Gone Fishing: L.A. Rams Fire Jeff Fisher

The Los Angeles Rams vaulted to the top spot in the sports news stream this afternoon when they announced they had made a head coaching change by dismissing Jeff Fisher after a 4-9 start to the 2016 season. The Rams lost their fourth straight game on Sunday and they had lost eight of their last nine games.

The reason why this move came as a bit of a surprise is that the team and Fisher had just recently confirmed that Fisher and General Manager Les Snead had both signed contract extensions (Fisher was given an extension through the 2018 season). The Rams owner, Stan Kroenke, spoke today about the firing of Coach Fisher and explained that the thought process at the time of the extension (which actually was signed before this season began) was to reward Fisher for making the transition of the franchise from St. Louis to their relocation this season to Los Angeles. The Rams are set to move into a huge new stadium facility in a few years and they thought Fisher could lead them into that stage in their progression in Southern California.

This season, however, was a spectacular failure for Fisher who has been dogged by on-field and off-field issues all season. The first issue was the decision to play Case Keenum at quarterback and bench the Rams top draft pick, Jared Goff, which then led to the media pressing Fisher about playing Goff. The team had traded future draft selections to move up to the top overall spot in the draft to select Goff and Fisher kept him on the bench.

When the media pressured Fisher about this situation, it was essentially discovered that he was against the decision to trade all of those future assets to move up to select Goff. The selection of Jared Goff was supposed to represent the future of the franchise in their new Los Angeles chapter, and that player was not in the plans for the head coach of the team, that was the first sign of trouble for Fisher.

Next, the play of the team after a surprising start, began to spiral downward. The players looked unfocused, and the play turned sloppy and undisciplined in all three phases: offense, defense, and special teams. The new fan base in L.A. grew weary quickly and called for Goff to get a shot at quarterback.

Coach Fisher, under what I would assume was intense pressure from the front office and the owner, relented and started Jared Goff. The situation went from bad to worse as the turnover ratio for the team ballooned and the Rams dropped their next four games. It was unfair to Goff too, since he had not seen the field at all, and then he is dropped into the middle of an already rocky season, and he is told to essentially learn the offense “on the go”.

The offensive woes continued with the Rams getting blown out by the Atlanta Falcons yesterday in front of a dwindling home crowd. The comments by running back Todd Gurley after the game are summed up by him calling the Rams “a middle school offense”, and in my opinion Gurley should not be saying anything to the media to criticize anything because his play has been well below the expectations, his performance has been terrible this season.

The offense is most probably a main reason why the decision to fire Jeff Fisher was made at this point because if the front office was lukewarm about keeping Fisher as their coach, the sooner they transition the new offensive scheme for Jared Goff to learn, the better off they will be in the long term. I have seen this with other teams and their young quarterbacks, the management wants to avoid having them learn multiple systems, and stability is needed for success.

Furthermore, Fisher had the whole ordeal with Eric Dickerson which unraveled off the field which became a huge distraction for the team. Dickerson is a Hall of Fame running back who was a staple of the L.A. Rams in their original run in Southern California before the team relocated to St. Louis in the mid-1990s.

Dickerson was seeking some on-field passes for himself and his friends, Fisher reportedly denied the request, and a rather vocal (at least Dickerson was) and public feud between the two men ensued. Fisher was never going to win a fight with a Rams former player that carries as much clout as Dickerson, so I knew this was going to be yet another “black mark” against Fisher.

The Rams were blown out yesterday by Atlanta, as I mentioned earlier, and with that loss Coach Fisher tied Dan Reeves for the most losses in an NFL coaching career in the history of the league. It was a matter of time before the hammer was going to drop on Fisher, I thought it was going to be after the season on that Monday where characteristically coaching changes are made.

In the interim, John Fassel, the son of former New York Giants head coach, Jim Fassel, will step in and guide the team. The Rams have a game on the road in Seattle on Thursday night, which also surprised many with the timing of this decision today, it is a short week for the team to prepare. This change being made at this point translates into a situation where reading between the lines it had to have been very rough behind the scenes over the past few days.

