History of the National Football League in Los Angeles
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The first NFL team to name itself after the city of Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926. However, this was a road team, based in Chicago, made up of Californians, primarily University of California and University of Southern California
alumni. Historian Michael McCambridge said that the Buccaneers became a
road team because the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had banned pro
teams from its stadium.[1]
However, the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the era before
modern air travel must have also been a factor in the decision to base
the team in the Midwest. The upstart American Football League also featured a similar Midwest-based road team of West Coast players, the Los Angeles Wildcats.
Both Los Angeles teams performed respectably on the field but folded
after the 1926 season amid league-wide overextension. Ironically, the
Wildcats' last game was an exhibition in San Francisco against the
Buccaneers in January 1927.[2]
Professional American football, especially its established top level, the National Football League (NFL), has had a long and complicated history in Los Angeles, which is the center of the second-largest media market in the United States. Los Angeles was the first city on the West Coast of the United States to host an NFL team of its own, when the former Cleveland Rams relocated to Los Angeles in 1946 and played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ("The Coliseum") from 1946 until 1979. The Rams, after moving to suburban Anaheim, California in 1980, were joined in the Los Angeles metropolitan area by the Los Angeles Raiders when that team moved into the Coliseum in 1982. A combination of a split fan base and earthquake damage to the Coliseum prompted both teams to leave Los Angeles simultaneously prior to the 1995 season. The Raiders returned to their original home of Oakland, California, while the Rams began a 21-year tenure in St. Louis, Missouri.
The two-decade span in which Los Angeles lacked an NFL team was brought on in part by the obsolescence of Los Angeles's existing stadiums, the unwillingness of the league to add expansion teams after 2002 (when the Houston Texans were founded) or relocate any other teams, and an inability to agree on a plan to build a new stadium, despite several proposals that received full regulatory approval but never landed a team willing to relocate under the developers' terms. The threat of a relocation to Los Angeles was, in that span, used as an effective bargaining chip for teams in other, smaller markets; a team could pressure their home city into contributing more toward constructing or renovating a stadium by raising the specter of leaving for Los Angeles if their demands were not met. The league's absence from Los Angeles ended in early 2016, when the Rams received league approval to return to the area beginning at the start of the 2016 season. Currently, Los Angeles is the home of the NFL's Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, the last of whom announced their intent to return to Los Angeles from its previous home in San Diego in January 2017. The two teams will share Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park when the stadium opens in Inglewood in 2020.
In addition to the NFL, Los Angeles has been represented by almost every other high-level professional football league: the PCPFL's Los Angeles Bulldogs, the AAFC's Los Angeles Dons, the original 1960s AFL's Los Angeles Chargers (which are the same team that is currently in the NFL), the CFL's Orange County Ramblers, the WFL's Southern California Sun, the USFL's Los Angeles Express, the Arena Football League's Anaheim Piranhas, Los Angeles Cobras, Los Angeles Avengers and LA KISS, and the XFL's Los Angeles Xtreme.
The two-decade span in which Los Angeles lacked an NFL team was brought on in part by the obsolescence of Los Angeles's existing stadiums, the unwillingness of the league to add expansion teams after 2002 (when the Houston Texans were founded) or relocate any other teams, and an inability to agree on a plan to build a new stadium, despite several proposals that received full regulatory approval but never landed a team willing to relocate under the developers' terms. The threat of a relocation to Los Angeles was, in that span, used as an effective bargaining chip for teams in other, smaller markets; a team could pressure their home city into contributing more toward constructing or renovating a stadium by raising the specter of leaving for Los Angeles if their demands were not met. The league's absence from Los Angeles ended in early 2016, when the Rams received league approval to return to the area beginning at the start of the 2016 season. Currently, Los Angeles is the home of the NFL's Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, the last of whom announced their intent to return to Los Angeles from its previous home in San Diego in January 2017. The two teams will share Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park when the stadium opens in Inglewood in 2020.
In addition to the NFL, Los Angeles has been represented by almost every other high-level professional football league: the PCPFL's Los Angeles Bulldogs, the AAFC's Los Angeles Dons, the original 1960s AFL's Los Angeles Chargers (which are the same team that is currently in the NFL), the CFL's Orange County Ramblers, the WFL's Southern California Sun, the USFL's Los Angeles Express, the Arena Football League's Anaheim Piranhas, Los Angeles Cobras, Los Angeles Avengers and LA KISS, and the XFL's Los Angeles Xtreme.
