Category: Los Angeles NFL team

The city of San Diego submitted its Chargers stadium proposal to the NFL yesterday, and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — it’s just a rehash of where things have stood for a while now, not an actual new bid. The actual 41-page letter can be found here, but it’s the same plan that Mayor Kevin Faulconer proposed back in August:

• $200 million in cash from the city, to be raised via lease revenue bonds (which San Diego officials say won’t require a public vote), then paid off by the city out of general revenues
• $150 million in cash from the county (which would require a public vote, which couldn’t take place until June)
• $362.5 million from the Chargers (who could use naming-rights fees to cover part of this)
• $187.5 million from PSL sales
• $200 million from the NFL’s G-4 program

Chargers owner Dean Spanos has repeatedly rejected this plan on the grounds that he doesn’t want to have to wait and see how people vote, but it’s the only plan he’s getting, so. Also, right now all three team owners (Chargers, St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders) have shown little interest in their current cities’ stadium plans, so there’s not much to separate them in terms of who should get to move to L.A. because of their unhappy home life.

As for the NFL as an entity, it issued a carefully phrased statement thanking everyone for playing, and offering them a complimentary edition of the home game:

“All three submissions are generally consistent with our most recent discussions with public officials and task forces,” the statementx read. “We appreciate the leadership that public officials have demonstrated on behalf of the three cities. There is a great deal of information for the three teams and all of NFL ownership to review and consider. At this point, no applications for relocation of a franchise have been filed.”

The first NFL owners meeting to discuss this mess and try to come to some sort of consensus — remember, it takes a three-quarters supermajority for the NFL to decide on relocations — is a week from Tuesday. Sadly it will not be televised, because it would blow The Decision out of the water.

St. Louis submitted its formal Rams stadium proposal to the NFL yesterday, the state-appointed stadium task force sending over a 400-page document outlining what’s currently on the table. That includes:

• $400 million in city and state cash and tax credits (plus another $77 million in future operating and maintenance costs)
• $250 million from Rams owner Stan Kroenke (who could pay much of that off with naming rights fees)
• $300 million from the NFL’s G-4 stadium funding program (which the league insists is capped at $200 million)
• the remaining $50 million or so from PSL sales (which could also help pay off Kroenke’s share)

It’s not a proposal that the league is particularly happy with thanks to that extra G-4 money, but it’s still an impressive haul, especially compared to the alternatives:

• Oakland, as noted yesterday, isn’t submitting a formal stadium funding plan at all, something that led Raiders owner Mark Davis to whine yesterday that “They just don’t want to play with us. I don’t know why. I don’t understand it.” (“Play with us” here is NFL-ese for “give us lots of money.”)
• San Diego is expected to submit its stadium financing proposal today, and it’s likely to be the same plan that led to negotiations with the Chargers completely breaking down a couple of months ago.

It’s increasingly clear that the NFL’s Los Angeles move threat shakedown plan really isn’t going as the league hoped: Once Kroenke announced plans to move the Rams to Inglewood and the Chargers and Raiders owners immediately countered with their own hastily assembled counterplan to move to Carson, the NFL responded by giving everyone until the end of 2015 to throw money at keeping their teams, hoping that this would help determine a winner. Instead, the league has three different stadium plans that it’s not really happy with, and nothing close to the kind of consensus among owners needed to pick a winner. There’s still a chance of some kind of horse-trading taking place to allow a January vote — I dunno, Kroenke gets to move the Rams to L.A. but has to take the Chargers as a tenant and the Raiders get the St. Louis offer, while relocation fee money is shuffled around to make everyone happy — but I wouldn’t bet on it, which means this whole mess could easily drag on for another season.

This is good news, mind you, for people who don’t want to see the NFL use the L.A. situation to shake down taxpayers for huge amounts of money, though St. Louis still seems likely to end up paying a huge tab for either the Rams or a replacement team eventually. (Blame St. Louis’s idiot negotiators in the ’90s, though their current idiot negotiators certainly deserve a share of the blame.) It’s probably going to mean more painful months ahead for Rams, Chargers, and Raiders fans, though, so if you’re one of those, you might want to pick another team to chain your heart to for a while. I hear Leicester City is fun.