The aftermath beyond these last three games of the 2016 debacle of a season for the L.A. Rams is that the team with a multi-billion dollar new stadium being constructed along with a huge retail and entertainment district surrounding it, which is dubbed “NFL Disneyland” needs to make a big splash again. The Rams front office needs to hire a big name to replace Fisher. They need a big time offensive minded head coach to install a system that complements Jared Goff, who they have committed significantly toward being their franchise quarterback.
Those names are Mike Shanahan, Jon Gruden, and Jim Harbaugh. The plan, according to reports from ESPN, NFL Network, and others if Shanahan was hired his son, Kyle, would join him in L.A. and would take the reins as head coach in a few years.

The most intriguing name, whether you like him or not, is Harbaugh. In my own opinion, I do not think that Gruden has interest in leaving his very lucrative ESPN commentary job to coach again, or else he would have done so already. I would also have some concerns if I were the Rams about whether Gruden still had the fire to coach after being away from the sideline for so long.

The Rams roster is not very good and needs a lot of work to build toward a playoff contender, let alone a championship contender. I would think Gruden would be interested in a team that was closer to winning than one that will take a bit of rebuild before it can turn that corner.

Harbaugh, though, is a name that is going to gain traction because he has lived and coached on the West Coast with Stanford and the San Francisco 49ers, and he had great success at both stops. In his current situation at the University of Michigan there have been some significant bumps in the road in that situation because Harbaugh wants to do things his way, and Michigan has resisted completely handing him the keys to do so.

The Rams, if they were very aggressive, could pry Harbaugh away from his alma mater, especially if they put enough money on the table. The fact that Stan Kroenke is a billionaire and has a significant amount of resources dedicated to making the Rams a part of the fabric of L.A. again is leverage for the next coach to utilize as well.

In a related note, now that Fisher is dismissed, Eric Dickerson has stated that he will attend Rams games again, and for whatever it is worth, he just started following Jim Harbaugh on Twitter.

The Rams ownership and management made a bold push to the NFL to gain relocation into the coveted L.A. market before any other team, and their first season there has been a flop. They need to make another bold move by naming the right man to coach the team moving forward and transition this team into one that will capture the consciousness of the fan base in Los Angeles. They need to right this ship before it sinks completely.

NFL – Los Angeles Update – The Fate of 3 Franchises

The NFL returned to Los Angeles with a preseason game last week between the newly relocated L.A. Rams hosting the Dallas Cowboys in front of almost 90,000 fans at the L.A. Coliseum. The Rams, who had called Southern California home for decades before moving to St. Louis in the mid ‘90s, only to return again to Los Angeles in a landmark decision by the NFL owners committee in February.

The Rams once played at the Coliseum, so the game had a retro feel, almost like a “back to the future” kind of vibe to it, and the team showed that they have some growing to do in order to get themselves back into a contender in the NFC. The top overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, Rams quarterback Jared Goff, looked shaky and inconsistent at points. The offense features a future star in the league at running back, Todd Gurley, and the defense is young but talented.

The on-field issues for the Rams are only one piece of the equation, the bigger picture is the importance of Los Angeles to the future of three franchises: the San Diego Chargers, the Oakland Raiders, and the before mentioned Rams. The vote that landed the Rams back in L.A. and approved the plan by Rams ownership to build a gigantic stadium and other development in Inglewood has some important caveats to it.

The Chargers have the right of first refusal, essentially as part of the NFL vote, they have two separate one year options on relocation to L.A. if they cannot come to an agreement with the authorities involved in San Diego to remain in that market. The Chargers exercised their first of the two options by choosing to remain in San Diego for the 2016 football season.

The stadium proposal for the Chargers, which I covered in previous articles, centers on a waterfront facility that will adjoin an expanded convention center space for the city. The voters in San Diego will ultimately decide the fate of the team with a referendum ballot initiative on Election Day in November. The measure will decide if the public funding portion of the project, which will be obtained through tax increases on tourism and hotels, will be approved by the citizens. In the event that the measure fails, I think the Chargers will move to Los Angeles and join the Rams in the Inglewood stadium.

