A real "playing field"

Ashley-Madison founder Noel Biderman sent a letter to the CEO at New Meadowlands -- obtained by TMZ -- declaring, "At this stage, we are prepared to make a preliminary offer ... of $25,000,000 for the Naming Rights for a five-year term." He adds, if the stadium gets better offers, "We would be pleased to match any such superior offer." The offer (which works out to $5 million a year) is pretty big, but it's still below the average for other stadium sponsorships -- Bank of America pays $7 million a year to sponsor the Carolina Panthers stadium and FedEx drops $7.6 a year on the Redskins stadium in D.C.

So, let's see if the gang at New Meadowlands is willing to sell naming rights to a web site that promotes infidelity. That's the real test, isn't it? To see if a professional sports franchise is honest enough to take money from a company that may not align itself with conventional thinking. Would they sell the naming rights to a company for less if that company promoted something that was in the mainstream, like cigarettes, big banking or big oil? Probably, but would that make the deal any more palatable? Probably not.

You see, sports likes to distance itself from certain things, like alcohol, even though they promote alcoholic beverages at every commercial break, and use the eraser phrase "Please drink responsibly." That makes it good, right? Suppose they decided to call it "Jesus Christ Memorial Stadium?" Would that offend anyone? Sure it would, but they wouldn't do that either.

On the home page of Ashley Madison's web site, they use the phrase "Life is short. Have an affair" as a way to sell their site to prospective customers. They say they are "The world's premier discreet dating service with over 6,190,000 members." For those of you who may not know, the word discreet, when used in that context, means that their users don't want anyone to know what they're doing - like their husbands or wives.

In fact, they gurarantee that you'll have an affair within 3 months if you sign up for the membership. If you don't, they will refund the $249 membership fee. Business must be booming, because they're offering millions to the Meadowlands stadium to put their name on the front of the building.

Of course, the Meadowlands people won't sell the naming rights to a company like Ashley Madison. They'd have a lot of questions to answer, and they don't like answering questions. After all, the porn industry makes about $10 billion a year, yet nobody would ever admit to watching a pornographic movie. People have affairs, yet none of them would ever tell anyone where they found somebody to hook up with.

That would be way too honest and above-board for anybody associated with professional sports to do. The same people who willingly participate in legalized ticket scalping, sports betting and promoting alcohol.

Why stop there?