When Mayor Kevin Faulconer pushed a plan that offered $350 million and public land, the Spanos family called it “paltry”. Was San Antonio an option for a team?
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“I will be working over the next several weeks to explore the options that we have now created for ourselves to determine the best path forward for the Chargers”, Spanos said following the owners’ vote Tuesday. A new report today suggested San Antonio might be a target. The Chargers have played in San Diego for 55 seasons after one year in Los Angeles when the former AFL franchise was born. “We owe it to this community to come together on a fair agreement”.
Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani told City News Service that he has been in touch with other city representatives.
“I will most definitely still be a fan of the Rams”.
Spanos has wanted a replacement for San Diego’s aging Qualcomm Stadium for around 15 years, a quest stymied thus far by the city’s fiscal problems of a decade ago, the recession and difficulty in finding a suitable site.
The NFL and the Rams spent time Wednesday hammering out the framework of a deal, which could include split ownership of the Inglewood stadium or having the Chargers be Kroenke’s tenant. At the time, the NFL did not allow black football players in the league.
The Chargers have until January 2017 to opt for Inglewood. They are not optimistic, however, that a ballot initiative calling for public funding for a portion of a new stadium would pass.
The team is expected to make a decision whether to resume negotiating with San Diego much more quickly than that, according to National Football League sources. The Inglewood proposal defeated the Chargers’ joint venture with the Oakland Raiders on a stadium in Carson. They ended a long quest to give the nation’s most popular and prosperous professional sports league a presence once more in the country’s second-largest market, sending the Rams back to Los Angeles beginning next season after an absence of 22 years. San Diego would become available if the Chargers exit.
“We’re not here to throw cold water on any proposal”, Goldsmith said.
How about the Raiders, who are playing on one-year leases in a baseball stadium?
Carter thinks the team’s marketing department will need a smart plan to re-introduce the Rams, who broke hearts in 1994 with their departure.
“It’s more than just a stadium”, Goodell said of the Inglewood project. “We have approached this in the spirit of openness and cooperation”, Faulconer said. “This is what we’re willing to do”.
He said clarity will come if the Chargers resume negotiations.
“A lot of it is on the record, there won’t be a lot of, ‘He said, she said, ‘” Stolze said.
Pankey was drafted by the Rams in 1980 out of Penn State and played 11 seasons in Los Angeles as a left tackle.
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They must decide where to play on Sundays until their palatial, billion-dollar new home in Inglewood is completed in 2019. The city has claimed that the Chargers didn’t negotiate in good faith and had several misrepresentations in their relocation bid. If they decline, the Oakland Raiders then have one year to decide if they will join the Rams.