Conversely, an approved vote by the required majority in San Diego would make for an interesting scenario because the Chargers would remain in San Diego. This would open the door for the Raiders to potentially move to Los Angeles under the terms of the agreement in the NFL owners vote regarding the return of the league to that market.

Raiding LA?

The report I saw from Mike Florio on NBC Sports was very interesting regarding the future of the NFL in L.A. in that the sources he consulted stated that the Rams would be very reluctant to have the Raiders join them in that market. The prevailing theory being that the Raiders (who also once called L.A. their home) would quickly become more popular than the Rams in Los Angeles.

The survey data seems to indicate that the L.A. market would have a more lukewarm reception for the Chargers in that market, and the Rams would be the more popular team in that scenario. The Raiders were enormously popular in L.A. when they played there, particularly in the ‘90s when the Silver & Black represented a greater societal symbolism with the movement towards the hip hop cultural revolution at that time which fostered an ESPN films production.

The Raiders have been working on several different fronts to find a new long term stadium solution to improve their revenue streams in order to stay competitive in the modern NFL landscape. The team has been working with Oakland on a new stadium for years, it has considered a relocation to San Antonio (that could be leverage for Oakland to make a deal), and the most recent scenario involves a potential deal with Las Vegas to relocate to the desert.

The other potential option for the future of the Raiders could be a move to L.A., but that would be put on the table as an option only after the Chargers exhaust their two optional years, which would mean 2018 at the earliest for a relocation to their former home in Southern California. That could still potentially happen if they do not reach an agreement with Oakland on a stadium deal in the interim.

In my view, as I have covered this topic and the NFL and their race to return to L.A. for years now, the Raiders situation is a mess and it will remain complicated for a while until it gains eventual resolution. The team ownership, notably principal owner Mark Davis, spins the line that the Raiders have many options as far as where they will eventually call home.

Back to Reality

However, in reality, he still has to get that relocation approved by the NFL and the full body of owners. Some pundits who like to “stir the pot” will say that Davis does not need NFL approval to move the team, that if he has a break in the lease in Oakland, he can move the team anywhere. While this may be true in theory, the fact is that if Davis wants to tap into the money that the NFL would provide toward the construction of a new stadium in a different market (usually in the area of $100 million) then he would need the approval of the NFL to relocate the franchise.

Some fans may recall that when the NFL announced that the Rams were going to be moving into Los Angeles, the league provided an incentive, which amounts to a consolation prize to the Raiders and Chargers. That incentive is to provide an additional $100 million (for a total of $200 million) to both teams if they could get a new stadium deal done in their current home markets of Oakland and San Diego respectively.

It is this incentive where I feel that both teams will eventually make something work in their home markets. In the San Diego scenario, the waterfront proposal has to pass in the November referendum. In the case of the Raiders and Oakland, I do not believe that they are going to Las Vegas especially now that the powers that be in that scenario have already changed the agreement.

The original Las Vegas proposal was for a 65,000 seat domed stadium to be built near The Strip to be shared between the NFL team (in this case the Raiders) and the UNLV football team. The proposed site development plan totaled $1 billion for the stadium and the city was willing to pay close to half of that amount. Mark Davis and the Raiders were going to get $100 million from the NFL to offset his end of the financing.

In the months that followed, Las Vegas got awarded an expansion NHL hockey franchise. Some feel that this recognition of finally getting a seat at the table at one of The Big Four sports leagues led the politicians there to change their tune about the NFL stadium proposal. The public financing end of that proposal went down sharply from the initial $500 million they were willing to absorb. The site that was identified has some other issues with it (which I will not detail further) and so now the proposal has expanded to nine different sites for a potential football stadium. These developments, on balance, make it seem that Las Vegas is less serious about spending public money to get the NFL to come to them, and that was the entire reason why Mark Davis was even entertaining the notion in the first place.

Gambling on the Desert

I thought that the Vegas option was waning but today I read two different reports: one that has the Raiders applying for trademarks around the name “Las Vegas Raiders”, and another that stated that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is looking to block the Raiders progress in Vegas because he prefers the team to remain in Oakland. This could get very sticky, very quickly. It is no secret that Goodell prefers that most teams stay in their current markets and the Bay Area is an important strategic region for the league. The issue of Las Vegas and gambling brings a whole other level of concern I think that the NFL is not willing to publicly recognize, but it is palpable internally within the league office at this point.

