Wayne Deboe has been through this before.
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Twenty years later, Deboe, now the president of the Oakland Raiders Booster Club, is waiting to find out if he’ll be forced to endure that separation a second time. “I’d be responding to a rumor”, he said.
You knew it was coming, but still it knocks you back a step.
Sports Director Ben Higgins will be heading to Houston for the NFL Owners Meeting. And it is expected that they will make a recommendation prior to next week’s meeting. “It’s very hard to wait”. All three have filed for relocation.
A special owners meeting is scheduled this week in Houston, and relocation by one or two of those teams to Los Angeles will be discussed – and quite possibly voted on.
In a glass-walled room high above Park Avenue, NFL executives and billionaire team owners huddled around a long conference table this week to solve a problem that has plagued the league for two decades: how to get professional football back to Los Angeles.
As the L.A. process heads toward a conclusion, each side is lobbying undecided owners.
The city of Oakland, while expressing an interest in keeping the Raiders, has not yet made a formal stadium proposal while the St. Louis plan includes a request for league funding that is $100 million in excess of the maximum provided under existing NFL policy.
That’s because the National Football League will support only one new stadium in L.A. capable of housing two teams.
“Far from being “struggling” compared to other USA cities, St. Louis is experiencing an entrepreneurial renaissance, ranking first in the world for growth in tech venture capital investment between 2013 and 2014 and being named #1 out of 14 Best Startup Cities in America by Popular Mechanics in 2015″, Slay wrote. Add the Chargers to the mix, and you’d have three teams utilizing one stadium for an unforeseen amount time.
Each of the teams in those cities has been working to improve on the inadequacies. “I don’t understand it”.
Each privately financed stadium proposal is believed to have at least the nine votes needed to block the other. The relocation fee alone, should the Raiders’ bid to move to L.A.be approved, would be $550 million, according to the Orange County Register.
The Coliseum, where the Rams and Raiders played, would likely be the temporary home for any team relocating to L.A. next season.
It means being forced to return to a substandard stadium in the city they just tried to leave. It’s even more nonsense now. And unless they do right by the Raiders after excluding them – cue laughter – the Rams and Chargers will be carving up the LA market and the league will have again gotten over on the ghost of Al Davis.
“Another team or teams going in there would have a huge impact on that (revenue)”, Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said last week in a video posted on his team’s website. “But I don’t think the Raiders want to be a tenant”.
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“It all comes down to what deal can be made with Kroenke to partner or stand down”, one source with knowledge of the negotiations said.
