The L.A. Lottery!

[Pogues]

With all these teams vying to move to Los Angeles, another team might also make the move...

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borow...to-los-angeles

So will it be Oakland, San Diego, St. Louis, or Cleveland? Or a combination?

[Piney Boy]

Cleveland fans........lol.

[revo]

SportsBusiness Daily reports the NFL's Committee on L.A. Opportunities has recommended the Chargers and Raiders' Carson project over Stan Kroenke's Inglewood site.
It's big news, but also far from final. The committee comprises just 6-of-32 owners, while multiple reports say there's still momentum for Kroenke's project, and partnering the Rams' owner with Spanos. The committee's recommendation is just that. It is not intended to be final say. News should flow out of the Houston meetings all day Tuesday.
Source: SportsBusiness Daily Jan 12 - 1:16 PM

[revo]

The Rams and Chargers have been approved to move to LA beginning next season. Kroenke's Inglewood location won't be ready for a few years, so who knows where they will actually play until then.

[Erik]

Looks like the Rams will play in the Coliseum until 2019.

The Chargers have until 1/15/17 to decide whether they want to move to LA and join the Rams in Inglewood. If they decide not to, the Raiders will then have that option.

In other words, to have both teams there, Spanos and Kroenke have to cut a deal, and they hate each other, so this will be interesting.

[Erik]

One reason why the owners went with the Rams' proposal is that it will not involve divisional realignment. And in fact will make it more coherent, as St. Louis is "West" only in comparison to the East Coast.

If the Chargers and Raiders had both moved to LA, they could not have stayed in the same division; FOX would have cried bloody murder that the AFC had 2 teams in LA and the NFC had none. One would have had to move to the NFC West, presumably with an NFC West team moving the the AFC West (presumably Seattle, since that's where they started out.)

[revo]

Some additional news:

- the Chargers have until March 23 to decide if they're going to move for the 2016 season
- USC has changed it's mind and now will allow both teams to play there until a new stadium is completed
- Giants co-owner Steve Tisch said it's "very unlikely" that the Chargers will play in LA in 2016
- the Raiders' lease is expired, so they could technically play wherever they wanted, although they'll likely be back in Oakland
- if the Chargers and Raiders stay in their home cities, the NFL will contribute $100m to a new stadium

[Erik]

The Raiders were also promised that, if they could make no progress on a new stadium, they would get "special consideration" next time the relocation issue came up.

ETA: I suspect what the league would really like to see is for Mark Davis to sell the team to someone with deeper pockets.

Since the league no longer has LA to use as a threat to cities reluctant to approve new stadiums, the next locales to be dangled as relocation targets are likely to be San Antonio and London.

[revo]

The Raiders were also promised that, if they could make no progress on a new stadium, they would get "special consideration" next time the relocation issue came up.

ETA: I suspect what the league would really like to see is for Mark Davis to sell the team to someone with deeper pockets.

Since the league no longer has LA to use as a threat to cities reluctant to approve new stadiums, the next locales to be dangled as relocation targets are likely to be San Antonio and London.

You don't think a team (like Jacksonville, for example) would want to take a shot at St. Louis or San Diego?

I don't mind the Rams moving back to LA, but the Chargers moving is a travesty. I actually was a Charger fan as a kid in the late 1970s/early 1980s -- I loved Air Coryell and John Jefferson, and even got goggles like JJ --and it stinks that they feel a need to move.

[GwynnInTheHall]

You don't think a team (like Jacksonville, for example) would want to take a shot at St. Louis or San Diego?

I don't mind the Rams moving back to LA, but the Chargers moving is a travesty. I actually was a Charger fan as a kid in the late 1970s/early 1980s -- I loved Air Coryell and John Jefferson, and even got goggles like JJ --and it stinks that they feel a need to move.

They don't feel the need to move, they want the city to pick up almost the entire tab to build a new stadium downtown next to Petco. Spanos is a greedy prick and because of his distaste for Kroenke and preference for the Carson site, i don't see them leaving. Right now the franchise is so mismanaged the fans are pretty apathetic add to that Spanos and his kids pretty much saying suck it to the fans and city and you have a lot of bride rebuilding to do in Chargerland to ever get a new stadium approved now. This all could have been avoided if things had been handled differently years ago when the Padres were making their move downtown.

I'm happy for LA and the Rams.

Now for the #3 pick in the draft...........

[Erik]

You don't think a team (like Jacksonville, for example) would want to take a shot at St. Louis or San Diego?

I don't mind the Rams moving back to LA, but the Chargers moving is a travesty. I actually was a Charger fan as a kid in the late 1970s/early 1980s -- I loved Air Coryell and John Jefferson, and even got goggles like JJ --and it stinks that they feel a need to move.

I think the NFL is dead in San Diego if the Chargers can't work something out there. SoCal can't support 3 teams. There are too many other things to do there. The Rams leaving St. Louis might get more public funds out of St. Louis and Missouri like the (original) Browns leaving Cleveland got more public funds out of Cleveland and Ohio, but who knows. The NFL kept using LA as a carrot because even though it had failed there before, it's too inherently attractive of a market to leave empty forever. The same can't be said for St. Louis.

[Hornsby]

St. Louis has now lost 2 teams, and that's no coincidence...they're not going to get another sniff for a long time. Frankly, they don't deserve one...

[Steve]

The L.A. Lottery would be a good name for a football team.

[johnnya24]

Probably a common topic of conversation in football circles, but since I'm not really part of those circles, I found this article fascinating:

The last thing the NFL in Los Angeles was ever about was the fans

The world’s most lucrative sports league has retired one of their most valuable money-making tools. For 21 years the NFL wielded a giant golden hammer over America’s cities, using the threat their local football team might move to Los Angeles to extract billions for valuable new stadiums.

No league in the US uses leverage quite like the NFL. They didn’t get to $10bn in revenue by being nice. They have played their broadcast rights brilliantly in recently decades, leading terrified networks to spend outlandish amounts of money out of the fear they might lose their tiny platter of games guaranteed to be ratings winners. But the league’s best trick has been getting cities and counties and states to spend taxpayers’ money on stadiums to be used for just eight regular-season games.

An LA without football has always been worth more to the league than a LA with a team. As the nation’s second-largest city sat without a team, every billionaire owner yearning for a new stadium equipped with executive lounges the price of small homes merely had to breathe the words “Los Angeles” to make local politicians crumble.

[Erik]

Yeah, that wasn't much of a secret.

The thing with the NFL is, since there are only 8 home games and the league's popularity is driven by TV, and TV revenue is shared equally among the teams, it doesn't really matter where the teams are located. The team with the a smallest market, Green Bay, has a national fanbase. What location does affect is franchise value. When Kroenke decides to sell the Rams, he'll get at least twice as much for them in LA as he would in STL.