The St. Louis Rams Should Not Move

The NFL is in a predicament right now. Three of its member teams are looking to move to Los Angeles: the Oakland Raiders, the San Diego Chargers, and the St. Louis Rams. If all three teams decide to up sticks and move, it will a disaster for the NFL. Not even Los Angeles could support three teams.

Yeah, we’ve all heard this before. Ever since the Rams and Raiders left in the 1990s, any time a team wants to move (or shake out a little extra cash from their host city), Los Angeles is always mentioned, and it has yet to work. But now, it seems like the second-largest city in the nation will be getting a NFL team again within a few years. The NFL even went so far as to put out feelers for temporary venues in 2016. While the Rose Bowl has already said no, other stadium such as the Coliseum and StubHub Center in Carson are still options.

I believe that if a team is to move to LA within the next few years, it shouldn’t be the Rams, but the Raiders. The Raiders’ stadium situation is far worse than that of the Rams. The O.co Coliseum has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the worst stadiums in not one, but two, of the Big Four sports, and the deal that is on the table for Oakland is, well… calling it “patently ridiculous” would be giving it too much credit.

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The current stadium plan for Oakland includes 4,000 homes, a shopping center, and several office buildings. However, the stadium plan would involve a 20% stake in the team being sold to the land developer at a bargain price of $200 million, and a lease for the stadium lasting 40 years. In addition, the plan also has spaces reserved for the A’s and Warriors despite the fact that Warriors are already planning on moving and the A’s have ruled out working with the developer.

All of this, combined with the fact that Raiders and NFL would foot the bill for the entire $900 million stadium, make the deal a bad one for the Raiders, especially compared to the $1.7 billion dollar project in Carson, California, which would also be funded by the San Diego Chargers (who the Raiders would share the stadium with), public subsidies, and further corporate input. The Carson City Council has even already approved the plan.

Complicating the Rams’s plan to move to Inglewood, California, is a report from ESPN’s John Clayton that NFL owners favor the Carson proposal over the Rams’s proposal for an Inglewood stadium. The Rams are also much further ahead than the other two teams in keeping the franchise in its current city. The $985 million dollar riverfront stadium would have a capacity of 64,000, with capacity for soccer matches reduced to 30,000. The stadium is expected to be complete by 2020 and would not only be home to the Rams, but also a potential MLS expansion franchise.

On the money side, financing would split roughly in half, between the NFL and the Rams and other sources, although Gov. Jay Nixon has stated that “this proposal would place no tax burden on Missourians”. Still, the current plan for a riverfront stadium in St. Louis is more favorable than the Raiders’ and the Rams should do everything in their power to stay in St. Louis.

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