Sports –
NFL Football Returns To Los Angeles
Los Angeles sports fan are dancing in the streets. NFL football is FINALLY returning to Hollywood in a very big way!
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For more than 2 decades, billionaire developers, corporate bigwigs, Hollywood power-brokers and at least 4 Los Angeles mayors have tried and failed to bring the National Football League back to the nation’s second-largest market. That nightmare is now over.
On Tuesday, NFL owners voted 30-2 to allow the St. Louis Rams to move to Los Angeles for the 2016 season. They also gave the San Diego Chargers a year to decide if they’d like to join the Rams in Inglewood. However, the Chargers declined the 1 year option — and announced they’d rather join the Rams right now.
So, after 20 years without 1 NFL franchise, Los Angeles just snagged 2.
The St. Louis Rams and San Diego Chargers will now be known as the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers. In fact, the NFL has already changed the names on their official website. The Oakland Raiders were also offered the option to return to Los Angeles, but will remain in Oakland for the time being. Interestingly, all 3 teams previously played in LA.
Rams owner Stan Kroenke called the decision to leave St. Louis “bittersweet.”
“We understand the emotions involved with our fans,” he said in his first public comments in more than a year. “It’s not easy to do these things. It’s purposefully made hard.
L.A. is “a difficult place to permit a stadium and build something that we as a league can all be proud of. I think we worked hard and we got a little bit lucky and we had a lot of good people help us,” Kroenke added.
“They made the right decision,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. “It’s such a natural to have the Los Angeles Rams back in Los Angeles.”
The new home for the Rams and Chargers will be built on the site of the old Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood. It will also rival the Dallas Cowboy’s huge facility, by becoming the NFL’s largest stadium with a price tag in the neighborhood of $3 billion dollars.
“We realized this was our opportunity,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, while predicting that the Inglewood stadium would change “not just NFL stadiums and NFL complexes but sports complexes around the world.”
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The Rams and the Chargers currently have 2 of the oldest and low-tech stadiums in the NFL — but all of that is about to change. Developers are envisioning transforming the 298-acre Inglewood site into a multibillion-dollar sports, entertainment, retail and housing complex. Imagine a low-slung, glass-roofed football palace alongside a state-of-the-art performing arts venue as the centerpiece. Consider a stadium with identical locker rooms, offices and owner’s suites for 2 teams, complete with 70,240 seats and the capacity to expand for an additional 30,000 people in standing-room-only areas for large events.
The venue will be set 100 feet into the ground with a 175-foot above-ground profile. The design calls for the stadium to be open on the sides, allowing breezes to flow through and enhance the outdoor feel. It will also feature a roof with metal borders and an area over the playing field made of a transparent material called ETFE, which is as clear as a car windshield and believed to be strong enough to support the weight of a vehicle. The venue will not only host NFL football games, but hopes to host such events as college basketball’s Final Four, the NFL Pro Bowl and scouting combine in addition to conventions and award shows.
“It’s going to be so much more than going to a football game,” said Mark Williams of HKS Inc., the firm designing the stadium. “You’re going to be absorbed into the site, absorbed into the stadium and get a very wide bandwidth of experience. It’s the kind of memory people are going to cherish for a lifetime.”
Until the stadium is complete, the Rams are expected to play at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. It’s unclear if the Chargers will play an additional year in San Diego or choose some other temporary location.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti called the NFL’s decision to return to LA “confirmation that this is a town that nobody can afford to pass up. He added: “It also confirms our strategy over the past 20 years, as painful as it was, that you can bring a sports team without having to spend taxpayer money on it.”
The Inglewood stadium will be built exclusively with private funds and is projected to open in 2019.
They want to build everything a hundred feet in the ground? I don't think that's a good idea with all the earthquakes they have there. That glass roof and those stands could crumble. But it looks real nice. Happy for L.A. to get football back again.