Rivercard
Too much good stuff
from profootballtalk.com
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NO PINK TACOS, AFTER ALL
Weeks after spurning an offer from the Pink Taco restaurant chain to slap its name on their new stadium, the Arizona Cardinals have sold the naming rights to their new digs for a whopping $154 million over 20 years to the University of Phoenix.
The deal has an average value of $7.7 million per year.
The "University" has 323,000 students, most of whom get their education over the Internet. It has no football team.
Frankly, we can't understand why the Cardinals turned up their beaks at the interest displayed by Pink Taco, but then jumped into bed with a company at which most college grads turn up their noses. Experts have characterized the school as having a "poor academic reputation," and have observed that the criticism of the University of Phoenix by traditional institutions has been "relentless."
In 2004, the University of Phoenix paid $9.8 million to resolve U.S. Department of Education allegations that the school threatened and intimidated its recruitment staff, pressuring employees to enroll unqualified students and taking steps to cover up the alleged misdeeds.
Apart from the stigma attached in some circles to the "University of Phoenix" moniker, we wonder whether the Cardinals (and the NFL, for that matter) considered the potential impact of the arrangement on the league's ever-tenuous relationship with the NCAA institutions from which pro football harvests talent. The NFL and its franchises usually bend over backwards to keep the "real" colleges happy; now, one of the 32 teams is allowing the scourge of the bricks-and-mortar institutions to gain instant national credibility.
The irony here is that the truly legitimate and credible business, Pink Taco, was rejected without negotiation presumably because the Cardinals deemed the name of the company to be undesirable. So instead the Cardinals hopped into bed with a business bearing a more vanilla moniker -- but that could do far more harm to the broader interests of the league than the "Pink Taco" label ever could.
-------------------------------
NO PINK TACOS, AFTER ALL
Weeks after spurning an offer from the Pink Taco restaurant chain to slap its name on their new stadium, the Arizona Cardinals have sold the naming rights to their new digs for a whopping $154 million over 20 years to the University of Phoenix.
The deal has an average value of $7.7 million per year.
The "University" has 323,000 students, most of whom get their education over the Internet. It has no football team.
Frankly, we can't understand why the Cardinals turned up their beaks at the interest displayed by Pink Taco, but then jumped into bed with a company at which most college grads turn up their noses. Experts have characterized the school as having a "poor academic reputation," and have observed that the criticism of the University of Phoenix by traditional institutions has been "relentless."
In 2004, the University of Phoenix paid $9.8 million to resolve U.S. Department of Education allegations that the school threatened and intimidated its recruitment staff, pressuring employees to enroll unqualified students and taking steps to cover up the alleged misdeeds.
Apart from the stigma attached in some circles to the "University of Phoenix" moniker, we wonder whether the Cardinals (and the NFL, for that matter) considered the potential impact of the arrangement on the league's ever-tenuous relationship with the NCAA institutions from which pro football harvests talent. The NFL and its franchises usually bend over backwards to keep the "real" colleges happy; now, one of the 32 teams is allowing the scourge of the bricks-and-mortar institutions to gain instant national credibility.
The irony here is that the truly legitimate and credible business, Pink Taco, was rejected without negotiation presumably because the Cardinals deemed the name of the company to be undesirable. So instead the Cardinals hopped into bed with a business bearing a more vanilla moniker -- but that could do far more harm to the broader interests of the league than the "Pink Taco" label ever could.
