When The NFL Has Not Place Left To Go

When I was a kid, a popular party favor was a small plastic square with movable tiles numbered one through 24. All spaces on the square were taken by a number –except one. Once the numbers were scrambled, your job was to try and get them all back to sequential order using only the blank space to manipulate the digits back in the correct position.  

I remembered that game as talks are heating up about bringing an NFL team back to LA.

Ah yes - the potential of a pro football team in the City of Angels.  The great “White Buffalo” of sports. 

Currently, the former LA Rams are posturing to move back to SoCal, and the San Diego Chargers are rumored to be moving north. Of course the Oakland Raiders are threatening to drive south.

Now first of all, I don’t care a wit about any of these teams and I have no favorite to eventually call LA home, but, I very much want some team to do it. I want some team to eventually become the metaphorical tile that occupies the blank space.

You see, if a team finally breaks through and becomes LA’s football team, it will hopefully remove the wiggle room that the blank space of Los Angeles has provided the greedy NFL owners over the years. The blank space they could previously use as leverage to threaten their current market and fans into paying for new stadiums. The blank space the owners could use to move the team if demands were not met.

If LA is occupied by an NFL team, so much power is stripped away from owners.  LA is the last great market available to the NFL, and if it comes off the table so goes the bargaining power of a team owner dissatisfied with his current lease, stadium age or fan support.

LA always provided a disgruntled owner with a credible threat to face the fans and media and say, “unless I can get X or Y or Z, I will unfortunately, begrudgingly have to consider a move to LA in order to remain viable in the hyper competitive landscape of pro sports.”

But, if the corpulent and fleshy owners don’t have an LA to spirit their billion dollar plaything away to…?

What would they do?  Would the Vikings really threaten to leave a market that supported the franchise for decades in order to see if they can get more from Columbus, or San Antonio or Salt Lake City? Do the Saints really think they can do better in Portland, El Paso or Oklahoma City?  Maybe, but are they really willing to take that risk?

An owner and his team could fail spectacularly in LA, yet due to its size and revenue power, they could still make ends meet.  But, if a middle-of-the-pack owner and team in a middle-of-the-pack market wants to try its luck in another middle of the pack market?  The results could be epically bad.

And one last thing about LA.  America’s second largest city, the entertainment capital of the world, one of the most influential metropolis’s on the planet has been without an NFL team for 20 years. It’s stronger than ever, more prominent than ever and more populous than ever. LA lost its football in 1995 and didn’t slide into the ocean. Instead, it went on and its people found something else to do. The city and its people thrived without pro football.

Once the space is occupied, NFL owners will be force to look around, bite their tongues and decide that staying put and paying for stadium upgrades out-of-pocket is the last recourse they have.

And that will be a good day for all.