Likelihood San Diego, Oakland or St. Louis will ever get NFL teams again

The Game Room
1

For the first time since the 1940s cities have lost their NFL teams with the possibility of never getting another one or having a second team in their metropolitan market.

SAN DIEGO
PROS: HUGE city of over a million people. City was willing to help fund a new stadium for the Padres. Spurned fans have refused to make the 2 hour trip to support the Chargers in hated LA so football loyalty can be easily won over.

CONS: San Diego has a reputation as a bit of a lukewarm sports town. That’s not a knock: if I lived in such a nice place I’d probably not care about sports either. The proof is in the pudding: a metro area of 3.3 million and left with only one sports team.

LIKELIHOOD: SLIGHT, BUT IT WILL TAKE MANY YEARS. At some point there’s a possibility the Chargers will tire of being second banana and paying rent to another NFL team in LA. If San Diego changes its attitude and offers a favorable stadium deal, the Chargers will move back in a New York minute.

OAKLAND
PROS: Absolutely none. Oakland has not approved a new stadium in like 50 years and teams are leaving in droves. The Raiders left , the Warriors moved across the Bay and even rumors abound the A’s are looking to move to their fourth city. Raiders fans will make the 6 hour drive or one hour flight to Las Vegas in droves to keep supporting their Raiders because after all its Vegas, and aren’t interested in another team.

CONS: Kinda just covered it. Oakland has quickly become a sports wasteland.

LIKELIHOOD: None. Zero. Oakland will never land another NFL franchise. Even the XFL doesn’t want them.

ST. LOUIS
PROS: No NFL team here has left a geographic black hole in the Midwest (Kansas City is 248 hours away). There is a legacy of two teams and one Super Bowl here in the past 60 years. With a metropolitan market of almost 3 million and only two well supported teams, there’s plenty of room for a third NFL foray into this market.

CONS: Like I just said, “third”. And both the Cardinals and Rams were stolen from other cities so any NFL legacy here is questionable at best. Both the Cardinals and Rams fled during low attendance seasons.

LIKELIHOOD: SLIGHT AND IT WILL TAKE A LOT OF MOVING PARTS. St. Louis fans won’t accept another “rent-a-team”. The only way the NFL will return is through expansion, which is very unlikely, and a stadium deal, which is another reason the Rams moved to LA. That said, there’s no reason to think St. Louis fans will not embrace an NFL teams that is truly their own, not someone else’s cast off.
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In what world is Las Vegas a 6 hour drive from Oakland? 8 plus.

Oakland will need to build a new stadium(s) and that probably can’t be done without a lot of graft. I don’t see a reason why they can’t keep the name while moving nearby though, the Giants and the Jets exist.

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See also the Arlington Cowboys, Orchard Park Bills, Santa Clara 49ers and Landover (Maryland) Redskins.

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Huh, didn’t know about the Bills. Santa Clara is particularly egregious as that’s 45 minutes to an hour drive.

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Fair enough I still think Raiders fans will make the trip.

I was afraid the 49ers/Jets-Giants points were going to come up. Let’s be honest if the 49ers win the Super Bowl San Francisco will go nuts and the same applies to New York.

I was in Milwaukee when Green Bay won their last Super Bowl and they celebrated just like Milwaukee won.

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Just for comparison, how far is between Boston and Foxborough in terms of mileage and driving time?

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It’s actually kind of funny when people poke fun of the “New Jersey Giants/Jets” because it means they inexplicably think those teams are named after the state, as opposed to that massive city (biggest in the country!) literally 4 miles away from the stadium.

Get your acts together, people…they’re properly mocked as the “East Rutherford Giants/Jets.”

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Likewise, in what universe is St. Louis 248 hours from KC? You could walk the distance faster than that. (I assume that’s more of a typo, since 248 miles is approximately correct.)

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Have you seen gameday traffic?

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I wouldn’t entirely rule Oakland out. One advantage that it has is that it’s part of a major metropolitan area, and over time, populations can shift. Who’s to say that the population gets priced out of the peninsula and moves east, bringing high tech jobs and incomes with them? I don’t see happening now, but I could see it happening at some point. I’ve also wondered if at some point the East Bay and Sacramento couldn’t perhaps share some sports teams.

