NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay

[Walk-Off]

21 minutes ago, LMU said:

San Manuel: where you can try to win some of it back on the way home before your spouse finds out.

That is a good quip.

 

On a serious note, I wonder if San Manuel's sponsorship of the Las Vegas Raiders is a byproduct of either a gentlemen's agreement among casino operators in the Las Vegas area to avoid sponsoring the team or a collective fear among Las Vegas casino executives that sales of tickets to Las Vegas Raiders home games will take too much money away from gambling and other activities at local casinos.

[dfwabel]

15 minutes ago, Walk-Off said:

That is a good quip.

 

On a serious note, I wonder if San Manuel's sponsorship of the Las Vegas Raiders is a byproduct of either a gentlemen's agreement among casino operators in the Las Vegas area to avoid sponsoring the team or a collective fear among Las Vegas casino executives that sales of tickets to Las Vegas Raiders home games will take too much money away from gambling and other activities at local casinos.

Caesars signed up as an the stadium's first "Founding Partner" last November, months before Caesars became the NFL's first casino partner.  Caesars also has a partnership with the Ravens

 

While also a "Founding Partner", San Miguel is just the "Official California Casino".

[Walk-Off]

10 minutes ago, dfwabel said:

Caesars signed up as an the stadium's first "Founding Partner" last November, months before Caesars became the NFL's first casino partner.  Caesars also has a partnership with the Ravens

 

While also a "Founding Partner", San Miguel is just the "Official California Casino".

Thanks for the clarification ... and for enlightening me on the matter.

[Gothamite]

2 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

All along, I have perceived the Bolts' move to the L.A. market to be first and foremost an effort by the Spanos family, with the possible blessings of Roger Goodell and the owners of most of the other teams in the NFL, to prevent the Raiders from coming back to the L.A. area. 

 

That’s some serious tinfoil territory.  

 

Spanos didn’t move to LA to keep the Raiders out.  You seem to have forgotten that the Chargers’ original plan was to move to Carson and share a stadium with... the Raiders.

 

Your theory is ludicrous on its face, as it would mean that Spanos has been playing an elaborate Sherlock Holmesian four-dimensional-chess con all along. This guy. 

 

 

Uh, uh. Nope.  

[GDAWG]

5 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

That’s some serious tinfoil territory.  

 

Spanos didn’t move to LA to keep the Raiders out.  You seem to have forgotten that the Chargers’ original plan was to move to Carson and share a stadium with... the Raiders.

 

Your theory is ludicrous on its face, as it would mean that Spanos has been playing an elaborate Sherlock Holmesian four-dimensional-chess con all along. This guy. 

 

 

Uh, uh. Nope.  

 

Spanos:

 

 

[Walk-Off]

8 hours ago, Gothamite said:

Spanos didn’t move to LA to keep the Raiders out.  You seem to have forgotten that the Chargers’ original plan was to move to Carson and share a stadium with... the Raiders.

 

Your theory is ludicrous on its face, unless you’re suggesting that the Chargers created and pushed for and torched their own market in service to a stadium proposal just so it would fail and damage the Raiders?  Which would mean that Spanos has been playing an elaborate Sherlock Holmesian four-dimensional-chess con all along. This guy. 

 

 

Uh, uh. Nope.  

I remember the foolhardy attempt by the Chargers and the Raiders to move together into a stadium in Carson quite well.  My speculation was specifically regarding why the Spanos family still had the nerve to shove the Chargers into the Los Angeles market after the NFL shot down the Carson proposal and okayed Kroenke's grand plan in Inglewood.

 

I agree that Dean Spanos is a numbskull; a Chargers team in an L.A. market shared with the Raiders would have been even deader meat than the Bolts have been with the Rams as crosstown competition (and I say that as someone who loathes the Raiders and especially the culture of the Raiders' fanbase).  Furthering the boneheadedness is that the Chargers were the NFL's closest team to the Los Angeles Basin for twenty-one seasons, yet Spanos, his kin, and their minions ignored seemingly every opportunity imaginable to build a bonafide fanbase for the Chargers in the Greater Los Angeles region during that time.

 

With that said, I happen to think that Spanos is also a greedy coward -- someone too petty and too impatient to be content to keep his team in the San Diego area while the Rams and his franchise's most hated rival return to the far larger market to the immediate north.  It seems to me that he was willing to accept a rebirth of the Los Angeles Raiders if the Chargers were also in the L.A. market (and especially at the same stadium), but not if the Raiders either were the L.A. area's only NFL franchise or were sharing that market with any other NFL team.  Does that make any sense?

[B-Rich]

13 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

I used to work alongside a man who had wished that the NFL would hold at least one Super Bowl at his favorite college football team's home stadium, which happens to be one of the largest stadia in the college game in terms of seating capacity, even though (a) this particular university and its football stadium are in a small, relatively poor city that is almost 200 miles away and in a separate television market from the closest NFL team and (b) the stadium is an outdoor venue in a climate whose winters have relatively few out-and-out cold days, but are nonetheless quite cooler than winters in at least the majority of the areas where the NFL has had open-air Super Bowls.  If I ever have the chance to have a long conversation with him about football again, a counterpoint that I definitely would want to give to him is that the NFL never dared to grant a Super Bowl to any stadium in the Los Angeles area during the 21 years between the Rams' and Raiders' departure and the Rams' return.

 

I am assuming you and he are aware that the NFL has ALWAYS ONLY given Super Bowls to markets which already host NFL teams, which is why Los Angeles did not host one in those 21 years. 

