Thoughts on why an NFL franchise will never succeed in LA

There’s talk again of moving a current NFL team to the nation’s second largest media market, Los Angeles.

The league has been salivating for years at the prospect of adding Hollywood-sized revenue to their coffers, ever since the Rams and Raiders skipped town after realizing what I’ve known since I lived in LA in the late 90s - in the world’s most self-absorbed town, there’s no room for the ultimate team sport.

It’s the very reason baseball and basketball work so well in the land of artificial beauty and self-importance : they are two sports that can be dominated by a single performer on any given day.

You can, as an opponent, lose to a superior performance by a lone super star in a way that’s never possible on the gridiron. Am I saying that one professional sports league is superior to another (at least when it comes to the Team concept in sports)? Of course I am!

Compare, if you will…

Michael Jordan with Terrell Owens.

Shaq and Randy Moss.

Larry Bird versus Dan Marino.

Owens, Moss, and Marino are all great athletes who could dominate a game like very few of their contemporaries.

And obviously Jordan, Shaq and Bird all played on great teams at one point of their careers - their teammates helped them win championships, to be sure - but I still say your chances are much greater when it comes to any single game, if you had to stake your success on ONE player having a great game, that a win was significantly more probable if the game in question were baseball or basketball.

I simply think it’s near impossible for a town full of people with a Me First attitude to root for a group of 53 guys as a unit… there’s nothing in the town’s DNA that lends itself to the sacrifice and All For One mentality needed to be successful in the game of football.

Don’t get me wrong… there’s a possibility that the NFL will be able to make a LA franchise subsist for a while, I just don’t see a raging fan base or decades-long waiting list for season tickets.

I have good friends and significant business interests in Los Angeles. I travel there quite often, and I love the restaurants, the weather on the coast. This is not an indictment on the town in total. But when it comes to professional football, I’ll take my Green Bay Packers any day.