This story in USA Today talks about something that Lynn Lashbrook, the founder and president of Sports Management World Wide, has been talking about for more than a year.

People have made huge investments in high-definition television and sound systems for their home these days — and you can’t blame them for staying home and watching games, rather than paying to get into games. For a lot of reasons — including rude fan behavior, traffic, too-crowded stadiums, to name just a few — watching at home can be a better experience than actually attending the games.

It’s the new challenge in professional sports — even for a league as wildly successful as the NFL, where at the height of the sport’s popularity attendance has dropped for two straight seasons. How do you get people to come to your stadium and buy tickets when it’s so easy to sit at home and watch the game for free?

Well, in the NFL, the blackout rule helps. If the game isn’t sold out, home-team fans CAN’T watch the games at home. No other sport has this rule — but they probably should. Even though teams are making more money off television than they are gate receipts in every major sport, they are still reliant on those gate receipts for a significant portion of revenue.

That’s why, at this point, serious thought is being put into added value for spectators at games. And I’m not just talking about bobblehead dolls and refrigerator magnets, either. The huge scoreboards are a help, as are insightful interviews on those boards before and after games. All-you-can-eat buffets in certain sections is a big deal these days. But you’re going to see more innovations inside arenas and stadiums as teams attempt to fight the battle against stay-at-homes.

Just wait until you see sports on 3D TV. I watched a baseball game in 3D earlier this summer and it was spellbinding. Sports have been playing a dangerous game for years now, competing against their live gates with home TV.

And it’s shaping up to be quite a fight.

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Nice job today by The Oregonian summarizing the mess that is Memorial Coliseum. I especially loved our fine mayor’s contributions to the story, including this gem, in reaction to The Trail Blazers’ “Jumptown” concept:

“Terrible,” Adams said of early Jumptown drawings. “The most un-Portland-like, significantly un-Portland like, renderings of what it would be.”

Now I wasn’t pleased with the role the Trail Blazers played in this whole thing. Most people I know believe they were the ones — not a band of architects — who torpedoed the idea of tearing MC down and building a ballpark. But I was intrigued by “Jumptown” and more than that, I fell on the floor laughing at Sam Adams’ idea that it was “un-Portland-like.”

What does that mean, Mr. Mayor? That it might actually be successful? Gawd, isn’t it time to go with something un-Portland-like? The whole idea that people can’t come to grips with the fact that the building is old, worn out and in serious need of a demolition is still something this city doesn’t want to face up to.

So, just as Portland has done with PGE Park, it will keep pumping taxpayer dollars into it, chasing good money after bad, trying to save something that deserves to be discarded — recycling gone wild. This city won’t come to grips with the idea that sports arenas have a distinct shelf life. Of course, this city won’t come to grips with the idea that every other major city in the world builds new arenas.

I’m warning you, Portland, you follow Adams’ idiotic plans for this site — basically just an overgrown community center — you’re going to be subsidizing that white elephant for decades.

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In the comments section of a recent post I heard a lot of people whining about Allen.

You can say what you want about how he’s run the team — and I’ve been critical of his management style — and you can even stay all paranoid about him moving the team to Seattle, which he isn’t going to do.

But I remain firmly convinced of one thing — without Allen as the team’s owner, the Trail Blazers would have moved out of Portland a long time ago.

Huh?

Well, here’s the thing — Allen’s most lasting contribution to Portland sports isn’t just his ownership of the team, it’s that he built the Rose Garden. And I will maintain forever that he’s the only one who would have done it.

I mean, seriously — you think the city of Portland would have done it? There is NO WAY. In the 90s, this team would have still been trying to make it playing in Memorial Coliseum and our city would have slipped into its usual “if you want an arena, you better build it yourself” mode and any other rational owner in sports would have looked elsewhere.

I mean, plenty of other cities would have been willing to build an NBA owner a new arena. The Trail Blazers would have moved to Kansas City or Las Vegas a decade ago without Paul Allen deciding just to build his own venue, which ended up costing him a lot of money and heartache.

The fact is, the price you pay for major-league teams these days — which most progressive cities believe is important — is building the venue.

Portland doesn’t do sports venues. We re-do them. Which is a bit of a joke in most cases.

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And as one commenter pointed out, if there truly is a hotel problem in Portland, just bring a cruise ship up the river, dock it right there downtown and take care of everyone. It would be kind of fun.

And if it was good enough for the Super Bowl in Jacksonville it would certainly take care of the All-Star Game in Portland.

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I’m sure you saw this story about Orlando landing the 2012 NBA All-Star Game. It’s the second time the Magic have played host to the game since it came into the league.

Meanwhile, Portland remains one of the few teams in the league to never have played host to the game — which sticks in the craw of a lot of long-time Portlanders. Oh, I know, when you talk to the Trail Blazers they’ll tell you that the lack of hotel space, or the lack of a huge headquarters hotel in the vicinity of the arena, means Portland CANNOT host it.

