Peter King + more: relocation, relocation, relocation

On Los Angeles, St. Louis and How It All Shakes Out

March 2, 2015 by Peter King

http://mmqb.si.com/2015/03/02/st-louis-stadium-rams-raiders-chargers-los-angeles-nfl/5/

I’m like everybody else with this Los Angeles thing. I’m on page 24 of a 300-page book, and it’s not all that interesting so far. But I hear the end is compelling, so I’d rather speed past the next 230 pages and go straight to the climax. Tell me what the end game is.

“What’s your gut feeling about the number of NFL teams playing football in Los Angeles in 2020—zero, one or two?” I asked Eric Grubman, an NFL senior vice president and the league’s point man on the L.A. market, on Friday.

“I don’t know the number,” he said near the end of a 35-minute interview. “But the least probable of those numbers is zero. I would say we’ve gone above the 50 percent probability that we’ll have at least one team there.”

The mystery brews. “You have to have some stomach to let the thing play out,” Grubman said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Right now, I don’t think anyone does. I do know this: Los Angeles has real momentum for the first time in 20 years.”

* * *

It’s been two decades and two months since the Los Angeles area had NFL football. The Raiders and Rams left simultaneously after playing in L.A. and Anaheim, respectively, for the last time on Christmas Eve 1994. And now, Los Angeles is a game of musical chairs for three franchises. The San Diego and Oakland franchises have announced their intention to bury the hatchet of a 54-year rivalry to initiate a joint $1.7-million stadium project in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson. Last Tuesday, the Inglewood (Calif.) City Council unanimously approved plans to build a football stadium that would be anchored by the move of the Rams from St. Louis. That doesn’t mean the Rams are signed and sealed for Inglewood, just that the locals are promising to build a palace if they come.

The Chargers are still trying to get a deal done to stay in San Diego. Ditto the Raiders in northern California. The Rams? No one quite knows what the Rams are doing. Kroenke is the invisible man; many hugely influential business and government people in St. Louis and the state of Missouri have never met the Howard Hughes of the NFL. For years the Rams tried to get a better stadium than the Edward Jones Dome, and the franchise was rebuffed because of the immense cost. But now, faced with losing the Rams, the state and city are working double-time to come up with a solution that—if nothing else—would make it difficult for 24 owners to vote in favor of the Rams returning to Los Angeles. (Franchise moves must be approved by a 75 percent majority of the 32 teams, though no one is sure if Kroenke will abide by that bylaw or just pull up stakes and force the league to stop him.)

The rendering atop this column—and the gallery below this paragraph—is a start. This is the first time anyone outside the league or the committee charged with keeping the Rams in St. Louis has seen the renderings of what a new $1 billion, 64,000-seat open-air riverfront football stadium on the banks of the Mississippi River would look like. Grubman has been to St. Louis on several occasions to meet with the group working to keep the Rams in town and working to clear 90 acres on the riverfront and get funding for the stadium, and he’s bullish on their prospects. But prospects for what? Keeping the Rams—even though Kroenke has not been part of the discussions at all, instead opting to have Rams COO Kevin Demoff head the team’s delegation in dealing with the transition? Preparing for a rainy day, and taking one of the teams (San Diego or Oakland) that doesn’t get a stadium built and sees the prospect of a shiny middle-American palace in a top-20 market? No one knows. But the stadium is currency in these stadium-driven times.

“It’s definitely a legitimate option,” said Grubman. “I see no fatal defect to it.”

Grubman told The MMQB that the NFL will commission detailed market studies in all three cities—St. Louis, Oakland and San Diego—so the league will be able to control the process with the best knowledge of the markets over the next few months. He said the market study has already been launched in St. Louis. The study in Oakland will begin in the next week or so, and the San Diego study will start later this month. That’s important because the NFL wants to know the appetite for ticket price and numbers in each place, as well as whether personal seat licenses are viable, and how many premium seats and boxes can be expected to be sold. By May, the NFL should have the answer to those questions.

The NFL told any team investigating Los Angeles to be sure to include in the stadium design the ability to add a second team. The St. Louis plan in Inglewood does that—obviously, so does the Carson site. No one expects two stadiums to be built in Los Angeles. But, increasingly, there is an expectation that one stadium will be built in greater Los Angeles, and it will house one or two teams. Kroenke’s plan is the most advanced.

Potential end game: Rams move to Los Angeles. Chargers can’t get a deal done in San Diego and join them in Inglewood. And by 2019, Derek Carr will be the quarterback of your St. Louis Raiders.

