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Leagues and Governing Bodies

NFL owners debate one, two teams for L.A.

As key NFL owners gather this week to review the potential return of the NFL to Los Angeles next season, there is an increasingly vigorous debate occurring in league circles over whether only one team should move to the nation’s second-largest market.

There are three teams vying to move to Los Angeles. The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders have jointly proposed a stadium in Carson. The St. Louis Rams are offering a venue in Inglewood.

Carmen Policy says delaying action in L.A. “would be a disaster.”
Photo by: AP IMAGES
Conventional wisdom has been that two of the teams would make the move. Three-quarters of NFL owners must approve a relocation.

“There are people [owners and league executives] who think there should only be one team,” an NFL source said. “The financial strength of the project is better with two, but the cost to the league of two G-4 [stadium loans] has to be factored in. If it’s [Rams owner] Stan [Kroenke] alone, obviously it is not a financial issue for him.”

Carmen Policy, who is overseeing the Carson project, addressed talk that some in the league favored only one team in Los Angeles by saying he would describe it not as a push for one team but rather a healthy discussion over the number of teams.

Several owners, including the New York Giants’ John Mara and the New England Patriots’ Robert Kraft, have previously said publicly they expect up to two teams in Los Angeles. Mara and Kraft are on the six-owner committee that’s meeting this week in New York.

“I have said all along that I believe there will be one or two teams in LA next season,” Mara wrote in an email last week. “I still feel that way.”

Kraft, who has been even more definitive in the past about two teams, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The other owners on the committee are Jerry Richardson (Carolina), Clark Hunt (Kansas City), Art Rooney II (Pittsburgh) and Bob McNair (Houston).

The hesitance over two teams relates to TV and the challenges of marketing more than one new team at once. With two teams in Los Angeles, that would mean two local games in the market each week — which in turn would mean fewer national TV windows on Sundays than would exist with one team (or no teams). That’s something that could lower national TV ratings, given the Los Angeles TV market’s size. There’s also concern about whether it is possible to introduce two new teams to a market at the same time, given they would be competing for the same commercial and consumer dollars.

Policy’s solution — a mega-market stretching from Santa Barbara to the border of Mexico that he outlined at an owners meeting on Aug. 11 — has been criticized in league and owner circles for assuming the NFL would not want to keep the San Diego market. But Policy said he is not backing down from that position, though he did acknowledge there is concern about whether the Chargers and Raiders were seeking to seal the NFL out of San Diego.

Policy also rebutted talk the Chargers could share a Kroenke stadium in Inglewood.

“That doesn’t work. [Chargers owner] Dean Spanos has made it perfectly clear,” Policy said. “First off, he likes Carson. … Secondly, he will not engage in — he will not be a tenant in — a landlord-tenant relationship.” Kroenke told owners at the meeting last month that a second team in his stadium would be a tenant, not a co-owner.

Policy strongly urged against postponing by another year a move to Los Angeles, an idea that has been floated within the league recently given the difficulty owners may have choosing between the two sites. “That would be a disaster,” Policy said. “It just places us in such a strange and undesirable position.”

The NFL’s Los Angeles opportunities committee meets Wednesday and Thursday, with a full owners meeting to follow Oct. 5-6, also in New York.

There had been some expectation that representatives from St. Louis and San Diego would get the opportunity to present their plans for new stadiums to full ownership. The NFL source said that is unlikely, though, but that the cities would perhaps get to present to a committee meeting before the full owners meeting in early October. That meeting will largely focus on the size and structure of a relocation fee, the NFL source said.

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