Philadelphia sports franchises are cursed. We haven’t won anything in 23 years in professional sports. For a four-sport town, that’s 92 years without a Championship. The Phillies are the losing-est team in the American history of professional sports. It’s pathetic. Everyone has their favorite curse that somehow is supposed to explain just why we can’t get there.

My favorite is the Curse of Billy Penn (my emphasis):

The Curse of William Penn is an alleged curse, sometimes used to explain the failure of professional sports teams based in Philadelphia… Atop City Hall at Broad and Market Streets in Center City… stands a statue of William Penn, city founder and original proprietor of the then-British-colony of Pennsylvania (meaning “Penn’s Woods”). By tradition—though not by law—no building in the city rose above this statue, until, in March 1987, a glass skyscraper called One Liberty Place opened just three blocks away. One Liberty Place dwarfed City Hall by 397 feet (121m)…

Philadelphia sports teams had just before then enjoyed an enviable run of success: the … Phillies had won the 1980 World Series and the 1983 National League pennant; the … Flyers had won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1974 and 1975, and were a regular presence in the finals (to wit, 1976, 1980, 1985, and 1987); the … Eagles had appeared in Super Bowl XV; and the … 76ers had won the championship in 1983, as well as making the finals in 1977,1980, and 1982. …. Construction on One Liberty Plaza began in 1984, one year after the last championship season in Philadelphia.

Unlike other “curses” that seem to strike particular teams (Boston Red Sox’s Curse of the Bambino, Chicago White Sox’s Curse of the Black Sox…), this evil is said to have struck four professional teams in the same city, and has now drawn “first blood” with an untimely death.

I have a solution.

Move the Billy Penn statue.

It’s simple. Hear me out. The new Comcast Center is presently being built. Besides housing the owners of two of the teams franchises, it will be the largest building in Philadelphia. Construction is still going on. So move the statue. Yes, the statue of Billy Penn. Move it. Top off the Comcast Center in style and break a quarter-century curse.

The logistics are there. The statue weighs 27 tons. And I did a little research on helicopters (when I say little, I mean I searched Google once). The Heavy Lift MI-12s (HOMERs) can apparently lift 36 tons in flight… so it must be possible to move this guy.

And what do we put atop City Hall in Billy Penn’s place? How ’bout that Rocky statue that has a hard time finding a home. What Philadelphian wouldn’t mind throwing tax money towards that?