The San Antonio option for the Raiders, in my view and it is shared by others with knowledge of this situation, is that it is a ploy for leverage for Davis to get a stadium done in Oakland. I understand that Davis owns quite a bit of land there but the other issue to consider is the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans would vote against that relocation. The owners of those two teams, Jerry Jones and Bob McNair, are both very powerful NFL owners that would get their other friends on the ownership panel to reject this potential move. Those two teams would be reluctant to have another competitor move into their region. The San Antonio option seems unlikely as well.

That leaves the Raiders probably staying in Oakland because they have the most incentive to do so ($200 million from the NFL towards stadium development) and the history of the franchise is tied to that market. The NFL would like to keep two teams in the Bay Area if possible, so I think every effort will be exhausted toward getting a stadium deal done. The issues with Oakland are that the public appetite toward funding a stadium with tax dollars is very unpopular.

The secondary issue is the land for a stadium is limited as far as the number of suitable sites that could be developed in a reasonable amount of time. Mark Davis has floated a proposal in the past for a very intimate new stadium around 50,000 seats but he prefers the current site where the team plays at Oakland Coliseum.

The problem with the Coliseum site development is that the A’s play baseball there from April through October, so it leaves very little time to do construction at the site without conflicting with the A’s and their 82 games played on that site each season. The A’s, for their part, have signed a lease extension to stay in Oakland, but have been trying to move to San Jose for years. The San Francisco Giants have the territorial rights to San Jose and have blocked the A’s from moving there.

The Raiders were hopeful that the A’s would move across the Bay to San Jose because it would clear the path for them to build a stadium on land adjacent to the Coliseum on a faster timetable. The presence of the A’s on that site provides another hurdle to the project, but in the end, I think the Raiders will get a deal done to stay in Oakland.

Rams Reboot

The fate of the Rams is also tied to these other two teams, even though the Rams got the coveted first shot at the NFL reboot in Los Angeles. The Rams will have the inside track on all of the top corporate sponsorships and marketing opportunities. However, if they have to eventually share the market with another team that will impact them over the long term. The difference comes with which team they could potentially have to share the market with in Los Angeles.

The infamous “polls” that Rams owner Stan Kroenke cited from Twitter that allegedly displayed that the residents in the L.A. area favored the Rams over the Chargers in terms of popularity were part of the pitch that landed his team in Los Angeles. The Chargers would not be nearly as popular, according to other industry studies, as the Raiders would be in L.A. which was part of NBC Sports and Mike Florio’s excellent reporting on this situation.

A relocation of the Raiders to Los Angeles in the future would have a significant impact on the Rams and their presence in the market from a marketing and fan base development perspective. The obvious best case scenario for the Rams would be if the Raiders and Chargers both stayed out of the L.A. market for the long term. In the interim they will look to reap the benefits of being the first entry for the NFL into that huge untapped area which is the second largest media market in the US. They will also open their new stadium in Inglewood in a few years which will provide the NFL with a glitzy destination for the NFL Draft Combine, the Super Bowl, and other large scale league wide meetings.

The Olympic fever that just gripped the whole country will also benefit the future bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics where the US Olympic Committee is looking for the Rams Inglewood stadium to be the landmark centerpiece to a bid to get the Olympic Games back on US soil.

In the end, the Rams may be just beginning their new quest to rebrand themselves as “the team” in Los Angeles, but the team and the NFL still has unsettled business with the Chargers and Raiders. The fate of all three of these franchises are tied to L.A. and it remains to be seen how the political and financial forces at play will decide the chain of events regarding the future of the sport that America loves in San Diego and Oakland respectively. The next few months will provide some clarity, but for now, it is still anyone’s guess how it will be decided, and the fans of the three teams hang in the balance.

