OT: Why doesn't Hampton Roads have a pro sports team?

[RUaMoose]

The Norfolk/Va Beach/Chesapeake/Newport News region has 1.7 million people and is the 37th largest metro market. That puts it just an eyelash behind Nashville, TN (35th) and ahead of such pro markets as Jacksonville, New Orleans, Ok city, and Buffalo. I would think this would be an attractive area for a pro franchise to tap into but to date no one has taken the plunge. DC would be the nearest pro city. The NBA is looking to expand to 32 teams with Seattle being the obvious choice for #31. Could the Scope be the (temporary) landing place for #32 ?
This post was edited on 3/11 2:35 PM by RUaMoose

 

[RUSK97]

Throwing a guess out there...it's similar to NJ in the sense that it's just sprawl and not a concentrated urban area. It may have 1.7 million people, but from the northern end of Newport News, east to Virginia Beach and to the southern end of Chesapeake, it's not clustered enough. Add to that the bridges and a body of water separating most of it and it makes it difficult or at least unappealing for the population to travel to a pro sporting venue.

 

[Mr_Twister]

If my memory is not failing me, I saw the ABA's Virginia Squires play at the Hampton Coliseum with Julius Erving and George Gervin. It was an exhibition game against the Philadelphia 76ers who had a man child 19-year old Darryl Dawkins. George Gervin was a tremendous player who never had near the notoriety of some lesser players.

 

[Mr_Twister]

The Virginia Beach/Norfolk area is chock full of people who value outdoor recreation - boating, fishing, swimming, beach, camping, hunting, tennis, golf, softball, volleyball, etc. And many are transients - the area is rich with military/government jobs, especially Navy people.

This post was edited on 3/11 3:16 PM by Mr_Twister

 

[derleider]

Originally posted by Mr_Twister:
The Virginia Beach/Norfolk area is chock full of people who value outdoor recreation - boating, fishing, swimming, beach, tennis, golf, softball, volleyball, etc. And many are transients - the area is rich with military/government jobs, especially Navy people.

Yep - I think all three of these are right. Not a huge metro, multipolar, lots of transients, and outdoor types. There are just better cities out there.

I mean the 37th largest metro means that if each league went to the top 28-32 metros - well its out.

And Austin and Las Vegas are bigger (as well as Riverside metro - but thats even more or just a spread out blob than the Virginia Beach area).

Really - what smaller metros have pro teams

Jacksonville - and thats pretty much a disaster - the fact that they havent moved yet is a minor miracle.
New Orleans - used to be bigger
Memphis and OKC - NBA teams - really the only smaller towns that work and arent historic holdovers - but both are centered on a single downtown.
Buffalo - historic hold over from when Buffalo was a bigger city, particularly relatively speakin
Green Bay - historic hold over from when pro FB teams existed in basically every mid-sized burg in the Midwest.

 

[srru86]

Originally posted by Mr_Twister:
And many are transients - the area is rich with military/government jobs, especially Navy people.

I think this is the key. I 'm guessing not an area with lots of disposable/recreational income floating about. The military and government employees are not buying season tickets. The significant number of retirees from the Navy in the area are on a "fixed income". The one major corporate employer, Newport News Shipbuilding, is not going to do much I'd imagine.

 

[sherrane]

Originally posted by derleider:

Originally posted by Mr_Twister:
The Virginia Beach/Norfolk area is chock full of people who value outdoor recreation - boating, fishing, swimming, beach, tennis, golf, softball, volleyball, etc. And many are transients - the area is rich with military/government jobs, especially Navy people.

Yep - I think all three of these are right. Not a huge metro, multipolar, lots of transients, and outdoor types. There are just better cities out there.

I mean the 37th largest metro means that if each league went to the top 28-32 metros - well its out.

And Austin and Las Vegas are bigger (as well as Riverside metro - but thats even more or just a spread out blob than the Virginia Beach area).

Really - what smaller metros have pro teams

Jacksonville - and thats pretty much a disaster - the fact that they havent moved yet is a minor miracle.
New Orleans - used to be bigger
Memphis and OKC - NBA teams - really the only smaller towns that work and arent historic holdovers - but both are centered on a single downtown.
Buffalo - historic hold over from when Buffalo was a bigger city, particularly relatively speakin
Green Bay - historic hold over from when pro FB teams existed in basically every mid-sized burg in the Midwest.

Addendum:

New Orleans got their NFL team for political reasons. The NFL wanted to merge with the AFL, but they needed congressional approval. There was a backroom deal made by Pete Rozell with Congressman Russell Long to put a team in New Orleans. The NBA failed in their first attempt to bring a team to the city as the New Orleans Jazz relocated to Utah. Their current NBA team was originally the Charlotte Hornets.

Jacksonville has their NFL team because the league wanted to expand to 30 teams. The NFL wanted to put teams back in the Baltimore and St. Louis markets. However, neither city was able to have an ownership group the league was comfortable with and Jacksonville and Charlotte did. The NFL did NOT want to expand into Jacksonville because of its size. The league announced Charlotte as the 29th team, but waited a month before awarding Jacksonville because they hoped the St. Louis group would get their act together. Jacksonville may have gotten a strong group because Atlanta Falcons founder Rankin Smith threatened twice to move the Falcons to Jacksonville in order to get concessions from the city of Atlanta.

