NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay

[Discrim]

Those dastardly stadiums, just sneaking up on you like that 

[The_Admiral]

It's kind of cool when you cross the Mississippi into Missouri and one of the first things you see is Busch Stadium telling you how many times the Cardinals have won the pennant or World Series. The problem is that after that, you're in St. Louis.

[IceCap]

10 hours ago, the admiral said:

It's kind of cool when you cross the Mississippi into Missouri and one of the first things you see is Busch Stadium telling you how many times the Cardinals have won the pennant or World Series. The problem is that after that, you're in St. Louis.

And you have to eat their wrong bagels and disgusting pizza.

[Red Comet]

Also, I wouldn’t feed their barbecue to dogs. And that leaves, what, toasted ravioli? I can get that at a supermarket here and I don’t have to risk getting shot to get that. 

[Gothamite]

On 8/2/2021 at 2:35 PM, gosioux76 said:

 

Just guessing here, but I'd presume that current size matters less than momentum and long-term prospectus. There are few cities in America right now growing as fast as Austin.

 

Yes, but as Arizona and Florida have shown us, rapidly-growing areas aren’t always good places to put a team.  
 

The transplants bring their own existing loyalties, and it can take a generation for those to shift to the home team.  If they ever do. 

[Camden Crazy]

On 10/5/2021 at 9:12 AM, leopard88 said:

 

York County has a lot of Maryland transplants and thus of lot of Ravens fans.  As far as I know there, are also still a few WFT stragglers left from the days when they held training camp in Carlisle.  Otherwise, Central PA is generally Steelers country.

 

As for baseball, I think it is still more Orioles territory than Pirates and Phillies, partly because of the transplants and partly because of the years of Orioles success in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The Orioles had an official team store in York up until a few years ago.  

[LMU]

San Diego enters the chat.

 

 

[Sec19Row53]

On 1/25/2022 at 11:46 PM, LMU said:

San Diego enters the chat.

 

 

I thought that missed the statute of limitations. 

[Walk-Off]

I can understand a San Diegan suing, at minimum, the Spanos family and the NFL over the Chargers' move, but how and why would the government of the City of San Diego be also a defendant in such a case?

 

Also, I believe that there is still an ongoing lawsuit over the Rams' departure from St. Louis, and I would not be surprised if at least one person or group in Oakland is suing over the Raiders leaving that town for the second time in that franchise's history.  Hmmm ... might all of these relocations end up fueling a class-action case against the NFL and its teams?

[Ridleylash]

1 hour ago, Walk-Off said:

I can understand a San Diegan suing, at minimum, the Spanos family and the NFL over the Chargers' move, but how and why would the government of the City of San Diego be also a defendant in such a case?

 

Also, I believe that there is still an ongoing lawsuit over the Rams' departure from St. Louis, and I would not be surprised if at least one person or group in Oakland is suing over the Raiders leaving that town for the second time in that franchise's history.  Hmmm ... might all of these relocations end up fueling a class-action case against the NFL and its teams?

The Rams lawsuit was settled for $790m back in November, but San Diego being emboldened by that lawsuit's success isn't surprising, given the amount of shady shenanigans on the league's part that led the Chargers to going to LA.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

I would like to take this opportunity to double down on my longstanding prediction that the Chargers will ultimately move back to San Diego.

The league will not put up for long with the constant embarrassment of the Chargers' few fans being overwhelmed by opposing fans at every home game in Los Angeles.  The Rams felt that to some extent; but that is likely to lessen.  With the Chargers it will never go away, even if they win a Super Bowl.  So I bet that the owners will persuade Spanos to sell to an owner who will bring the team home to San Diego.

[gosioux76]

6 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

I would like to take this opportunity to double down on my longstanding prediction that the Chargers will ultimately move back to San Diego.

