It’s unclear which team(s) will get to L.A. It’s now clear that the NFL believes the home cities of the current candidates to relocate haven’t done enough to keep them.
Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times reports that, in a 48-page report distributed to all teams on Saturday, Commissioner Roger Goodell called the proposals of St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland to keep the Rams, Chargers, and Raiders, respectively, “unsatisfactory and inadequate.”
Goodell adds that each city has had “ample opportunity but did not develop their proposals sufficiently to ensure the retention of its NFL team.”
But Farmer points out that Goodell makes no recommendation about a solution to the L.A. problem. Surely, all three teams won’t get approval to move. Goodell’s comments would make it a shock if at least one doesn’t.
The six-owner Committee on L.A. Opportunities is expected to make a recommendation to full ownership. For anything the league does, at least 24 of 32 owner votes will be needed.
A special ownership meeting will occur on Tuesday and Wednesday in Houston, and it is widely believed that the league will at that point come up with a solution to the L.A. problem. At this point, no one knows what it will be.
In time, however, each of the three cities that could lose its team to L.A. may eventually lose its team, somewhere, absent a dramatic change in the local willingness to subsidize the NFL and its billionaire team owners.