Buffalo was an original AFL team. The original 8 teams included six cities the NFL declined to expand to (Boston, Buffalo, Houston, Denver, Dallas, and Oakland) as well as New York (Titans) and Los Angeles (Chargers). Like predecessors to Jacksonville, strong ownership groups in marginal professional cities can succeed, especially before the era of mega dollar TV contracts. Buffalo later added the NHL's Sabres. The Sabres have been a good NHL franchise because it is a suburb of hockey-crazy Toronto. The Braves, an NBA franchise, is now the Los Angeles Clippers.

Green Bay was an original NFL franchise that was created before sports were televised, so the TV market is irrelevant.

EDITED to clarify my point:
Hampton Roads doesn't have a pro sports team because a solid ownership group has never emerged during league expansion. As the original AFL teams and especially as Jacksonville has demonstrated, strong ownership groups can overcome the limitations of their market size. After Baltimore and St. Louis failed to win NFL expansion in the early 90's, they attracted established teams from Cleveland and Los Angeles. That is significant because these teams left larger markets because of the attractive proposals the cities made to lure the franchises there.


This post was edited on 3/12 9:52 AM by sherrane

 

[derleider]

Originally posted by sherrane:

Originally posted by derleider:

Originally posted by Mr_Twister:
The Virginia Beach/Norfolk area is chock full of people who value outdoor recreation - boating, fishing, swimming, beach, tennis, golf, softball, volleyball, etc. And many are transients - the area is rich with military/government jobs, especially Navy people.

Yep - I think all three of these are right. Not a huge metro, multipolar, lots of transients, and outdoor types. There are just better cities out there.

I mean the 37th largest metro means that if each league went to the top 28-32 metros - well its out.

And Austin and Las Vegas are bigger (as well as Riverside metro - but thats even more or just a spread out blob than the Virginia Beach area).

Really - what smaller metros have pro teams

Jacksonville - and thats pretty much a disaster - the fact that they havent moved yet is a minor miracle.
New Orleans - used to be bigger
Memphis and OKC - NBA teams - really the only smaller towns that work and arent historic holdovers - but both are centered on a single downtown.
Buffalo - historic hold over from when Buffalo was a bigger city, particularly relatively speakin
Green Bay - historic hold over from when pro FB teams existed in basically every mid-sized burg in the Midwest.

Addendum:

New Orleans got their NFL team for political reasons. The NFL wanted to merge with the AFL, but they needed congressional approval. There was a backroom deal made by Pete Rozell with Congressman Russell Long to put a team in New Orleans. The NBA failed in their first attempt to bring a team to the city as the New Orleans Jazz relocated to Utah. Their current NBA team was originally the Charlotte Hornets.

Jacksonville has their NFL team because the league wanted to expand to 30 teams. The NFL wanted to put teams back in the Baltimore and St. Louis markets. However, neither city was able to have an ownership group the league was comfortable with and Jacksonville and Charlotte did. The NFL did NOT want to expand into Jacksonville because of its size. The league announced Charlotte as the 29th team, but waited a month before awarding Jacksonville because they hoped the St. Louis group would get their act together. Jacksonville may have gotten a strong group because Atlanta Falcons founder Rankin Smith threatened twice to move the Falcons to Jacksonville in order to get concessions from the city of Atlanta.

Buffalo was an original AFL team. The original 8 teams included six cities the NFL declined to expand to (Boston, Buffalo, Houston, Denver, Dallas, and Oakland) as well as New York (Titans) and Los Angeles (Chargers). Like predecessors to Jacksonville, strong ownership groups in marginal professional cities can succeed, especially before the era of mega dollar TV contracts. Buffalo later added the NHL's Sabres. The Sabres have been a good NHL franchise because it is a suburb of hockey-crazy Toronto. The Braves, an NBA franchise, is now the Los Angeles Clippers.

Green Bay was an original NFL franchise that was created before sports were televised, so the TV market is irrelevant.

Didnt realize that about Buffalo. I figured in both FB and hockey they went back to the WW2 era, although now - looking it up - it appears that Buffalo was last a top 10 population city in 1910 (displaced by LA in 1920), so my entire timeline of Buffalo history seems a little off.

Incidentally - this page is pretty facsinating. Seeing how much cities in the Northeast quadrant shrunk from 1950 on as white flight and suburbanization took hold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_States_by_population_by_decade

 

[dollarbill]

It looks like ODU football is on the rise and is filling the gap a bit. Their attendance is strong as they move into 1A. $$$$

This post was edited on 3/12 9:57 AM by dollarbill

This post was edited on 3/12 9:57 AM by dollarbill

 

[B1GOSU]

I used to live in Hampton Roads (Williamsburg) and everything people have mentioned as to why the area doesn't have a professional team is true. Hampton Roads is a large, spread out area. It can take over an hour to get from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach, for example. And other parts of Hampton roads are even further than that, such as Chesapeake, Suffolk and Portsmouth areas. In comparison, Washington DC is about 2.5 hours from Williamsburg. Richmond is about an hour and 45 minutes from DC. The DC professional teams really pull from the VA metro areas.

Now what that area is good for is top-level recruiting. If Virginia or Virginia Tech were ever added to the B1G, Hampton Roads would be a gold mine of talent for the conference.