Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world behind only Elon Musk, has stated that he is willing to purchase the Seattle Seahawks from the estate of Paul Allen for $5 billion — with a "b."
Bezos, of course, owns both Amazon.com and the left-leaning — to put it mildly — Washington Post (which he purchased in 2013 for a quarter of a billion dollars), and is now looking to expand his horizons so to speak.
Ever since Allen died in 2018, there have been widespread rumors that his heirs might sell the team — and those rumors are hotter than ever now.
With his longstanding ties to the Pacific Northwest, it is highly unlikely that Bezos would move the club — making him a more likely candidate than ever that he would be the one who purchases it.
And this move would not get in the way of the NFL's future expansion plans — which are now more likely than ever to happen because a federal judge in California just hit the league with a $4.7 billion fine for violating antitrust laws related to its sale of NFL Sunday Ticket to out-of-market cities; e.g., if any Eagles fans wanted to watch Eagles games if they lived in, say, San Francisco.
Adding two — or even four — new teams would be a very quick way for the NFL to recoup what it has lost in this judicial ukase, making expansion all the more likely.
In our politically divided nation, it will be interesting indeed the next time the Seahawks (if Bezos indeed buys them) and the Broncos play each other (in 2026) — in that Bezos pays every single one of his workers at least $15 an hour while Rob Walton, the owner of the Broncos, pays his workers $7.25 an hour in every state where he can legally get away with it — and then blithely advises his "associates" to apply for welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid.
And who knows? If expansion does occur, it could lead to a realignment in which Dallas, the most culturally conservative city that has an NFL team, goes into the same division as San Francisco and Seattle, the two most culturally liberal cities that have NFL teams. Then watch the sparks fly!
In that case, the Ravens can be moved to the NFC East, making that division a "Team Bus Division" because each team would get to travel by bus whenever they play on the road against any of their division rivals (and finally result in Baltimore being in an Eastern Division for the first time since the Colts were in the AFC East from 1970 through 1983). What divisions other teams go into depends on which cities get expansion teams.
If Donald Trump wins the November election and the Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress, you could see the NFL get an antitrust exemption, as baseball has had since 1922 (the 67th Congress, which served in 1921 and 1922, was the last time the Republicans had a three-fifths majority in the Senate).
And to any pro football fan, regardless of personal political leanings, such a thing would propel the NFL forward into a true golden age, with growth in the number of teams, the number of games, and the number of teams making the playoffs.
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