That’s an impediment, but seriously — it’s just the easy excuse for the league and the team. The simple fact is, the Blazers quit bidding for the game years ago. They really haven’t wanted it. Many NBA teams have no interest in staging the game. It is a major pain in the backside.

I don’t think the Blazers have had any interest in messing around with all the details and distractions that the All-Star Weekend can bring to a franchise. The only entity that really benefits from the event is the city itself, with all the visitors and attention in can bring to a community.

There are two real reasons for a team to chase that game. The first is that you’re having trouble selling season tickets and you need the game to spark interest in your NBA team. You can even include tickets to the game or the Saturday circus of events as part of a season-ticket package. This reason is much less common than it used to be, mainly because the hosting teams just don’t get all that many tickets anymore. The league sucks most of them up for its bigwigs and VIPs.

The best reason to want the game now is that it’s major leverage in your community. If you need some juice with the mayor or city council in getting a new arena built or renovated, you can promise the All-Star Game — and often the local political hacks will fall all over themselves to help you. The game does bring major revenue into town and also brings plenty of attention to a community.

For politicians, it doesn’t get any better than that.

OK, so let’s fast-forward to our situation in Portland. Right now in the Rose Quarter, three different groups are trying to win the right to develop the area — including the Trail Blazers’ Jumptown proposal. The basketball team is the favorite in the process, by the way. The Blazers usually get what they want around here, as all of us who wanted to see Memorial Coliseum turned into a showplace for a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium know by now.

But if you’re the City Council and the mayor’s office, the least you can do is extract a commitment from the Trail Blazers that they’ll do ALL they can to get an All-Star Game in Portland in return for the rights to developing Jumptown. It would be a nice way to open that neighborhood when and if it ever does get built.

And honestly, hotel rooms or not — and with all the damn trolleys and trains running around this town, our hotels are all accessible from the Rose Quarter — this town DESERVES an NBA All-Star Game. And the Blazers damn well ought to start bidding for it again.

The league owes us one and so does the team. I cannot believe our “city fathers” — and in the case of Portland even using that old term is pretty hilarious — haven’t pressured the team to make it happen by now. Well, I CAN believe it because the level of naivete around City Hall when it comes to sports has never been higher.

But the mayor, city council and everyone else in a position to have a say about developing that Rose Quarter area should make sure they do all they can to get past the BS and hold the Trail Blazers accountable for bringing the game here.

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If all the reports coming out of Eugene are true, the Oregon basketball coach has already been told he’s out at the conclusion of the season.

My question is, “Why?”

No, not “Why is he out?” — he’s earned that the old fashioned way: by losing a lot of games. Home games, at that. But the more pertinent question is “Why now?” Why wouldn’t you wait until the end of the season?

There is a possibility, particularly with the parity in the talentless Pac-10, that the guy could win the conference tournament. Yes, a remote possibility — but it could happen. And if you’re going to fire him before the season ends, why not just hand him a gold watch and send him on his way immediately and let the assistant coaches guide the team the rest of the way?

I dunno. I have no idea what’s going on.

I will make a prediction here, though. Nike is going to have a hand in hiring the next coach and trust me, that company — oh, you ought to hear the stories about the wonderful off-season trips it sends its basketball coaches on — has all kinds of muscle with top coaches around the country.

I would expect the next Duck basketball coach to be a very accomplished coach, an experienced winner on the Division I level and someone whose name alone will help sell tickets and sponsorships in that new arena.

Anything less would be a disappointment.

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I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from my baseball fan friends who are really disturbed that it appears the city will once again lose the Portland Beavers because PGE Park is going to be modified for soccer and football, with no further configuration for baseball. And of course, no obvious sites for local baseball relocation.

And I’m having to tell them that this time, I’m not on their side.

While I’m not a soccer fan, I understand this city’s romance with the sport. In many ways it is the perfect sport for Portland — all-inclusive, European, Yuppie, rowdy. It’s perfectly Portland, actually. And it’s an easy sport to garner fan support because there just aren’t many games. Perfect for a “mid-major” city like this one.

But the bottom line for me is real simple: Is PGE Park as a baseball venue worth fighting for? The easy answer is: No way. I was there as a little kid for the very first baseball game there, in 1956. It was poor then and it’s still not a good spot for baseball.

Yes, a lot of great players have played there. But if anybody ought to be nostalgic about the joint it’s me. I practically grew up in that place, as a batboy for the Beavers and later a clubhouse boy, pressbox boy, PA announcer, scoreboard operator, official scorer and even a director of group sales. Later, I covered the team for many seasons, starting when it returned to Portland in 1978. I do not think there are many people on the planet who have watched more games there than I have.

But I’m not feeling much of a connection there. It was always a very cold-feeling stadium and never a “ballpark.” Ever. It’s pretty much an inadequate place for baseball, from having too many seats to having way too many poor seats. The concourse is too small, the restrooms too scarce and the seats are difficult to get to. And when you get more than about 7,000 people in there, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

I long for a day when the citizens of Portland can have a real ballpark. Not a football stadium pretending to be ballpark, like PGE Park, which is still a venue better served as a greyhound race track than a ballpark.