San Diego Chargers Downtown Stadium Proposal News

In a follow up to earlier news stories on this topic, the San Diego Chargers of the NFL have advanced their proposed stadium plan for the downtown waterfront site in details that were leaked to the media on Tuesday. Several local news sources in San Diego have reported on this development, and the full proposal is expected to be formally released at some point this week.

The new stadium for the team is being sent through a process called citizens initiative which in the State of California is similar to a referendum voting mechanism. In this process if a certain amount of votes is gained on the proposed issue at hand then the measure will gain approval. The Chargers and the City of San Diego municipal officials are utilizing this mechanism because if the stadium proposal passes via citizens’ initiative, then the exhaustive environmental review of the land being used for these developments will be bypassed.

In California, the environmental review process could add extensive time to the completion of the project. In the event that the initiative is approved by the majority of the general public then the stadium development will take a huge step forward. It should be noted that the Chargers new stadium, under the details of this plan, would be attached to a new convention center for the city. Therefore, the vote will be for approval for both projects.

In an ironic twist, this initiative is the same procedural mechanism that the Chargers used to accelerate their stadium proposal in the LA suburb of Carson in order to “fast track” the land there in the race to LA with the Rams. Carson approved the measure, but the Chargers/Raiders joint proposal was voted down by the full league ownership panel in February.

I will outline the terms of the proposal, the “high points” and then to differentiate the other reporting on this topic, I will focus in on the potential issues with the proposal and the perspective of the parties involved in how this situation got to this point. A comparison will be made to the new stadium deal for the Chargers and what the agreement would look like if the team used the option to move to Los Angeles as a tenant in the Rams new stadium there.

Leaked Proposal

The proposal calls for the following in terms of the financing for the new stadium and convention center:

1. The San Diego Chargers will contribute $650 million to the development of the stadium (important note: the NFL contributes $100 million to any new stadium project and the Chargers will get an additional $100 million from the league as part of an incentive stay in San Diego that was granted to them when the NFL voted against their proposed move to Los Angeles)
2. The government will contribute $350 million to the development of the new stadium and will set up a Joint Public trust essentially to establish municipal ownership of the stadium. Translation: the city will own the stadium. The municipal government will also raise the $800 million for the new convention center.
3. The San Diego Chargers will get all stadium revenues for the 10 – 13 game days that they operate within the facility (includes preseason and playoffs).
4. The City will get all revenues from the rest of the events held at the stadium throughout the remainder of the year.
5. The Chargers will be responsible for all construction cost overruns that may occur.
6. The City of San Diego will finance their portion of the project through bonds and the increase of the hotel tourism tax which will increase from 12.5% to 16.5% this will be for the stadium and the convention center.
7. The increase in hotel tax will “sunset” after a period of 33 years. Then it will decrease to 13.5%
8. The stadium will have 65,000 seats and expected completion date is 2022

Some of that division of asset allocation is pretty standard in the stadium development deals. The construction overruns are usually covered by the team involved in these projects. In the current state of affairs in California where residents feel squeezed by high property taxes and increasing costs of living against flat wage increases, makes the public appetite for a tax increase to build a stadium a complete nonstarter. Therefore, the hotel tourism tax increase was the obvious pathway for both sides in this situation, the team and the politicians, to ensure the best chance for approval of the initiative.

Definite Issues

There are some definite issues with the proposal though which may be more readily discussed in the next few months. The most critical of all is the fact that the neither the Chargers nor the city own the land that the proposed stadium is supposed to occupy. In recent years similar arena or stadium proposals have faced that critical issue as well. In Seattle there is a struggle over land to build a new arena to attract an NBA or NHL team. In Sacramento, the Kings faced some of that push back in their quest for a new downtown facility. The most public dispute was in Brooklyn back when the Nets proposed the Barclays Center in the Atlantic Yards area and the local residents fought back. The government used imminent domain to push people off their property to build the arena.

The assumption could be drawn here that if the proposal has advanced to this stage that one or both parties involved has some kind of “inside track” on gaining the land for this potential use, but that is not always the case. In my view, a huge part of positioning a proposal for development is to make sure you have control of the land in the first place. However, the politics of the situation dictates that if they get this “ball rolling”, then the public will back them to gain control of the land, and that is the card that might be played in this case.

