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Portland Timbers to Make Major Announcement at 3 pm; Four Hours To Speculate Wildly

By William Conwell
USA TODAY Sports

Merritt Paulson will be making a "major announcement" at 3:00 pm  today and there are very few clues out there as to what it might be. Notably absent from the team's media advisory are Mike Golub and Gavin Wilkinson, instead listing only Paulson and "invited guests".

In Major League Soccer, the history of the major announcement is a long and colorful one. Previous major announcements have included sponsorships, television deals, and player signings (or the slightly less glamorous version: player re-signings). Some teams have even made major announcements for coaching clinics.

Recently, however, the major announcement has been suitably major. The signings of Michael Bradley and Jermaine Defoe, Orlando City's bid to join MLS, and David Beckham's decision to exercise his option to own a team are the three most recent major announcements from around the league and all will have huge impacts on the sporting landscape in MLS.

So, with little to go on, here is a little bit of wild speculation on just what we might hear from Merritt Paulson today, ranging from the vaguely plausible to the obviously unlikely.

  1. The Timbers, fed up with the debacle surrounding partnering with Sacramento Republic FC, have decided to start their own USL Pro team called Portland Timbers B which will start play in 2015. The first signing? Player-coach Mikael Silvestre.
  2. Tired of journalists grumbling about how cold it is standing around on the sidelines of practice, the Timbers have installed a coffee vending machine in the press room, but only at the practice facility so it will not see any use until April.
  3. The Timbers have put in place a plan to install terraced seating in the North End at Jeld-Wen next year and Paulson will be showing off some pretty renders of how the project will look when completed..
  4. BEES!
  5. Paulson will declare war on PSU Football at the press conference, challenging David Hersh to an arm-wrestling match for control over the lines painted at Jeld-Wen.
  6. A bronze statue of John Spencer and Kris Boyd high-fiving, commissioned in early 2012, was recently delivered to the stadium. Does anybody want it?

As you can see, I ran out of plausible very quickly, so feel free to speculate away in the comments below.

Update: Paulson has been busy on twitter ruling things out. Unfortunately he has not yet ruled out "BEES!"

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