As the NFL continues to pave a road back to Los Angeles, some days are just bigger than others.
Today was one of those days – although many bigger ones loom ahead.
The league’s Los Angeles relocation owners committee met today in New York to get updates from the St. Louis Rams and the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers on their stadium projects in Inglewood, Carson and back home in St. Louis, Oakland and San Diego
In addition, the Missouri advisory committee tasked with coming up with a plan to help build the Rams a new stadium in downtown St. Louis was invited to New York to fill the committee in on the latest developments there.
The six-owner committee will meet with all 32 owners to update them in May 18th in San Francisco
I have reached out to as many key players as possible, and I will update as needed.
NFL vice president Eric Grubman passed on commenting when I emailed him earlier today.
I can confirm Rams CFO Kevin Demoff attended the St. Louis presentation – read into that what you will – although it’s not believed he had an active role.
The Chargers and Raiders issued the following statement:
“The Raiders and Chargers today made a joint presentation to the NFL’s
Los Angeles committee of owners. The goal of the presentation was to
update the owners on the LA stadium site in Carson, which was fully
entitled on Tuesday night. In addition, we presented a new stadium
design for LA that is the result of two months of close collaboration
between the teams. Goldman Sachs representatives were at the meeting
to answer questions about the financing plan. And, finally, both teams
updated the owners on the situation in our home markets.”
By the way, 3,000 miles away in Oakland Floyd Kephart, the developer in charge of the Coliseum City project intended to build the Raiders a new stadium spoke to interested citizens and reporters, and it was quite entertaining to say the least.
Kephart had a few interesting zings for Grubman, whom he met with last week, and it likely didn’t sit well at the NFL office in New York.
Kephart is upset that Grubman classified the Oakland stadium issue as going backwards on a radio interview in Los Angeles Tuesday.
My sense is the NFL and Raiders were expecting Kephart to give them more details about his financing when they met with him last week. The fact they left without a better idea of where his money is coming from is disconcerting. The NFL was expecting more answers and Kephart didn’t provide them.
Hence, Grubman classifying the project as moving backwards.