The league will not put up for long with the constant embarrassment of the Chargers' few fans being overwhelmed by opposing fans at every home game in Los Angeles.  The Rams felt that to some extent; but that is likely to lessen.  With the Chargers it will never go away, even if they win a Super Bowl.  So I bet that the owners will persuade Spanos to sell to an owner who will bring the team home to San Diego.

 

It'll definitely be interesting to see how the Chargers do in the next year or two. They have a promising team with a popular quarterback; seems like a good formula for building a fan base. But it's got to be a real gut punch to be the second tenant in a stadium owned by the Super Bowl champs. 

[Ridleylash]

14 minutes ago, gosioux76 said:

 

It'll definitely be interesting to see how the Chargers do in the next year or two. They have a promising team with a popular quarterback; seems like a good formula for building a fan base. But it's got to be a real gut punch to be the second tenant in a stadium owned by the Super Bowl champs. 

The Chargers were already the lame duck brother to the Rams before now, this just makes it much worse. I'd be shocked if they manage to even remain relevant among LA sports as the Kings are coming out of their rebuild and becoming a legitimate playoff team and with the Dodgers and Rams being big-time players in the market.

[Red Comet]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

I would like to take this opportunity to double down on my longstanding prediction that the Chargers will ultimately move back to San Diego.

The league will not put up for long with the constant embarrassment of the Chargers' few fans being overwhelmed by opposing fans at every home game in Los Angeles.  The Rams felt that to some extent; but that is likely to lessen.  With the Chargers it will never go away, even if they win a Super Bowl.  So I bet that the owners will persuade Spanos to sell to an owner who will bring the team home to San Diego.

If the NFL let the Chargers play in a soccer stadium and the NHL is going to let the Yotes play at the community ice skating rink, then it should be clear at this point that the Big Four sports leagues couldn’t give a rat’s ass about us the fans so long as the TV revenue keeps rolling in. 

[Walk-Off]

When the Chargers exercised their option to move to the Los Angeles market (with only a few days left before the NFL would have forced the Bolts to surrender that option to the Raiders, if I remember correctly) and join the Rams at the latter team's then-under-construction stadium, at least one report that I read had stated that not only would the Chargers be obliged to play a certain minimum number of seasons in Inglewood, but also the NFL would require the Spanos family to wait a certain amount of years after either the basic relocation itself or the opening of the new stadium before selling the franchise (I do not remember which event was the exact trigger), so that the family could not use either a move to the more populous Greater Los Angeles area or the debut of the Inglewood stadium as a basis for "flipping" the Chargers to new ownership for a quick, easy, huge profit.

 

Whether or not any of that is true, I think that, ultimately, how much longer the Chargers stay in the L.A. market will depend mostly on (a) how well Dean Spanos and his family keep getting along with the other NFL teams' ownerships and with the league's own leadership and (b) how much the league trusts the Raiders to stay in the Las Vegas market, let alone keep out of Southern California in general and the vicinity of the City of Angels in particular.  A sharp decline in the respectfulness of the Spanos family's relationships with other owners in the league and with Roger Goodell or any future NFL commissioner might be very likely to cause most of the rest of the league to ignore any and all commitments that the Chargers had made upon relocating just over 100 miles up the coast and instead pressure the Spanoses either to sell their team or take the Bolts out of Greater Los Angeles (if not bring the team expressly back to San Diego).  Even then, however, most of those other owners and the people in charge at the league's headquarters might fear that the Raiders' ownership would exploit a departure of the Chargers from the L.A. area by doing whatever can be done to wiggle the Raiders' way out of their own long-term commitments to Clark County and the State of Nevada and then make a beeline back to the Los Angeles Basin (whether as roommates to the Rams at SoFi Stadium or at a second Greater Los Angeles stadium such as a revival of real estate developer Ed Roski's 2008 proposal in the City of Industry).  In that case, most of the powers that be across the NFL might favor a Chargers team continuing to play deeply in the Rams' shadow at Kroenke World over a second coming of the Los Angeles Raiders -- a team that, throughout their 13 years at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, had an extremely sparse number of sellout home games and tended to attract fans who were, at best, too poor to attend games regularly and, at worst, too willing to commit violent or otherwise criminal acts.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

3 hours ago, Red Comet said:

If the NFL let the Chargers play in a soccer stadium and the NHL is going to let the Yotes play at the community ice skating rink, then it should be clear at this point that the Big Four sports leagues couldn’t give a rat’s ass about us the fans so long as the TV revenue keeps rolling in. 