I really don’t see St Louis getting another major sports franchise. Its metropolitan area population growth has stagnated for the past 10-15 years. If you’re a St Louis area public official, it’s hard to see how you sell the city to the league and it’s hard to see how you see the league to the city considering how badly they got screwed by the Rams and the NFL leadership.

San Diego seems the most likely to get a team and it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Chargers eventually decide that they were better off down South. Obviously, we’re talking a minimum of a decade for this ‘experiment’ in L.A. to play out, but I hope San Diego gets their team back.

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NFL not worried about Oakland while the 49ers are still in the area. They were not even worried when LA had no team for a long while. NFL is so big they can be OK with a few issues that would hurt other leagues.

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to be fair, the Administration and Practice Facility has always been located in Santa Clara, even going back to the 1980’s when Joe Montana was the quarterback.

They would just bus up to SF the night before and stay at a hotel by the airport for games at Candlestick.

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I think that this is a distinct possibility. The Chargers haven’t been able to draw in L.A. since they moved (though being stuck in that soccer stadium didn’t help), and they will almost undoubtedly continue to play second fiddle to the Rams, even after they move into Stan Kroenke’s new stadium for 2020.

Maybe that’s enough for Chargers ownership, but if not, and if they can come up with a way to build a new stadium in San Diego that the taxpayers can support, I could totally foresee them moving back.

As for Oakland and St. Louis, I think the outlook is grimmer, at least for the foreseeable future. I don’t know that there are any other teams which are going to consider moving in the near future, other than maybe the Jaguars, and the NFL is far more interested in getting a team into London than in going back to those two cities.

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I agree that Sam Diego seems like it’s the most likely landing spot.

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And there’s just as many, or even more, 49er fans in Silicon Valley as SF proper. The people raising the biggest stink were the ones who think the world drops off south of the city and the bridges lead to nowhere.

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I think almost every team does this the night before the game regardless of location of the stadium. They want their players away from their families with each other the night before the game.
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I doubt Oakland ever again. The Oakland Raiders became prominent during the explosion of football on TV during the 1970s, even the kids that watched them are now in their 50s. The Bay Area is very international and diverse, there’s room for one NFL team, but pro football will never dominate the market there.

San Diego. Highly doubt it unless the Chargers flop horribly in LA. San Diego isn’t a great sports town, it’s got lots of military and retired military with their old sports loyalties and the weather is just too nice. The NFL season kicks into high gear after Halloween as the weather gets lousy in a lot of the country while San Diegans are debating which surfboard to use on Thanksgiving.

St Louis is a a tough one. It’s a city that supports baseball and hockey and doesn’t have a lot of transplants. But, it’s not a growing city and certainly isn’t a target of most millennials. And, it’s failed twice. No one is clamouring to bring hockey back to Atlanta, for example.

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I still don’t ever see a team in London. The NFL can do everything possible to try to grow the game there but they can’t change the fact that the Sunday night game is often the best of the week and that starts at 1 am London time.

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The Chargers will probably experience a nice bump in popularity once they move into their new stadium - one would hope anyway. But the real test comes once they’re a few years in and trying to sell out the stadium.

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The Chargers’ move to LA was extremely ill-advised; it’s one of the dumbest franchise moves in the history of a major North American sports league. San Diego will get another team eventually, and, yeah, it could be the Chargers.

Oakland is very unlikely in any foreseeable timeframe.

St. Louis was seriously burned by the Rams, and I don’t think they have a taste for the NFL’s bullshit.

Here’s the thing about pro sports:

  1. All the major leagues have a policy, official or unofficial, that any stadium must be paid for, at least mostly, by the taxpayers.
  2. So far they have usually been able to get politicians to agree to this.
  3. IT’s a gigantic scam that the taxpayers always get ripped off on.
  4. Some places have wised up and that number will grow.

Right now, I think most US cities could be grifted into building a new stadium for an NFL team. I am not sure that is true of all of them, and St. Louis may be one of the exceptions. They did offer the Rams half a billion dollars of taxpayer money and the Rams responded by essentially insulting the city and saying St. Louis sucked. That might be it, especially when a lot of St. Louis fans still remember the Cardinals.