The St. Louis Rams stadium battle — and by extension, that of the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, the two teams whose owners are competing with the Rams’ Stan Kroenke to move to Los Angeles — is reaching peak craziness. All this happened since Friday:

• The St. Louis board of aldermen approved the city’s share of a $477 million subsidy package for a new $1 billion Rams stadium, including a scheme by which the city would kick back stadium taxes to the team, in exchange for the NFL upping its contribution from $200 million to $300 million.
• NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent Missouri stadium point person Dave Peacock a strongly-worded letter saying that the NFL putting in an extra $100 million was “fundamentally inconsistent with the NFL’s program of stadium financing” and complaining that he’d failed to pass this along to the board.
• NBC Sports’ Mike Florio reported that “a source with knowledge of the situation” told him the idea for the extra $100 million was proposed by two members of the NFL’s own Los Angeles relocation committee. (Under this plan, the added money would come off the top of L.A. relocation fees.) Florio didn’t know which of the six committee members were responsible — both Panthers owner Jerry Richardson and Texans owner Bob McNair are on record as supporting the Chargers’ and Raiders’ competing L.A. plan, but it could have been any of them — but given that Goodell’s letter specifically stated that “each of these owners” on the committee supported making clear that the extra money isn’t on the table, it sounds like there’s some epic in-fighting going on in the NFL board room.
• CBS Sports’ Jason La Canfora reported, citing “numerous well-connected ownership sources,” that if Kroenke is denied the chance to move to Los Angeles, he could consider either moving to London or buying the Denver Broncos and selling the Rams to someone who’d keep them in St. Louis. Either of which could happen, sure, but these could also be NFL sources trying to keep up the pressure on St. Louis to commit more stadium money even as momentum seems to have swung slightly toward Kroenke not being the L.A. lottery winner.

I’m still putting my money on nothing at all getting decided in January, if only because of the increasing indications that there are various NFL owner factions trying to work their own angles to influence the ultimate decision. Remember, any final ruling requires 24 out of 32 owners to agree on it, and Goodell is going to have to do a much better job of herding cats to get three-quarters of owners to even agree on what to order for lunch, let alone an L.A. decision. Rams fans may have to wait a bit longer to find out if Thursday’s game was their last one in St. Louis ever.

With less than two weeks to go before the NFL’s deadline for cities to put up stadium plans to keep their teams from moving to L.A. or else … something, something bad … the league’s internal squabbles over the whole process are increasingly being aired in public:

• Houston Texans owner Bob McNair declared that one key factor in deciding what teams if any will move is “support” from their existing city: “If they’re receiving a reasonable amount of support, my personal feeling and most owners’ is we don’t think people should move.” And to make that even clearer, he added that St. Louis’s stadium plan for the Rams is “getting pretty close, in my opinion, to being an attractive proposal,” and “if they do come up with an attractive proposal, then in my view, my personal opinion, I don’t think the Rams will receive the approval to relocate.”
• To make things even clearer, McNair canceled a planned meeting with San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer about that city’s stadium plans.
• Meanwhile, it’s turned out that Disney CEO Bob Iger was recruited to get involved with the San Diego Chargers‘ and Oakland Raiders‘ Carson stadium project by Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who sits on the NFL’s L.A. relocation committee along with McNair.

So the writing is on the wall: Once St. Louis approves its $477 million in stadium subsidies later today, the Rams will be told to stay put, and the Chargers and Raiders will move to Carson, right? Except that McNair and Richardson are only two owners out of 32, and any relocation decision needs 24 votes for approval. While none of us have Steve Tisch’s psychic powers, I’d say that “no decision in January” is looking like a more and more likely outcome.