 

Please note that I have made no claim regarding anyone caring about the fans. The reason for the Chargers' move back to San Diego will not be love of fans. Rather, the reason will be the bad publicity that is generated every time that team plays a home game in a stadium full of fans who are booing it.

 

The image-conscious NFL is accustomed to being presented as a juggernaut. It will not put up indefinitely with being made a fool of in one of the biggest cities in the world, especially not when it can exchange the guaranteed bad publicity and embarrassment of the Chargers playing in Los Angeles for the great publicity that would accompany the team returning to San Diego under new ownership.

[Walk-Off]

8 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

The reason for the Chargers' move back to San Diego will not be love of fans. Rather, the reason will be the bad publicity that is generated every time that team plays a home game in a stadium full of fans who are booing it.

 

The image-conscious NFL is accustomed to being presented as a juggernaut. It will not put up indefinitely with being made a fool of in one of the biggest cities in the world, especially not when it can exchange the guaranteed bad publicity and embarrassment of the Chargers playing in Los Angeles for the great publicity that would accompany the team returning to San Diego under new ownership.

 

I agree that the NFL is a highly image-conscious organization and is accustomed to being, and wants to be, regarded as a juggernaut.  However, I think that one of the many historical factors that has caused the NFL to be so obsessed with its image happens to be all that went wrong with the Raiders as a Los Angeles team from 1982 through 1994 -- especially after the Raiders and their then-owner, Al Davis, won an antitrust lawsuit against the league to earn the right to move to La La Land.  As the Raiders garnered so few home sellouts, and thus played very few home games on local television due to the league's blackout policy of that time ... and, even worse, became a magnet for an embarrassingly high number of criminally inclined fans ... throughout the time that L.A. was their home, I think that Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, et al. were are all too justified to look at the Raiders' situation in L.A. and think something like, "Al Davis sued us ... and beat us in court ... for this?!"

 

How does this relate to the Chargers' current situation?  Well, my impression is that, as displeased as the NFL might be with the Chargers' continued dearth of fan support since leaving San Diego for the Los Angeles Basin, the league might actually be willing to tolerate such a problem as long as allowing or requiring the Bolts to leave the L.A. market creates even the slightest risk of enabling and emboldening the Raiders to try to betray their commitments to the Las Vegas area and then head back to the Greater L.A. region.  It all makes me wonder if, deep down, the NFL establishment's most desired situation in Southern California consists of (a) the Rams thriving over the long term in the Los Angeles market as an NFC team, (b) any AFC team other than the Raiders playing alongside the Rams in the L.A. market, and (c) any NFL team other than the Raiders, regardless of conference, occupying the San Diego market.

[gosioux76]

1 hour ago, Walk-Off said:

How does this relate to the Chargers' current situation?  Well, my impression is that, as displeased as the NFL might be with the Chargers' continued dearth of fan support since leaving San Diego for the Los Angeles Basin, the league might actually be willing to tolerate such a problem as long as allowing or requiring the Bolts to leave the L.A. market creates even the slightest risk of enabling and emboldening the Raiders to try to betray their commitments to the Las Vegas area and then head back to the Greater L.A. region.  It all makes me wonder if, deep down, the NFL establishment's most desired situation in Southern California consists of (a) the Rams thriving over the long term in the Los Angeles market as an NFC team, (b) any AFC team other than the Raiders playing alongside the Rams in the L.A. market, and (c) any NFL team other than the Raiders, regardless of conference, occupying the San Diego market.