Contents
- 1 Origins of football in Los Angeles
- 2 NFL in Los Angeles: 1946–1994
- 3 1995: Both Los Angeles franchises leave
- 4 Two decades without a team
- 5 2016: The NFL returns
- 6 Football stadiums in the Los Angeles area
- 7 Non-NFL gridiron football activity
- 8 In fiction
- 9 See also
- 10 References
- 11 Further reading
- 12 External links
Origins of football in Los Angeles
The first major professional football team to actually reside in Los Angeles were the Los Angeles Bulldogs, who operated both as an independent and as a member of several other leagues from approximately 1934 to 1948, in its later years reduced to minor status. The Bulldogs played most of their tenure at Gilmore Stadium, a stadium on the site of what is now CBS Television City. The NFL had actually admitted the Bulldogs to the league for the 1937 NFL season, but reneged on the agreement because of travel concerns (the great distance between the Bulldogs and every other team, plus having to cross the Rocky Mountains in an era when travel by airplane was still a rare and hazardous endeavor, proved to be too much of a risk for the newly stable NFL to be willing to take; the league had finally stabilized in the mid-1930s after a decade and a half in which teams were leaving and joining the league annually). The NFL would hold its first two All-Star Games in Los Angeles following the 1938 and 1939 seasons.
In 1946, the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference started play, lasting four years before folding with the demise of the AAFC. In 1960, the American Football League (AFL) was formed, with a franchise at the region, the Los Angeles Chargers. After the inaugural season, the team moved to San Diego to become the San Diego Chargers, who joined the NFL during the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. The Continental Football League, a second-tier professional league active in the late 1960s, included the Orange County Ramblers among its teams.
NFL in Los Angeles: 1946–1994
Los Angeles Rams
In 1946, the defending NFL champions, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles.[3] The other league owners were not pleased with the move, but the league relented due in large part to concern that Los Angeles could potentially become the nucleus of a rival league. The Rams played home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, at the time shared with two NCAA teams – the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins – and an AAFC franchise, the Los Angeles Dons. It was the establishment of the Rams in Los Angeles that prompted the league to lift its moratorium on African-American players that had been in place since the early 1930s: terms of the Rams' lease on the Coliseum required the team to integrate, and to do so, the Rams signed former UCLA stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. When the AAFC folded in 1950, the Dons went out of business, but the AAFC's San Francisco 49ers were admitted to the NFL. This provided the NFL with a workable pair of West Coast cities for travel.Another AAFC franchise which moved over to the NFL in 1950 was the Cleveland Browns, who were based in the city the Rams had deserted. The Browns and the Rams met in three NFL championship games in six seasons—in Cleveland in 1950 (Browns won 30-28) and in Los Angeles in 1951 (Rams won 24-17) and 1955 (Browns won 38-14).
The Rams quickly became established as an NFL power, winning 7 straight divisional titles from 1973 to 1979, with top quarterbacks like Roman Gabriel and the legendary Fearsome Foursome, consisting of Rosey Grier, Lamar Lundy, Merlin Olsen and Deacon Jones.
Rams move to Anaheim
By 1979 the Rams were a successful franchise, and made it to their first Super Bowl that year. However, they had long been dissatisfied with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. For most of the Rams' tenure there, it was the largest stadium in the NFL, with over 90,000 seats. However, even in the Rams' best years, the cavernous venue sold out very infrequently, causing blackouts of Rams games on local TV. Additionally, it was located in South Central Los Angeles, which was perceived as being one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods; it had begun going to seed from the 1960s onward. The Coliseum also lacked adequate nearby parking. At various times they shared the stadium with both the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins football teams. Ownership (Carroll Rosenbloom, followed by his widow Georgia Frontiere) was unable to persuade the city to build a new stadium in Los Angeles, so they decided to move out of the Coliseum to Anaheim (28 miles southeast of downtown L.A.) in Orange County, which was then experiencing an enormous boom in population and construction.Beginning in 1980, the Rams played in Anaheim Stadium, which already had a football press box built into the upper deck when it opened in 1966.[4] Further renovations included enclosing the facility by extending the stadium's three decks (the stadium had previously been open to the outside), and building luxury suites in the mezzanine "club" level.
Los Angeles Raiders
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum next received an NFL team in 1982, when the Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles to become the Los Angeles Raiders. Team owner Al Davis relocated there without the approval of his fellow owners or NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. One major factor for Davis in moving to the Coliseum—despite its flaws as a football stadium—was his assumption that the NFL would eventually approve pay-per-view telecasts for its games; such a move would potentially have given the Raiders a virtual TV monopoly in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest TV market. Davis also counted on being able to persuade the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission to renovate the facility, particularly by installing scores of luxury boxes.The Raiders continued the success they had in Oakland after the move south, winning Super Bowl XVIII in January 1984 and reaching the AFC Championship Game after the 1990 season. But the team gained a controversial reputation off the field, as its silver and black colors became associated with L.A.'s notorious street gangs. More importantly, the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission never gave Davis the lucrative package of amenities he had been promised, and the NFL's broadcast contracts never instituted pay-per-view. Additionally, due to concerns about the area around Exposition Park and the Raiders' difficulty in selling out their home games (resulting in television blackouts in Los Angeles), the NFL scheduled all of the Raiders' appearances on Monday Night Football as road games after 1985,[5] and would not even consider letting them play Monday night games in Anaheim. Eventually, Davis lost patience and entertained an offer from Irwindale, California (east of downtown L.A.) in 1987, but did not move there.[6][7]
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