Today’s NFL-to-L.A. scuttlebutt roundup:

• The NFL’s deadline threat apparently scared the St. Louis board of aldermen into action, as its ways and means committee is set to vote today on the Rams stadium bill, with the legislation set to go to the full board tomorrow. Guess we’ll find out soon enough what Lewis Reed wants for his vote.
• SBNation Chargers blog Bolts From The Blue has a long essay that makes a good case that the internal fight over which NFL owners will get to go to L.A. is about old-guard owners (who support Chargers owner Dean Spanos) and new-guard ones (who mostly back Rams owner Stan Kroenke) as much as anything else. It also makes a far-less-good case that the NFL is heading for a “stadium crisis” because lots of stadiums are nearing 20 years old and not all owners can fund new ones out of their own pockets — even if you accept the dubious notion that 20-year-old stadiums are too decrepit to play in, there’s these things called “banks” that owners can borrow from — so feel free to stop reading when you get to that part.
• Fans in one Oakland Coliseum luxury suite are taping paper soda cups to the ceiling to catch leaks, because nobody can be bothered to call a plumber, I guess.

Something really weird appears to be going on in Oakland, where there are suddenly reports that the NFL could be stepping in to develop not only a new stadium for the Raiders, but a mixed-use development around it on the Coliseum site as well. From the San Francisco Business Times:

The NFL could be the big entity that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has suggested could provide security for ground lease payments and game-day revenues from the Raiders that would be used to pay off new stadium bonds. Plus, the NFL would come in as a partner on a planned office, housing, retail and hospitality project — dubbed Coliseum City — that has stymied three other developers, most recently Floyd Kephart‘s New City Development LLC.

And from Matthew Artz of the Bay Area News Group:

NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman said Monday that the league isn’t offering any more help to keep the Raiders in Oakland than it would offer to help keep the Chargers in San Diego or the Rams in St. Louis.

But he added that the league is open to discussing the development opportunity in Oakland, known as Coliseum City, which the city had previously granted to a string of developers — none of which got a project off the ground.

“We have for several years stated: ‘Don’t put a real estate developer between the Raiders and the city. If there is development value available, talk to the Raiders about it, or perhaps the Raiders plus (the) league,’ ” Grubman said in an email.

Grubman was replying to a request for comment, though, I believe, which raises the question: Whose idea is this, exactly? Clearly somebody is floating it, but it doesn’t appear to be either Schaaf or Grubman, and neither article includes an initial source.

As for whether it makes sense for the NFL to built a residential and office complex: Sure, as much as it would for anybody else. But that’s the problem — Floyd Kephart’s Coliseum City plan didn’t crash and burn because he was a terrible developer, it did so because he didn’t have a way to generate $400 million from thin air to pay for the part of the stadium costs Raiders owner Mark Davis didn’t want to cover. The NFL or Davis could take over for Kephart, sure, but they’re going to face the same problem if new development isn’t enough to throw off $400 million in excess profits. (SPOILER: It won’t be, no matter how hot the Bay Area housing market is right now.)

All this seems like somebody’s way to make it seem like there’s some progress being made in Oakland ahead of the league’s December 28 deadline to get somewhere on new stadiums in Oakland, St. Louis, and San Diego. Whether it’s Oakland officials trying to make the case to the NFL that their stadium plans aren’t dead, or NFL officials trying to make the case to any Mark Davis supporters in the owners’ group that they wouldn’t be leaving him high and dry in the event of the Rams and Chargers getting to move to L.A., I couldn’t tell you.

Meanwhile, well-connected NFL reporter Peter King claims that “the Carson proposal—with either the Chargers and Raiders together, or the Chargers alone—seems to have more momentum than Stan Kroenke’s plan to move the Rams to a complex in Inglewood.” Of course, King earlier this year predicted that the Chargers and Rams would both end up in Inglewood, but maybe his sources are indicating that opinions have shifted among NFL owners since then? Or somebody is trying to spin him for their own purposes. It’s going to be really hard to separate the information from the disinformation over the next few weeks, I’m afraid.

