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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It’s time for a new name.

Never liked the name, anyway. New stadiums are one thing, but I’m not much a fan of selling naming rights to stadiums that have already been in existence for like a century. It was Multnomah Stadium for decades and then the city bought it and turned it into the drab old, “Civic Stadium.”

So for a few bucks it’s got a new name. And what do we have to look forward to now? Burgerville Stadium? Do you want fry sauce with that?

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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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No.

I’m taking some heat from a few long-time friends that I’m not in the middle of the fight to keep PGE Park as a combination baseball/football/soccer venue. But really, it’s not worth fighting for.

It’s never been a ballpark. It’s been a stadium. And I’m just not going to settle for a stadium any longer. If we have to lose baseball yet another time, in order to get a real ballpark built, I’m all for it.

The University of Oregon, for $21 million, has built PK Park, a gem of a ballpark — a facility that may be the best ballpark anywhere between Seattle and San Francisco. And Portland, in like 100 years, can’t build a new ballpark? Ridiculous.

And I sit back and watch politicians criticize Randy Leonard and Sam Adams for what they’re doing with PGE Park, well — at least it’s SOMETHING. I mean, if you’re against the current plan for PGE Park, what exactly is your plan for professional sports in Portland? That’s what I thought — you really don’t care. You have no plan.

Am I big soccer fan? Obviously not. But for me, it is serving a purpose. It’s forcing this city to face up to its sports future. Will we ever build that ballpark, that gem, here? Maybe not. Probably not. At least not in my lifetime.

But at least we’re no longer fooling ourselves into thinking PGE Park is a real ballpark. It’s a stadium. And if you don’t know the difference, well, that’s maybe why we’re in the fix we’re in.

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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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All I really know for sure is that the landlord apparently changed the locks on all the doors because the lounge was behind in its rent payments. This was the site of “Talkin’ Ball” on Comcast Sportsnet and we had to move the last show over to the Blazers’ studio in the Rose Garden, which is a great locale.

I’m not sure where we’re going to be doing future shows but rest assured we will be continuing that series, although there are no shows scheduled after the next two games.

I would ask that you keep your comments civil in regard to The Agency.  This was NOT a national chain. A lot of very nice Portlanders spent a good deal of money to try bring this town a place they thought was needed. A lot of very nice people worked there, too.

My sympathies and best wishes go out to them.

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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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He was the mostly absent guy who owned the Portland Beavers and Timbers for a while prior to selling them to Merritt Paulson. My understanding is that he made a lot of money when he flipped the franchise to Paulson.

But it didn’t seem to do him much good. His financial problems have put a LOT of people out of work at TGI Friday’s restaurants all over Oregon and Southwest Washington.  (Thanks to Clueless Vince for the tip!)

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I’d never thought much about the leverage that college students might have with athletic departments all over the country.

Until I found BCSbusters.com.

If you’re in college, or wish you were, you really need to go to that site. It’s maintained by a group of college kids in Portland (who attend a college that doesn’t even have football!) who are fed up. And they’ve found a little bit of leverage where I think they might have a valid way of impacting that system.

Every year, students pour millions into college athletic departments with student fees. In many cases, those athletic departments — and football programs — would be in some serious financial trouble without that contribution.

But what if students decided to rebel and withhold that money until the whole BCS thing is fixed? Or better yet, abolished? I’m not sure, but I can tell you right now that it would frighten the daylights out of some colleges to even hear of a student senate contemplating legislation that would cut off funds.

And why shouldn’t students get involved? Perhaps it’s the only thing that would help. I’m so sick of this stinky stuff — a bunch of university presidents bowing down to the bowl bigwigs in a corrupt system that really makes no sense in the modern world.

And it’s so ridiculously unnecessary. Previously I’ve outlined my plan to use almost all the existing bowl games to host national playoff games, suddenly turning obscure bowls into first-round playoff matchups that could feature some of the top teams in the country.

And talk about television revenue! It would make March Madness look like chicken feed. But oh yeah — there are all these reasons that we can’t do it. Of course, none of those apply to every other level of NCAA and NAIA football, where playoffs already exist.

Anyway, these kids at BCSbusters.com have it figured out. I’d love to see people all over the country involved in this — just to make university administrations uneasy, if nothing else. Please kids, go there, register for their newsletter and forums, send the link to your friends and get involved.

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KGW.com is teasing a story for the news at noon that he’s “suspending” efforts to relocate the Beavers in Beaverton. It wouldn’t be surprising. There’s simply no time to wait for them to have an election.

Beaverton residents can now go back and rest comfortably, knowing they will now continue to be totally irrelevant. Take that five bucks a month it would have cost and buy a happy meal.

UPDATE: The story is here. Paulson informed the mayor with a letter that read:

“It is with sadness that I am writing to inform you of my decision to suspend planning and negotiations with the city on a new stadium. I’ve made this decision for practical, not political reasons. … The practical consideration is that after more than three months of effort, there is no stadium location under city control and the City’s timeframe for making a firm financial commitment is months off. This makes it impossible to meet the timelines required to start groundbreaking in time to play the 2011 season at a new stadium.”

Your turn Gresham. Or Oregon City. Or West Linn. Or Lake Oswego. Or Vancouver. Or Linnton.

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