 

 

[Red Comet]

>Be the San Diego Chargers

>Move to LA because bigger market, better stadium and blocking the Raiders from moving there

>Raiders move to Las Vegas

>Get screwed out of your own market by a team that is 3 hours away

 

If they didn't deserve every bit of this, I'd feel bad for them.

[Walk-Off]

30 minutes ago, B-Rich said:

 

I am assuming you and he are aware that the NFL has ALWAYS ONLY given Super Bowls to markets which already host NFL teams, which is why Los Angeles did not host one in those 21 years. 

 

 

Oh, I have been definitely aware of that policy ... or at least have noticed a pattern of each Super Bowl being played only in an area that had at least one NFL team (or an AFL team, in the case of the Miami-hosted second and third editions of the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game") when that particular game took place.  However, I am not sure if this co-worker of mine had bothered to recognize that same pattern with Super Bowl host regions, let alone known of an explicit policy confining Super Bowls to markets with NFL teams.  If he knew that such a rule existed, then I am sure that he was wishing that the NFL would repeal that mandate and become willing to stage Super Bowls at college football stadia in places without NFL franchises.

[Gothamite]

So he’s uninformed and misguided.   

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

18 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

A sizable portion of greater LA and the IE get on the 15 every weekend and hoof it up to Vegas.

 

They walk to Las Vegas?

[tp49]

2 hours ago, Gothamite said:

So he’s uninformed and misguided.   

He is a Tennessee fan so it's par for their course. 

[DustDevil61]

14 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

I agree that Dean Spanos is a numbskull; a Chargers team in an L.A. market shared with the Raiders would have been even deader meat than the Bolts have been with the Rams as crosstown competition (and I say that as someone who loathes the Raiders and especially the culture of the Raiders' fanbase).  Furthering the boneheadedness is that the Chargers were the NFL's closest team to the Los Angeles Basin for twenty-one seasons, yet Spanos, his kin, and their minions ignored seemingly every opportunity imaginable to build a bonafide fanbase for the Chargers in the Greater Los Angeles region during that time.

There are two instances where the Chargers really botched their move.

 

The first was not getting to Los Angeles when the getting was good. I don’t think that many people—San Diegans included— would think that a Chargers LA move in 2007 would’ve been anywhere near as boneheaded as it was in 2017. In 2007, the then-St. Louis Rams hadn’t even started flirting with the idea of returning to LA, as Georgia Frontiere was still alive and owned the team. That would have left the Chargers as Southern California’s sole NFL team, effectively minimizing the alienation in San Diego while staking a claim in Los Angeles. Even if the Rams or Raiders had returned about a decade later, the Chargers would have had either team beat by a decade. (Of course, we may have ended up with the San Diego Rams or Raiders, but the point still stands.)

 

The second is waiting a whole year after the Rams returned. The Chargers may have been able to have a better footing had they decided to move in right on the heels of the Rams, but waiting until the last second—a whole year after the Rams had settled in—only exacerbated the Chargers’ irrelevancy.
 

 

[Gothamite]

14 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

I remember the foolhardy attempt by the Chargers and the Raiders to move together into a stadium in Carson quite well.  My speculation was specifically regarding why the Spanos family still had the nerve to shove the Chargers into the Los Angeles market after the NFL shot down the Carson proposal and okayed Kroenke's grand plan in Inglewood.

 

 

The nerve?  He was desperate, grasping at straws.  Spanos had so poisoned his own market that he had to either move or sell the team.

 

14 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

It seems to me that he was willing to accept a rebirth of the Los Angeles Raiders if the Chargers were also in the L.A. market (and especially at the same stadium), but not if the Raiders either were the L.A. area's only NFL franchise or were sharing that market with any other NFL team.  Does that make any sense?

 

I think it was more about the Chargers needing to be in Los Angeles and pathetically latching on to someone, anyone, who could actually build a stadium.  If that was the Raiders, it would be the Raiders.  If the Jets had tried to move, Spanos would have pulled his puppy-dog routine on them as well.

 

 

As it turns out, only Kroenke could put a plan together.  So Spanos gets to humiliate himself in Stan's shadow now.  All because he botched San Diego.

[TBGKon]

Out of curiosity, is there a reason as to why the Chargers were given the first right of refusal to negotiate with the Rams to move to LA, with the Raiders having to await that decision?

[leopard88]

17 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

That would be the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Neyland Stadium.

 

That was my guess.

[LMU]

6 minutes ago, AstroBull21 said:

Out of curiosity, is there a reason as to why the Chargers were given the first right of refusal to negotiate with the Rams to move to LA, with the Raiders having to await that decision?

Because the Spani are such team players and so likeable amongst the the ownership club.

[Wings]

Especially if Mark Davis was the other choice. 

[Gothamite]

Don’t forget that the NFL also wanted to blunt Kroenke's windfall from the market.  The idea was that by making him share LA, the Rams wouldn’t see such a massive increase in either franchise value or income.  

 

So they saddled him with the Chargers.  Oops. 

[bosrs1]

2 hours ago, AstroBull21 said:

Out of curiosity, is there a reason as to why the Chargers were given the first right of refusal to negotiate with the Rams to move to LA, with the Raiders having to await that decision?

 

Probably because Vegas was in the advanced stages at that point and the Raiders has long exhausted all options in Oakland. Spanos hadn’t really done anything in SD and had no other prospects if SD didn’t materialize.