The Spanos family, owner of the Chargers, has until January 2017 to decide whether to serve as a tenant in a to-be-built mega-stadium in Inglewood owned by Stan Kroenke and the officially relocated Los Angeles Rams. If the Chargers don’t take the option, Raiders owner Mark Davis will then have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

In the days after the Jan. 12 announcement that the NFL had given its blessing to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Inglewood, there was considerable cynicism in San Diego and the sports world in general about the Chargers’ one-year option. The assumption was the team was gone.

But in the past 10 days, there have been glimmers of hope that the Chargers may yet be able to work with the city and county of San Diego to build an NFL-worthy stadium with $350 million of public subsidies. The main reason is the emergence of Fred Maas — a high-profile developer and former leader of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversaw highly successful redevelopment efforts in downtown San Diego — as a special advisor to the Chargers helping get a stadium built. The Union-Tribune has more:

“(Maas) has been around San Diego a long time,” Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said on a video posted to the team’s web site. “… He’s very familiar with all the political aspects of what goes on in the city, how all that works. His knowledge of San Diego as a whole will help us.” …

 

Maas was the stadium point man for former Mayor Jerry Sanders, as well as the former director of the Centre City Development Corp.

 

The Chargers suggested to Faulconer that he consider Maas to head the city’s side of stadium negotiations in 2014.

 

After meetings with Faulconer, Maas withdrew from consideration, citing concerns about the commitment he would have to make considering all that the new mayor was working through. … It was around that time in late 2014 that many people close to Spanos began to indicate he had essentially given up on getting a stadium deal in San Diego.

The San Diego Reader offered this tart description of Maas: “a specialist in steering public money into private real estate ventures.”

Raiders owner blasts A’s over long lease

Meanwhile, in Oakland, no Maas-type figure has emerged to help owner Mark Davis deal with local governments. While the Raiders renewed their lease for another year at O.co Coliseum, Davis is sounding increasingly downbeat about the lack of progress toward a new stadium — especially because of the actions of the Oakland A’s, the other primary tenant at the Coliseum.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s,” Davis told CSNBayArea.com … . “They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back. Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”

That’s from coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Leaders of Nevada’s largest city are wooing Davis. Their strongest argument is the prospect of the Raiders not having to pay much or anything toward construction of a new stadium that an NFL team could share with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ football team. Last month, the Review-Journal reported, Davis went to Vegas and …

… met with casino giants Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta, UNLV president Len Jessup and former school president Donald Snyder. Adelson’s Sands Corp. has proposed building a $1.2 billion domed stadium … .

Long-standing NFL concerns about having a team in America’s sports betting mecca remain intact, if not as prominent. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft have come under fire for their early investments in DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports betting site that has exploded in popularity since 2014, and they may be forced to sell their shares.

A series of unflattering media reports have depicted Raiders owner Mark Davis as clueless and outmatched by his responsibilities, with relatively few financial resources. Even if Davis had the best press in the world, however, he would have huge obstacles to overcome. Unlike the owners of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams — the other teams in the L.A. triangle — he has no leverage with his home-town officials. Between their own budget headaches and a long history of scraping with Mark Davis’ late father, previous owner Al Davis, Oakland officials have no interest in offering a subsidy of any kind to the team and appear indifferent to the team departing.

Meanwhile, the Raiders’ and Chargers’ announcement earlier this year that they wanted to build a shared $1.7 billion stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County is far less advanced than Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s planned $1.8 billion Inglewood stadium project. Kroenke has all has necessary environmental OKs to begin construction, and as the league’s second-wealthiest owner, the multibillionaire has no need to hunt for public subsidies or partner with other teams.

If Kroenke is willing to flout league rules and move a team without permission from three-quarters of team owners — as Al Davis did when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982 — he has clear sailing ahead. But if the league puts up enough obstacles to a unilateral move — say, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell trying to withhold TV contract money or threatening some other highly punitive action — Kroenke would be forced to reconsider. As the past three years have shown, Goodell is the most unpredictable commissioner of a major U.S. sport in memory.

No team has enough owner support to relocate — yet

Pro Football Talk, generally the best connected of any media covering the NFL, looks at a possible — perhaps likely — scenario. It appears to be what Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan was talking about last week after owner meetings in New  York City when he referred to a “Plan C.”

With Chargers owner Dean Spanos definitely having the nine votes needed to keep Rams owner Stan Kroenke out of L.A. and Kroenke likely having the nine votes needed to keep Spanos out of L.A., the future of the NFL in Los Angeles could hinge on the ability of Spanos and Kroenke to work something out. …

 

Some owners actively oppose Kroenke’s desire to move the Rams, believing that Spanos has tried long enough to get a new stadium in San Diego, and that St. Louis is on the verge of crafting a viable stadium proposal to keep the Rams. But if at least nine owners feel strongly enough about Kroenke getting the L.A. market to vote against the Chargers, the situation will remain at impasse, with both teams in limbo.

 

A brokered deal would hinge, as many such arrangements do, on money and/or other considerations. With each owner able to block the other from moving, one owner needs to persuade the other owner to drop his opposition. In addition, then, to the relocation fee that would be paid to the league generally, the owner who moves to L.A. may have to make a large, separate payment to the one who doesn’t.

 

Likewise, the arrangement could include other terms. For example, if Spanos accepts that the Chargers will stay in San Diego and the Rams will move to L.A., the league could agree that only one team would be in L.A. …

 

It’s becoming more and more clear that something will happen, sooner than later.

Owners eager to set up team in L.A.

Meanwhile, the eagerness of the other owners to get a team in Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. Last week, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Jr. and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay all told reporters in multiple interviews that it was quite possible the NFL would have a team playing in the nation’s second-largest market in 11 months.

It seems unlikely that the league would allow two teams to play in temporary quarters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or at the Rose Bowl in the same season. So NFL insiders offer this scenario as increasingly plausible: Kroenke gets the necessary support in a January vote to allow him to bring the Rams back to Los Angeles — after he makes a big enough payoff to Chargers owner Dean Spanos to drop his interest in Los Agneles.

The NFL has long liked the idea of teams sharing new stadiums, as the New York Giants and Jets do in the Meadowlands facility in northern New Jersey. So perhaps “Plan C” is for the Chargers to sign on as a secondary tenant in Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium. But that’s an awfully complex negotiation to finish by the January vote at which NFL owners want to take decisive action.