more, given the prices — at the concession stands.

See, it's really not that outrageous, is it? Shoot, the Chargers could almost make a profit by doing this.

Sounds good to me and I would venture a guess that either the Chargers or Channel 8 will pick up the tab when the bell tolls tomorrow.

Hey I wish I were going...... but I was in Denver last week and have already been to one pre-season and two regular season home games. Balancing the budget to make it to another game this year will be difficult ( //hoping for playoffs) so It is my want that reason prevails and someone ponies up the $260 K to ensure that I can sit on my couch and see the 50 greatest Chargers honored this Sunday.

Make it happen, ye with deep pockets!