Which leads us to this unfortunate part of the story: Kroenke seems (and I say “seems,” because of his actions, not because of his words—there have been none) to be the most determined owner to want to move to Los Angeles. The Chargers and Raiders want to stay put. But San Diego and Oakland have nothing stadium-wise in the works. St. Louis is by far the most aggressive with the best plan to keep the Rams, right down to an agreement to clear a 90-acre blighted plot downtown to make way for the stadium. And get this: Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has an agreement with skilled construction workers in eastern Missouri to work round the clock (three eight-hour shifts a day, every day) so the stadium could be finished in 24 months … without workers taking overtime. That’s significant because if the first shovel goes in the ground by this August, the NFL could have a pristine new St. Louis stadium built in time for the 2017 season. (That’s likely too fast a timetable; it’s more likely that stadium construction would start later, and the venue would be ready in 2018 or in time for the NFL’s 100th season, in 2019.)

So St. Louis has an owner with one foot out the door but with a solid plan to keep the team in a beautiful stadium. The preferred goal of San Diego and Oakland is to stay in San Diego and Oakland. Or, as Grubman said: “St. Louis is being aggressive and specific. San Diego recently has shown potential to be aggressive, but has not yet been specific. Oakland has been neither aggressive nor specific.”

It’s a tough place to be for St. Louis. But you wouldn’t know that by talking to former Anheuser-Busch president David Peacock, who, along with local lawyer Robert Blitz, is heading up the local effort to keep the Rams. Or, in an unspoken but obvious alternative, to make St. Louis so attractive that if the Rams leave some other stadium-needy team would have to strongly consider a potential turnkey operation in Missouri.

“We’re trying to move with speed and certainty, with no ambiguity,” Peacock said over the weekend. “This is the right moment in time for a new stadium in St. Louis. We have a lot of young people moving to our urban core, which you couldn’t have said a few years ago.

“Stan has all kinds of options. We understand that. We can’t worry too much about that. I would be more concerned if we weren’t having regular dialog with Kevin [Demoff] and Eric Grubman about all facets of the plan. We are relying on the integrity of the league’s bylaws. If you assemble all the important pieces—the control of the land, the stadium financing, the cost-certainty, the stadium plan—I don’t know … If we do everything we say we’re going to do, it’s hard to imagine 24 owners would vote against it. If we do our job, I can’t imagine 24 votes to approve the Rams moving.”

The St. Louis stadium project looks to be on solid ground. There’s the standard $200 million league loan that several teams have used, a $250 million commitment from the owner, an estimated $150 million from the sale of seat licenses (which may be optimistic, but it’s close to the level of the commitment at the new Minnesota stadium), plus the remainder to be raised through a combination of local, county and state taxes, plus a commitment of some player and coach state income tax revenue to be funneled to the stadium project. (An unusual revenue source, to be sure, but the thinking goes: if there’s no team, then the state gets zero dollars from some high-earning individuals now located in another city.)

But is it enough? And if Kroenke leaves, will it be enough to attract another team? I’ve thought about this a lot, and several people connected to the story say I’m not the first one to suggest this is the end game: Rams move to Inglewood. Chargers can’t get a deal done in San Diego and join them in Inglewood. Raiders, left without a stadium option, take the St. Louis deal. And by 2019, Derek Carr will be the quarterback of your St. Louis Raiders.

That is a virtual sports-talk-show bit of guesswork by me. But it’s the most logical thing I see, putting all the puzzle pieces together. I have a feeling, though, the puzzle is going to look different in six months. And it’ll look significantly different than that on March 2, 2016.

The reason it’s impossible now to predict how each domino will fall is this: Each team has an owner, a city, local officials, a state government and some emotion involved. Los Angeles has four possible venues with desperado leaders—all of which and all of whom are wild cards. Some people won’t make decisions until pressed to the wall. So it’s really impossible to know what the reaction of one owner will be if one city does something, or Los Angeles does something else. What Kroenke has done well for himself so far is to create options. Billionaires are usually good at that. Kroenke’s no exception.

So we let the process play out, knowing that by the time the NFL turns 100 the second-largest city in the country should finally have a team (or two) back. Whichever teams they may be.

“If you asked the 10 people closest to this issue to all write their predictions down on what will happen to these teams [and the Los Angeles market] and seal them in envelopes, you’d have 10 different answers written down,” Grubman said. He’s right—but Kroenke’s in the best position of them all, here in the first quarter of the Los Angeles game