How bad is the economy? This bad.

What once was commonplace but then seemed unthinkable for a team that has been among the NFL’s most successful has come to pass again.

The Chargers fell about 7,000 tickets short of selling enough non-premium seats to Sunday’s home opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars, and so the game will be blacked out on local television.

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The Chargers said recently that more than 10,000 tickets remain for their next home game, Oct. 3 against the Arizona Cardinals.

The Chargers have won the third-most regular-season games in the NFL since 2004, the biggest reason for their stretch without a blackout.

Team President Dean Spanos recently attributed the difficulty selling tickets to the poor economy and perhaps fans’ lingering disappointment over the team’s most recent playoff loss.

Unemployment in San Diego is “down” to 10.6%.

So yeah, things are tough all over. Kind of.

The Detroit Lions have avoided a local television blackout of their home opener against Philadelphia.

The Lions announced Friday they had sold enough tickets to ensure Sunday’s game will air live in the Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw-Flint and Toledo, Ohio, markets.

The NFL had given the team a 24-hour extension until 1 p.m. ET Friday.

Lions president Tom Lewand said the Eagles returned a few hundred tickets from their allotment. Those tickets are available to the public, but that won’t affect the broadcast.

Detroit unemployment: 15.2%

What makes this hilarious (and it is) is that the Chargers are trying to get a new stadium and they would like for the city to pay for most of  it because we really need to spend $400 million dollars on a structure that seats 62,000 people eight to  nine times a year and, you know, we can probably do without all that extraneous stuff we always upon which we waste our rainy day money:

San Diego residents could see a combined $30 million in additional reductions to public safety, libraries and parks under the latest round of budget cuts being proposed.

Mayor Jerry Sanders has asked every city department to identify a total $76.7 million in cuts by next month as he begins deliberations on how to close a $72 million deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

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The police department has been asked to cut the most dollars — $15.9 million — of any department. That’s the equivalent of laying off the 251 workers who serve as captains, lieutenants, dispatchers and entry-level officers. The department has a $385 million operating budget

Fire and rescue will have to cut $7.2 million from its budget.

Libraries, the City Attorney’s Office and the department that deals with road repairs round out the five areas that will have to make the biggest cuts.

Jay Goldstone, the city’s chief operating officer, said he understands the difficulty departments will have in finding areas to cut because this will be the fourth consecutive year he’s asked them for reductions. He said the proposed cuts may include laying off police officers or expanding the city’s brownout policy in which up to eight fire engines are idled each day to save money.

“Typically, you ask for a lot more than you need because departments are going to give you options and alternatives,” Goldstone said. “While they will rank them in priority order, they may not be the mayor’s priority so you want some ability to not take everything.”

The city slashed $179 million from its budget last fall. That round of cuts included layoffs in the police department and the implementation of brownouts.

The Chargers, it is worth noting, are owned by billionaire Alex G Spanos.