NFL owners will vote Monday on whether to green-light the Raiders for eventual departure to Las Vegas.
It's understood that it's a go.
So the NFL, brought to you by the Vagabond Inn, is doing more shuffling on than Ickey Woods after he scored touchdowns.
The Rams went from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2016, where the Spanos Chargers of Costa Mesa/Carson/Inglewood will join them. The Raiders, after two lame-duck seasons in Oakland, apparently will move to temporary digs in Vegas starting in 2019.
For Chargers followers who care to relive the thrill, the Raiders ongoing departure hits home like three raps to the shins with a ball-peen hammer.
Gluttons one and all, let us count the similarities, shall we?
1) Neither San Diego nor Oakland was willing to hand the NFL a juicy stadium subsidy like those that other cities and states fork over before breakfast.
2) The NFL kept asking until it got what it wanted. Extraordinary means were found to fund football palaces for the Chargers and Raiders.
3) For the Chargers, the problem solver was Rams owner Stan Kroenke, whose brainchild is the pleasure dome in Inglewood that, unlike Kubla Khan's, isn't an opium dream.
As part of Kroenke's planned $2.6-billion development that will also include an NFL campus, the fake-grass venue is to open in 2019, somewhere in a concrete maze far from metro-rail stops.
The Chargers aren't wanted in L.A., but Dean Spanos, the team's overly enabled owner, likes free rent.
3) How did Kroenke solve the L.A. riddle?
The mega-billionaire was as opportunistic as an All-Pro linebacker pouncing on a fumble.
When the California State Supreme Court ruled in the summer of 2014 that a citizens initiative could allow a real-estate project to bypass strict environmental rules, Kroenke was ready to act in L.A.
He had bought a parcel on former Hollywood Park racetrack months earlier.
4) The Inglewood City Council, in effect enabling not only Kroenke but Spanos, whom NFL owners would give a spot in the Kroenke Dome as a consolation prize for shooting him down in Carson, approved the massive real-estate plan.
City councils are important to NFL facility pursuits, as Chargers exec John Spanos, a son of Dean, noted this week when the team announced it had secured a training site in Orange County.
The Chargers are "very excited," Spanos said in a Tweet, "to create this partnership and grateful for the Costa Mesa City Council and their hard work in making it happen."
The italics are mine.
San Diego City Council members were to the bloated, imperiously presented Chargers initiative what Junior Seau was to opposing blockers and ball-carriers.
5) When Inglewood's City Council embraced the NFL, it also weakened San Diego's hand in the stadium game 125 miles to the south.
Inglewood's deal with Kroenke precluded a new environmental impact study and a public vote _ and that drew pointed commentary from Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik.
It's possible that the council members were swayed by the more than $118,000 in campaign contributions made since 2006 by the development firm building the stadium and an associated retail and residential complex. Political corruption, by the way, is also a taxpayer cost.
6) The mega-billionaire Kroenke had a lot more financial clout than Spanos, whose wealth is largely the Chargers franchise.
Kroenke secured about $1 billion in low-cost financing. In League circles, he gained powerful support from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Jones has a side business that runs stadiums. A revenue-growing salesman to the extent that Dean Spanos is not, Jones is known to look askance at NFL franchises that are brakes to the League's revenue train.
7) Nevada lawmakers played the role of Sugar Daddy to Raiders owner Mark Davis, himself also a beggar by NFL standards.
The state legislature pledged $750 million in hotel taxes to an NFL stadium and convention center. It was the largest subsidy to an NFL team.
Making the obvious even more clear, the NFL had officially bedded down with the sports gambling industry.
8) NFL officials say they wanted to stay in Oakland. They say the city's political leadership failed to come up with a compelling plan. Vegas stepped up, they say.
Sound familiar?
9) Both Oakland and San Diego built multi-purpose stadiums in the 1960s, and for awhile, the stadium deals seemed to work out for the cities and the teams.
10) Neither city was able to keep up in the stadium game that the NFL has played with increasing creativity.
The League has extracted billions of dollars from city and state public funding sources while exploiting its federal anti-trust exemption.
Resistance is futile. Fit in or fit out.
11) In the mid-1990s, both Oakland and San Diego patched together Band-Aid solutions to expand their respective venues and placate the NFL. Neither investment turned out well for either city.
12) At Oakland, a hideous upper-deck expansion known as "Mt. Davis" obliterated gorgeous views. With attendance lagging amid the team's stretch of 13 consecutive non-winning seasons, sections of Mt. Davis were tarped off.
13) The city of San Diego invested heavily in a similar expansion of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, killing eastward views in Mission Valley.
As part of the same 1997 subsidy to the Spanos Chargers, the City enacted the infamous ticket guarantee and also provided the team a training site and administrative building on 14 acres north of Mission Valley.
14) Taxpayers in Oakland and San Diego are still paying millions of dollars on the stadium expansions.
Their NFL teams that weren't truly theirs, meantime, are moving on.
15) So, the NFL has uprooted two longtime rivals whose inceptions go back to when John F. Kennedy was in the White House (yes, the Raiders spent nine years in Los Angeles before Al Davis, ticked off at L.A. politicians, moved the team back to Oakland in 1995).
16) Why is California different from the rest of the country when it comes to subsidizing the NFL?
Environmental regulations are a bigger piece to the real-estate puzzle in the Golden State. Also, super-majority votes are needed for public approval of funding measures such as the Chargers initiative.
17) The NFL stands to extract about $1.6 billion in relocation fees from the three moves. Chargers and Raiders franchise valuations are on the rise, too.
The downside is obvious. Los Angeles Chargers and Las Vegas Raiders are abominations in the team's former markets where roots plunge to the early 1960s.
By not brokering a more creative and visionary solution, the NFL missed out on keeping the Chargers in San Diego and the Raiders in Oakland.
I think each move chips away at the League's sports soul (admittedly, about the size of the Grinch's heart).
And, the stadium game may not be over for the Spani. Whereas Jets and Giants owners were friends who shared a facility, the Spanos-Kroenke alliance is one of convenience. Tenancy could wear thin with Dean. His lead counsel on all things stadium, Mark Fabiani, isn't one to twiddle his thumbs.
The Raiders have a far-flung following that will ease the transition. Even so, I doubt the Raiders, playing on fake grass in a sterile Vegas dome, will develop a passionate following like the one they have in Oakland.