 

I get what you're saying, but now that the Raiders are comfortably ensconced in a $1.9 billion palace built for them in Las Vegas, are they really still a threat to decamp for L.A. anymore? If anything, I think the Rams have proven that L.A. isn't the football panacea it was made out to be, at least when it comes to drawing the interest of fans. (Can't argue it's value as a TV market, of course.) 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

10 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

As the Raiders garnered so few home sellouts, and thus played very few home games on local television due to the league's blackout policy of that time

 

No team could sell out the Colliseum, which seats about 80,000. Still, the Raiders drew a solid 50,000 a game there. It's not the team's fault if the league bases blackouts on such an inapplicable metric.

 

10 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

... and, even worse, became a magnet for an embarrassingly high number of criminally inclined fans

 

Please stop. That's some ugly dog-whistle stuff there.

 

The Raiders have a huge and dedicated group of supporters in L.A.; even after 25 years away, and even with the Rams having come back, the Raiders are still the most popular team in that city by a wide margin. They are also one of very few NFL teams with a longstanding national fanbase, rivalled only by the Cowboys. (Indeed, the Raiders' fanbase is international, as they were a huge hit in Mexico a couple of years ago.)

 

While I am glad that the Rams went back to L.A., if the owners had accepted the plan that would have brought in the Raiders (and the Chargers, ho hum) to a proposed stadium in Carson instead of rejecting it in favour of bringing the Rams back, there would never have been a case where that team's fans would have been outnumbered in their own stadium.

 

9 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

now that the Raiders are comfortably ensconced in a $1.9 billion palace built for them in Las Vegas, are they really still a threat to decamp for L.A. anymore?

They are not. But they are still close enough to have an impact, as those crazy Westerners think nothing of making a trip 300 miles in each direction for a game. Also, the Raiders get one "home" game in Los Angeles each year, when they go in to play the Chargers; and every Raiders game is available on L.A.-area radio.

 

Los Angeles is indeed a two-team town: Raiders and Rams; the Chargers are not even in the conversation. The Charges are far more pathetic than the Clippers ever were; there is no Chargers equivalent to Billy Crystal.

 

The Rams will not be dethroning the Raiders; that cannot be the goal. The immediate goal is just to have more fans in the stadium than the opponents; this is something that should be within reach of the defending Super Bowl champions — at least until the Rams host the Raiders, which I don't believe is scheduled to happen for several more years.

 

[Walk-Off]

16 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

I get what you're saying, but now that the Raiders are comfortably ensconced in a $1.9 billion palace built for them in Las Vegas, are they really still a threat to decamp for L.A. anymore?

 

For sure, I hope that the Raiders stay content to play at Allegiant Stadium and in the Las Vegas market for decades to come, regardless of what becomes of the Chargers.  However, when it comes to how the Raiders might react to a retreat of the Chargers from the Los Angeles area, what matters ultimately is not what any of us ordinary fans think, hope, or fear, but rather what the NFL's leaders and the owners of all of the other teams throughout the league think, hope, and fear.  When I look at the NFL, I see a league whose most powerful figures, for better or worse, remain so shell shocked by the negative effects of the Raiders' one stint so far in Los Angeles that they have stayed determined at all costs to make it as difficult as possible for the Raiders to earn another chance to play home games in the L.A. market ... even if those costs include a long-term acceptance of a "sick man" Los Angeles Chargers team.

 

Why else, then, did the NFL decree back in January 2016 that the Raiders would be allowed to come back to the Los Angeles area only if and after the Chargers declined to make such a decision within a year-long window, and how else does one explain why the Raiders applied to move to the Las Vegas market only after (one week after, to be precise) the Chargers announced the exercising of their own Los Angeles relocation option -- an option that, at that point, was only a few days away from being handed over to the Raiders?