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National Football League
Draft King Analysis
October 23, 2009
Lou Pickney, DraftKing.com
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This Sunday I'll be in St. Louis for the Colts/Rams game. The idea of an unbeaten team taking on a winless club isn't particularly thrilling, but in the NFL you never know what will happen. It will be interesting to see to what degree Steven Jackson will be able to run against the Colts defense, particularly with Indianapolis having parted ways (for the second time in as many seasons) with DT Ed Johnson.
The Rams are one of the teams being mentioned as a possible relocation candidate for the forthcoming 75,000 seat stadium that has been approved for the city of Industry, located in the greater Los Angeles area. That stadium has been green-lighted with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approving a bill that nullifies a lawsuit by the neighboring city of Walnut, which sued claiming that Industry had approved the stadium without sufficiently investigating the environmental impact it would have.
St. Louis will have the Rams through at least 2014, but a clause in the contract the team has with the Edward Jones Dome allows them to opt out. This could potentially put the team in a spot to move back to Los Angeles -- a market that the nomadic franchise (which was based in Cleveland prior to its move to Los Angeles in 1946) called home for nearly 50 years.
Between the Rams, Raiders, and Chargers, the NFL has three franchises that once called Los Angeles home. I'm of the opinion that a team which voluntarily left the #2 media market in the United States doesn't deserve to get to go back. I can't help but think of a few lines from the classic film Pulp Fiction which seems to sum up how I feel about the situation.
Marsellus Wallace: Leave town. Tonight. Right now. And when you're gone, stay gone. You've lost your Los Angeles privileges. Deal?
Butch Coolidge: Deal.
Expansion would be a terrible idea, particularly with the league perfectly balanced with 32 franchises and 16 teams in each conference. Relocation to Los Angeles has been tried since both the Rams and Raiders skipped town after the 1994 season, most notably by the Seattle Seahawks (which parlayed the attempted move into the construction of Qwest Field and the ultimate demolition of the Kingdome). But it will likely be relocation that fills the void in Los Angeles.
So, which lucky owner gets to go to L.A.? Four options come to mind beyond teams that once played there: the Vikings, the Jaguars, the 49ers, and the Bills.
The Vikings moving to L.A. would be a sad case of déjà vu for people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area -- remember that Minneapolis lost the NBA's Lakers to L.A. in 1960. But with the aging Metrodome as its home and no new stadium of the horizon, they are as viable of a candidate as any other team.
The Jaguars have had attendance issues, and Wayne Weaver parlaying an expansion team in Jacksonville into being the sole team in the Los Angeles market (with all of its media dollars) has to be tempting.
The 49ers would be tempting for the NFL since that would avoid the geographical problems of having a team from a non-West conference in the city (not that realignment couldn't fix that problem). It would be strange to see the 49ers pack up and head south, and surely they'd pick another name for the team if it happened.
The Bills, I'd think, would be more likely to move to Toronto than anywhere else, particularly with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell having an eye for international market increase for the league. Team owner Ralph Wilson likely won't move the team out of Buffalo, but the man turned 91 last week. I don't think he'd move the team from Buffalo, but this consideration is not being made with the idea of Wilson still being the team's owner at the time of the Bills moving.
Whatever happens, look for Los Angeles to have a team to call its own again within a few years. The chess game (or shell game, depending on your perspective) on which team moves to the city will be interesting to see play out over the next few years.
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