LA Football Report – Week 2

It’s never too early to laugh at the NFL. I will, over the course of the season, chronicle the experience of the LA football fan and compare/contrast the performance of LA’s real teams (USC and UCLA) versus those money-grubbing assholes trying to “Fight for LA” (RAMMIT and Shitty Clippers).

Here is a handy table that I will be updating each week:

As you can see, there are laughs aplenty to be had. For one, the record of the two college teams is 5-1 while the NFL teams are 1-3.  Quite honestly, they play better football too.

Also, as others have pointed out, RAMMIT and the Shitty Clippers COMBINED couldn’t outdraw the USC-Texas game.  This, of course, assumes that the announced attendances are even accurate. Multiple reports say that the actual crowd that showed up for  last week’s RAMMIT win over Indy was closer to 48,000 than the 60,128 announced. For comparison purposes, though, we will go with the “official” figures.

It’s actually interesting that the NFL is releasing “official” attendance figures for the LA teams.  Last year, RAMMIT were the only team in ESPN’s attendance tracker to not have attendance reported.  If you followed the link, you will have seen that RAMMIT is not represented this year either.  Also, the Shitty Clippers only have their road game represented.  Notable teams with only one game shown include Washington (RAMMIT opponent Week 2), Indianapolis, (RAMMIT opponent Week 1) and Tampa Bay while Miami is the only team besides RAMMIT not shown on the list.  This, of course, is because they played the Shitty Clippers in Carson and their game against Tampa Bay got moved due to the hurricane.

There were a ton of articles and tweets talking about this from the likes of:

Deadspin

SBNation

Sporting News

USA Today

Pro Football Talk

I could go on, but I think you get my point.  Everyone is making a big deal of this, which is all fine and good.  The one thing that irks me, though, is this piece from the Deadspin article:

Could it be possible, after the NFL spent decades using Los Angeles as a threat to strong-arm cities into building stadiums to keep their teams, that Los Angeles didn’t actually want its own team, let alone two?

To this I say:

WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN LIVING THESE LAST 30 YEARS?!?!?

The only people that wanted the NFL in LA were employed by the NFL.  As the author notes, most people in LA already have a team and it’s not from here.  To that I will add that the team with the highest concentration of fans is the Oakland soon-to-be-Vegas Raiders.  The drive/flight up to Oakland for Raiders games has been a tradition among SoCal fans for decades which will now be made even easier with the team in Vegas.

Of course, the NFL is now trying to do some damage control saying that they “are confident” in the LA market. If you read the article, the author is basically putting all the chips in the new stadium attracting fans. That is laughable.  Yes, there will be a short-term effect as everyone will want to check out the new thing in town.

HOWEVAH, they will quickly be reminded that the new thing in town is in Inglewood. The town that is always up to no good. And that has really shitty freeway access and in which the closest freeway boasts the worst traffic in all of Los Angeles.

USC plays and sells out games at the Coliseum because of four major reasons:

1. The security is top notch.
2. The pre-game activities are held on-campus and there is a safety corridor that leads from the USC campus past the beautiful Exposition Park museums and to the Coliseum.
3. The 110 freeway entrances/exits are within a block of the stadium/parking areas.
4. The subway has two train stops within walking distance of the USC campus/Exposition Park.

There is no reason for fans to be interacting with the neighborhood south, west, and east of the Coliseum.  Which you don’t want to because reasons.

Inglewood, on the other hand, is at least a mile away from the two nearest freeways and has no public transit options.

Getting in and out of that stadium will be an unpleasant experience to say the least. It was difficult enough when the Lakers played at the Forum and that only held a quarter of what this stadium is supposed to hold.

What does this all add up to?  Well, if you read Florio’s article on the Pro Football Talk site, there is a very telling sentence:

Regardless, the question now becomes when/if someone will be making an exit from the L.A. market far sooner than planned.

Read the last four words again.

FAR SOONER THAN PLANNED.

The NFL was never committed to the LA market. All they wanted was to continue to use the lure of the LA market to get other communities/suckers to pony up for new stadiums. Kroenke was able to get the stadium in Inglewood built because he BOUGHT the land!  He was going to make out either way by turning the area into a residential/commercial mall complex like the many others that are sprouting up in LA all of a sudden.  That was the only way they could get into LA.

RAMMIT and the Shitty Clippers were never meant to stay in LA.

The league talks about London all the time and expanding to other countries.  You know that the LA teams will be the ones to go there, right?

While the NFL is publicly bemoaning the attendance and making transparent “shows of faith” in the LA market, it is actually happy.  This was their plan all along.

How do I know this?

I was one of the people chosen by the NFL to respond to a survey years ago about the possibility of one or two teams moving to the LA market.  I gave an honest assessment and indicated that it would not work.  Our good friend from the old site, Sarah Sprague, also filled one out and, while her responses were a bit more optimistic than mine, they still pointed to difficulty in a team succeeding here.  I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of survey recipients responded in a similar way.

As the league brought the two teams here, I figured that they ignored the survey results and just did what they wanted to do all along.  Which, they did.  However, they didn’t really ignore the survey results. The survey results gave them valuable information that was revealed in Florio’s article.  They figured they could move teams to LA and then blame the market for their failures when they relocated them somewhere else.  For a princely sum.

The owners may be morally reprehensible assholes, but they are not idiots.  Who are the ones laughing all the way to the bank?

So, the big question going forward is how long they will last here until one or both leave.  The new stadium will be supposedly ready by 2020.  The Olympics will be here in 2028.  I’m guessing about midway through is when the first team leaves, most likely the Shitty Clippers and most likely to London.  RAMMIT may stay for a bit longer unless Kroenke is able to get St. Louis to bend over and take it again.

Or maybe Mexico City.

Nah, we all know Mexicans are all RAIIIIIIDERRRRSSSS fans.  And Steelers fans and Cowboys fans and Patriots fans and Packers fans and….  Just like LA.