The second issue here is that the Chargers may not have the public approval sentiment necessary to get the citizens’ initiative passed successfully. The public perception of the team took a major negative blow when the team and their owners, the Spanos family, decided to pull up stakes and set their sights on moving to Los Angeles. Some residents feel that the team which has been based in San Diego since 1961 abandoned them for a better potential scenario in LA. The Spanos family now has to return to San Diego and gain a two-thirds majority in this ballot initiative to move forward with the stadium plan. That may not occur, which would set the stage for the team to either explore the longer route to the downtown stadium or exercise their option and move to Los Angeles in 2017.

In the event that the ballot initiative is successful, in fact, in the opinion of others regardless of whether it does or not – the politicians were always more in favor of the Mission Valley stadium proposal because the city owns that land. However, the attached convention center project with the stadium downtown being one component of a larger project which could benefit far more residents, could be the reason that this measure may gain approval.

Charged Up

The Chargers are viewing this situation in two ways: they have always favored the downtown site over the Mission Valley option, and they view the convention center being attached to new stadium as a way to compete with LA and other cities for Super Bowls and other large scale events.

That is a good segue to another point that was neglected from the leaked proposal yesterday: it does not state whether the stadium will have a roof or some kind of retractable cover to it. That type of feature adds a great deal of cost to a stadium development project, but it also enhances the functionality of the facility to be able to host political conventions, NCAA basketball Final Four, and other big revenue generating events.

The proposed new Rams stadium in Inglewood, CA will have a roof to be in consideration for just those sorts of events. The San Diego proposal should consider that design feature for the same rationale, however it could add around $200 million in estimated new costs to the project.

The Chargers, as was mentioned earlier, lost their bid to build a stadium in the LA suburbs, but they still have the opportunity to join the Rams in LA if they cannot get a long term stadium deal brokered in San Diego. The Chargers would be a tenant in the Inglewood stadium which means they would not have an equal share in all the revenues in that arrangement. They would essentially lease the building from the Rams and operate it on game days in that scenario.

Greed Wins

This is the main reason why I have maintained the belief that the Chargers are going to remain in San Diego and get the downtown stadium deal completed. In this agreement with San Diego, the NFL is subsidizing $200 million of the $650 million that the Chargers are contributing to the project. That means that the Spanos family will spend $450 million to get a $1 billion dollar new stadium that they will not have to share with any other team. The Chargers will reap all the football related revenue as well as the profits from any naming rights agreement to the stadium.

The Chargers will also remain in a market where they have established relationships with corporate sponsors and an established fan base of season ticket holders and they would not have to compete with another team for those audiences which they would have to in the event they moved to Los Angeles.

It comes down to greed. The reason why the Chargers will stay in San Diego if this deal gets approved is because they will not have to share revenues with anyone, and the city wants to keep the Chargers and have the new stadium and convention area to lure the Super Bowl and other big events back to San Diego. It is the same reason why the NFL approved the Rams ambitious new Inglewood colossal stadium and real estate venture: greed.

I am not a proponent of cities or counties paying for stadiums or arenas, I think the teams and the leagues involved should finance a portion of it and have private financing for the remainder. The Rams project, for what it is worth, will be fully privately financed. The City of San Diego wants to own the stadium though and has decided that is the right way for them to move forward. There is inherent risk in owning structures of that size and magnitude. That risk must be mitigated by the potential revenue return on the investment. In this case, the studies must have proven that out for San Diego to move ahead with this type of arrangement.

In the end, the November ballot measure will be the next big hurdle for this project to clear. Then, the land ownership piece will come into play. The stage could be set for the Chargers to remain in San Diego in a world class new stadium. The NFL will inevitably be the ultimate winner in that scenario, which I have reported about in the past, and it remains a valid point. Then, the league would just have to figure out what to do with the other team that whiffed on going to Los Angeles: the Raiders, but that is a whole other saga for another time. In the end analysis between the money and power of all of this politics is greed, the fans are used as pawns, in the end the pursuit of greed always wins.