If the NFL is ever going to return to Los Angeles, there are a whole lot of questions the league must answer. And despite months of discussion within the league about its L.A. options, there are still more questions than answers.
Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times has a good rundown of all those questions, demonstrating just how much the NFL still has to do before it can identify whether the Rams, Chargers, Raiders or two of those three teams will move to L.A. next year.
The biggest problem is that none of the three owners -- Stan Kroenke, Dean Spanos or Mark Davis -- has the necessary 24 votes from the other owners to approve a move to Los Angeles, but all three of them are believed to have the necessary nine votes to block another team from moving. In other words, Kroenke can’t find 23 other owners to support giving him the L.A. market, but he can find eight other owners to help him block Spanos or Davis from going there. And Spanos and Davis are similarly situated with only enough support from their fellow owners to block a rival move, not enough to approve their own move.
It’s possible that the Rams could move on their own. It’s possible that the Chargers and Raiders could move together and share a stadium. It’s possible that a site in Inglewood (which is near Los Angeles International Airport) could get the nod, or that a site in Carson (about 15 miles south of Inglewood) will be the home of the NFL’s new stadium.
But it’s also possible that the NFL’s owners simply won’t be able to reach a consensus on which teams should move and which stadium site they should occupy, and that the NFL will end up not moving to Los Angeles at all. If the NFL can’t get all the pertinent questions answered soon, putting off a move until at least 2017 may be the answer.