Welcome to the CMEpalooza Center

As many of the fans of our blog know, Derek and I are big fans of the Philadelphia 76ers (I know, I know – a lot of you don’t follow sports. Keep reading anyway). We both go to a smattering of home games and exchange furious text messages as another season goes down the tubes in the early rounds of the playoffs.

Big 76ers news last week, though, gave us renewed enthusiasm during the doldrums of the offseason. The 76ers ownership, along with a few well-heeled partners, announced plans to build a new downtown arena, scheduled to open in 2031. Of course, with any new stadium comes a new naming rights agreement. You know what I mean. Smoothie King Center. Talking Stick Resort Arena. KFC Yum! Center. Slap a little corporate branding up there for a few million (or hundreds of million) bucks, and voila!

So as various local entities put out the call for creative naming ideas of the proposed new stadium, we figured, “Hey, people love CMEpalooza. People also love a worthy cause. So why not give people a little of both?”

Here is what we are asking you to do:

1. Go to this link and flood their inbox with proposals for CMEpalooza Center (please, please, please, don’t misspell CMEpalooza. Big CME. Little palooza. Put them together. CMEpalooza). Make up a good story. Maybe Derek promised his son that if he got straight As in 9th grade that he’d do something special for him. Maybe my grandmother told me on her deathbed that her dying wish was to see CMEpalooza Center in lights. You get the idea.
2. Donate! Now, let’s be realistic here. At SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, naming rights cost $400 million over 20 years. That seems a bit, I dunno, excessive. So we’re setting the bar a little bit lower. We only want naming rights for 1 year. Let’s peg the cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million. That means we only need 25 of you to donate $1 million each! That’s less than 10 cents a day (Derek, check my math) (note from Derek: Close enough!).

This  is your chance to make an academic wunderkind/ailing octogenarian’s dream come true. Don’t let us down.