"Is keeping a football team more important that putting police officers on the street? More important than giving teachers raises?"

Yesterday there were some football games. I watched none of them. Ditto for basketball games, and the vast majority of baseball games.

It's so much more fun playing games than watching them. My current favorite game is Bait the Party Elder.

There are brain injuries -- but not mine.

In Losing the Rams, St. Louis Wins, by Joe Nocera (New York Times)

Don’t cry for St. Louis, sports fans.

The departure of the Rams to Los Angeles, whence they came two decades ago, is something for the city’s residents to cheer, not bemoan. St. Louis got lucky ...

 ... the economics underpinning the recent deal St. Louis and the State of Missouri tried to put together to keep the Rams would have been financially ruinous. Let’s not be coy about this: St. Louis, a city of fewer than 320,000 people, with a shrinking tax base, simply couldn’t afford to help finance the $1 billion stadium that the Rams’ billionaire owner, E. Stanley Kroenke, was seeking. Its mistake was in trying.

And the truth.

... whatever the deficiencies of the proposal from the city and state, it was more than the city, especially, could bear. It would have broken St. Louis’s back, and quite likely forced cutbacks in service that the city badly needs. And it raises again the question of whether cities should really be in the business of subsidizing sports facilities. Is keeping a football team more important that putting police officers on the street? More important than giving teachers raises?

Of course not. But mayors and governors can’t bring themselves to tell a team good riddance when it threatens to leave. Instead, they move heaven and earth to keep the team — even if, as in the case of St. Louis, they can’t afford it. That’s why the pro sports business model works so well. It relies on the expectation that government officials will panic at the thought of losing a team.