“It ain’t that easy – and it’s not just you change owners and snap your fingers and get it. The opportunity was missed, the chance was seven to 10 years ago when Bruce Allen was here; maybe they were waiting for a better deal, or were too cheap to get out of the FedEx lease, but they missed the window to make it a simpler transaction.”
Those were Danny Rouhier’s thoughts from Wednesday’s Grant & Danny show, his words on how he thinks the Commanders missed the boat on getting a new stadium years ago, and how those expecting a new one right away under Josh Harris will be sorely mistaken.
DC City Councilor Kenyan McDuffie called in to BMitch & Finlay on Wednesday, the same day he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about being pro-RFK site as the next Commanders Stadium home, and Grant & Danny wanted to talk to him as well; phone issues prevented that, but in the moment, Grant laid out his thoughts about how the RFK problem is a two-faceted one, the first much more complicated than the second.
“There are two things that complicate this: first, it’s how you get the land back, because DC and the team can strike a deal with what to do with the land that, federally, isn’t going to happen,” Grant said. “But to your point, there is so much divisiveness about whether people wanted it, which is why I wanted to talk to Mr. McDuffie, to see if there’s momentum, and if it’s actually feasible and doable. Was it anti-Dan venom? I know at one point it was anti-name venom, which is gone, and Dan’s gone now too – so is everyone on board now, or is it actually they don’t want it?”
“The chairman of the City Council has adamantly said he doesn’t want a stadium there; maybe he gets some other compromises elsewhere and we get one, but it’s not this unanimous, slam-dunk thing now that Dan is gone,” Danny replied.
Neighbors aside, what is the argument for those in power to not build the stadium there?
“If this is a smaller stadium with a retractable roof that will have events close to 200 days a year and there will be things built around it – how do you see what happened at Capital One Arena or the Navy Yard, and say you have no interest in that or it’s not worth discussing?” Grant asked.
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“The answer to that is we don’t need a stadium there, we can just develop it without a stadium,” Danny said. “The problem is they’re not trying to get the land back, because no one knows what they want to do with it, and it’s a ridiculous, never-starting process. They can say they want to build a destination in that part of town and keep more green space, as opposed to something that’s not going to get used as much.”
For that part, Danny noted how AT&T Stadium currently has four non-Cowboys games listed on their event schedule over the next seven months, which may be a function of that stadium’s size, but still also illustrates how you might not get enough dates to economically justify it.
Traffic is also an issue, so the money could be used for other economic development that will be more constant than the eight to 12 Commanders games per year – but to Grant, there’s not much else you can do with that land based on what McDuffie wrote in his op-ed.
“There’s a really small runway to land the plane of what you want to do with that area – one is a stadium, the other is the fields for youth sports,” Grant said. “The point of McDuffie’s story is that unless you want one of those things, you can’t do it until at least 2040.”
Grant, as he even admits, wants the stadium in DC for the same reasons he wanted Nationals Park in the District, even if he knows “you can’t have Navy Yard 2.0 around that stadium” – but as Danny said, “if the stadium is in DC, that’s the site, and the most green space you have in DC is already right there along the Anacostia River anyway.
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