Speaking of things that miraculously keep burning way longer than you ever thought possible, here’s the latest from the debates over whether and which NFL teams will move to Los Angeles:

• The chair of the St. Louis board of aldermen’s ways and means committee says he’ll set a committee vote for this Thursday morning on the Rams stadium funding package. The financing plan has been tweaked again — now instead of using naming-rights money to fund the public’s share and kicking back sales taxes to the team, the state would let the Rams have the naming-rights cash and use the sales taxes to pay the public’s costs — but since it’s the same amounts of money being spent on the same things, the exact bookkeeping really shouldn’t matter. (Though I suppose now the public would be stuck with the risk that sales tax revenues fall short, instead of the risk that naming rights fees fall short, if you think one of those is inherently riskier.)
• Oakland councilperson Rebecca Kaplan is griping that Mayor Libby Schaaf (who beat out Kaplan in the mayor’s race last year) hasn’t presented a concrete Raiders stadium plan, but she seems to be the only one concerned, according to the San Francisco Chronicle: Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley says he’d rather build a new stadium for the A’s and convert the Oakland Coliseum to football-only, while economists Victor Matheson and Geoffrey Propheter both say Schaaf is doing the right thing by not giving in to extortion. No word in the Chronicle on Schaaf’s possible consideration of using tax-increment financing for a Raiders stadium, which hopefully means it’s back off the table.
• I suppose I should have something from San Diego on the Chargers as well, but all I’ve got is evidence that Kevin Acee doesn’t know the difference between “flaunting” and “flouting” (and neither do the San Diego Union-Tribune copy editors, if they still have any).

December 28 is the alleged NFL deadline by which cities have to submit their stadium plans or else risk losing teams to L.A. I have no idea what happens if some city comes up with new plans on, say, December 29 — do the NFL owners put their hands over their collective ears and shout, “Not listening! Not listening!”? — but at least it should make for some excitement during an otherwise slow news week.

The NFL owners held another one of their closed-door meetings on relocating teams to Los Angeles yesterday, but hoo boy, did the fireworks ever spill out into public:

• The owners set a December 28 deadline for St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland to make their final stadium offers, and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay and New York Giants owner Steve Tisch said they hope for an owners’ vote on which team(s) will move on January 12 or 13 — though, of course, setting arbitrary deadlines and then moving them back is standard operating procedure for sports leagues. (Also, when asked by the L.A. Times if a final vote would really happen in January, Tisch replied, “I’ve lost all my psychic powers. Especially regarding this subject.”)
• Houston Texans owner Bob McNair warned St. Louis officials that they need to “firm up” their stadium plan for the Rams if they want it to be considered by the league — an apparent attempt to get the St. Louis board of aldermen to vote on the stadium funding bill next week before it goes on holiday break, under pain of being told “Sorry, too late.”
• Rams owner Stan Kroenke has reiterated that he’d be open to sharing an Inglewood stadium with the Chargers. That would eliminate the Chargers’ planned Carson stadium (if  Chargers owner Dean Spanos went for it) and leave the Raiders stuck in Oakland — or more likely, negotiating with St. Louis to try to grab whatever deal Kroenke left on the table there.

Put all the tea leaves together, and this certainly sounds like the NFL is trying to negotiate a deal that makes the maximum number of league parties happy: Kroenke gets to go to L.A. and gets another team to help him pay his $1.86 billion stadium bill (via an equity stake or rent payments, it doesn’t matter); Spanos gets to stop having to fight with San Diego for stadium subsidies, even if it means playing second fiddle to Kroenke; and Raiders owner Mark Davis … well, nobody really cares about Mark Davis, but at least he can have St. Louis as a fallback plan — which would also mean that the NFL wouldn’t be entirely throwing away that offer of public stadium cash, just pushing back the timeline a bit on how long to take to shake it loose.

As always, though, it’s important to remember that “the NFL” isn’t really a single entity, but rather 32 rich guys trying to hash out a deal. It’s possible that this one will make enough people happy that they can get the necessary three-quarters majority to approve it — or it could be that the room remains splintered, or talks break down over how much of a relocation fee to demand from any owners who move, or any of a number of different things. In fact:

“It’s hard to see one of the proposals as getting 24 votes,” Colts owner Jim Irsay told reporters on Wednesday, adding: “I don’t think we’re extremely close right now.”

Maybe it’s time we crowdsource the likely outcome here — anyone want to start up a betting line on which teams move? Though the only way to accurately predict it would probably be a betting line only open to NFL owners, so scrap that idea. I’m going back to throwing darts at the wall.