But oh yeah, we don’t want to spend money in this town to build even a minor-league park. Mostly that’s because a great many people here don’t know how nice those cool new minor-league ballparks are — and what they would do to spark interest in the team.

And hey, we just remodeled old PGE Park a while back, didn’t we? Well, yes — but it was an overall catastrophe, for sure. And we have to admit that and move on. It was poorly designed and not well-thought-out — a project I will always believe should never have been chosen in the city’s request-for-proposal process — but that’s another topic for another day.

Yes, we did fund a poor stadium remodel. But it’s not as if this city has been investing a whole lot of coin in sports venues over the years. Sports fans, you’re living in a city that has NEVER, and I’m including old Vaughn Street Ballpark, funded the construction of a new baseball stadium. It has NEVER funded the building of a new football stadium.

EVER. I mean, is there another city in the world of at least moderate size that can say that? Yes, we funded Memorial Coliseum for peanuts, about half a century ago. That’s pretty much it for all of sports. And of course, the collective ego in this city dictates that a lot of people here think we’ve taken the right path in that regard — and the entire rest of the world is wrong. Yeah, sure.

In the last few years, Seattle has spent more than a billion bucks on football and baseball venues and while you heard a ton of grumbling about it at the time, you’re not hearing it now. People up there are ecstatic with what the Mariners and Seahawks and their venues have done for Seattle.

But that’s the difference between a big-league city and a bush-league town. And so don’t come at me asking to save PGE Park for baseball. I’m not down with that. We’ve lost the Beavers before — twice. And maybe being without them again will finally spark an interest in building a new ballpark. If it doesn’t, well, that’s fine by me.

I mean, really — this is Portland. And it’s about time we started holding out for something better than just the constant attempts to turn a cow’s ear into a silk purse.

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I got a note from a Portlander named Sean-Michael Riley a while back. There is an advisory committee taking suggestions about possible ideas for the development of the Rose Quarter and his notion is getting some traction.

Riley has proposed a roller coaster for the area — and I think it’s a pretty good idea. Yeah, I’d still like a ballpark and believe it to be the best possible use of the land, but when I got his note I remembered that Marshall Glickman and I once had a discussion about the same thing.

Marshall, who ramrodded the planning and construction of the Rose Garden for the Trail Blazers, thought a roller coaster was a fun idea to bounce around. Since I’m a coaster-rider from way back (seriously, I’ve been on some of the best in this country) I was excited.

But not just any roller coaster, please. Build the biggest, fastest, highest or longest. Or, since it tends to drizzle here a little, how about the world’s biggest covered one? Or biggest enclosed one?

Riley’s website for his vision is here and I encourage you to take a look. I mean, why not? We don’t have a serious roller coaster anywhere in the Pacific Northwest and I believe it would be a big draw. You could still have an entertainment district but the big coaster could hover above — making it an iconic image for Portland and a destination for tourists.

But maybe such out-of-the-box thinking is way too much for the folks around here?

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I sent you to the website the other day – imaginejumptown.com — but I didn’t have time to comment much. It appears that Larry Miller has gotten his old pals at Nike to buy into the thing with some sort of Nike museum. That sounds great for the area in the Rose Quarter.

But what still bothers me is the stubbornness of sticking to this “bright future for Memorial Coliseum” garbage. I realize the Trail Blazers have sold themselves on the concept that the indoor venue, the coliseum, cut down to seat 5,000 or 6,000  people, is a more viable venue than a Triple-A baseball park for bringing people into the new neighborhood.

I think they’re wrong. Yes, much of the winter the ballpark would be vacant. But that’s the time of year when the Rose Garden will be hopping. You don’t need the ballpark in the winter — you need it in the summer and spring when the Rose Garden (and Memorial Coliseum) is dark all the time.

Does Portland need a 5,000-seat arena? I don’t think so. We already have one at University of Portland’s Chiles Center. I think that size is a little too small for the Winter Hawks, who should be playing in the Rose Garden. And I think by the time you get done updating 50-year-old plumbing, wiring and structure of the old MC, you’re spending so much money you’d have been better off leveling the thing and starting all over.

It’s going to be a money pit. A big, big money pit. And when you’re done, what kind of arena will it be? Probably not much of one. Honestly, if they’re so committed to keeping the outside structure, the box, they ought to gut the inside and install the world’s biggest and fastest indoor roller coaster there. It would have a better chance of being a big attraction than that old junky arena. Seriously.

A wise baseball guy, Bill Cutler, a one-time owner of the Portland Beavers, once sighed as he watched the city of Portland first installing artificial turf on ancient then-Civic Stadium. He turned to me and smiled.

“It’s like putting silk stockings on a hog,” he said. And he was so right. But this is Portland — we just can’t bring ourselves to throw anything away here. We’re constantly recycling.

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Here’s your link to the website. The plan also includes “a bright future for Memorial Coliseum.” That promise right there might be enough to make the project difficult to pull off.

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