We (and by “we” I mean “the NFL”) should build a giant arena somewhere in the desert outside Vegas, or maybe southern California somewhere, and just make it the permanent home of the Super Bowl. The league can build its little Super Bowl village with its NFL Experience stuff, and keep it up all year, a whole little town dedicated to the majesty of football. All of this crap currently clogging Broadway could have a permanent, lucrative home! It would be a football theme park for most of the year, and then for one week it would be a mecca of stupid, bloated NFL excess. The arena would be state-of-the-art, indoors and climate-controlled, with a zillion luxury boxes and maybe a couple of normal seats for “regular” “fans.” Every single aspect of the entire experience could be controlled as minutely as Disney’s imagineers control Disneyland. Everyone wins, besides the people attending the game and various players with catastrophic head trauma.

This is also how to fix the Olympics.

Sochi is already a disaster. The games may go off largely without incident, but beautiful (and supposedly protected) natural areas have been destroyed, critics have been silenced, and people have been uprooted. The IOC never should’ve awarded Sochi the games. All of these problems — the corruption, graft, waste, environmental destruction, repressive government actions, the threat of terrorism and the draconian security response to that threat — all of them could’ve been predicted, when Sochi was selected, by, I don’t know, any actual informed observer of Russia under Vladimir Putin.

But rather than relying on informed observers, the IOC relies on fancy presentations and sincere-sounding guarantees from bid committees. Sochi is hosting because the IOC is easily flattered, and Putin is not above cheap flattery. As contemporary news reports explained, Putin flew to the IOC meeting in Guatemala and charmed the members of the committee by speaking English — “he never speaks English,” French IOC member Jean-Claude Killy gushed. According to one report, a notorious heroin kingpin was instrumental in securing the votes of “some Asian countries” (that report is from ABC’s Brian Ross, so, grain of salt). Thus, a summer resort town next door to one of the most unstable regions in Eastern Europe won out over South Korea and Austria.

Everyone already assumes the Olympics selection process is corrupt. Sometimes the host nations are ruled by tyrants. All the time, the host cities find themselves spending much more money than they thought they would. The inevitably poor residents of whatever “blighted” neighborhood the Olympic venues are to be built in are inevitably uprooted. After the games, most of the permanent structures spend a couple of decades slowly collapsing. (Have you been out to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium recently?)

It makes absolutely no sense to build brand-new Olympic sporting venues in completely different places every four years. Let’s just pick two host countries, have them build permanent venues, and let them host all the Olympics. Have the winter games in a county that already has the facilities and infrastructure, like Japan. The summer games could happen in Greece, but Australia might be a safer choice. Permanent Olympic hosts may seem like a proposal that robs poorer countries of the opportunity to host the games, but the Olympics are already biased in favor of rich, northern hemisphere nations in a million ways, and hosting them is more of a burden than a honor.

It is time for sports to stop victimizing our cities. If holding big events in the same place every time is good enough for tennis and golf it’s good enough for American football and the Olympics. Please call your congressperson or member of Parliament or whatever you have today.

*You may have heard that by googling “Super Bowl” or “what time is the Super Bowl” or “When is the Super Bowl” or “What time will Superbowl kickoff” or “what time Super Bowl kick off” or “super bowl commercials” or “Super Bowl Ads,” or any number of other possible phrases.