At a time when the Panthers are for sale and the local chicken littles are eagerly anticipating/volunteering to be extorted by a new NFL owner, they already have another 13 years worth of dates for Bank of America Stadium.
The ACC just announced that they had extended their contract to play the conference’s football championship games in Bank of America Stadium until 2030.
They were already playing the next three years there, so they tacked 10 years onto the existing deal.
The game has also been played in Jacksonville and Tampa, but has been in Charlotte seven of the last eight years, with the only exception in 2016 when the state’s since-revoked HB2 policy caused the conference to pull the game at the last minute and play it in Orlando.
The Panthers agreed to a “hard-tether” through 2019 with the city of Charlotte in exchange for $87.5 million for renovations, but the reality is the stadium is not in such condition that it needs to be replaced anytime soon.
That won’t keep a new owner from trying to squeeze the locals for more money, of course, and the track record of Charlotte’s city government is that it will hand the guy a blank check before he even asks for one.