
Editor's note: The above video is from the Aug. 18 installment of SportsTalk Live's "But Seriously."
The National Football League is planning to run town hall meetings in St. Louis, San Diego and Oakland to get a better sense of what the locals think about the prospect of losing their franchises to the planet-eaters in Los Angeles.
Or, as the tour will come to be known in time, the Up Yours Symposia.
The meetings -- scheduled for this coming Tuesday in St. Louis, Wednesday in San Diego and Thursday in Oakland -- are designed to gin up fans for keeping teams that aren’t theirs even though they have paid for them many times over, and to fight for the right to hurl even more money at them. They’ll make for nice visuals, and they’ll keep up the show that, in this country anyway, the NFL is God without the beard and thick eyebrows.
[NEWS: NFL schedules public hearing regarding Raiders relocation]
And for at least one, and quite possibly two of those, the end result will be a middle finger.
And you thought it was easy to rig daily fantasy.
NFL
The futures of the Chargers, Raiders and Rams will not be determined, or even mildly affected, by these town hall meetings. They are the most brazen illusion of vox populi -- “quod si non sumus audiendo vocem populi.”
“The voice of the people even though we’re not listening.”
The 32 owners have determined Los Angeles must be repopulated with one or two of these three teams, which some group is already being played as a sucker. No matter how loudly they shout, their input will be shouting underwater.
And the team that doesn’t get to move will get to use the illusion that the people were heard to go back to their city, county and state governments and say, “So let’s talk about you’re re-elections, and what you can do for us to improve the chances of that happening.”
Take, say, Oakland. Mayor Libby Schaaf has been consistent in saying the city hasn’t the money to help with a new stadium. But if the Raiders are shut out of the Great Southward Expansion, she and her fellow pols will be stuck with a team they can’t pay for, and an electorate demanding that they do it anyway. Good luck turning that into a re-election slogan.
And if, as some folks have already suggested, Oakland ends up keeping the Raiders only so that the other owners can force Mark Davis to sell the team (while cashing $225 million checks each year, a neat trick by any standard), the league is making an economic dead horse out of one of its least favored franchises. Either way, it won't be because of the town hall's persuasive gifts.
That’s taking the tinfoil hat and making pants and a coat to go with it though, so let’s just stay with what we know.
Fans will gather next Tuesday. They will make noise and wave signs and paint faces and hold up weeping children, all with an eye toward thinking, “I’m the one who saved the Chargers/Raiders/Rams,” and they’ll think this while being played for saps. That is, unless one of them is invited into the owners’ meeting in January and given a vote, which we are fairly certain is not one of the prizes in the Super Bowl L Raffle.
No, it’s better they hear the truth now, which is that their voices have already been ignored even though they haven’t cleared their throats yet, and that they don’t have a sign or a painted face or a baby powerful enough to make even an atom’s worth of difference. Their team will stay, or their team will go, and they will be utterly powerless to do anything about it.
They will be props, and because they will look the same whether they are in Jack London Square, beneath the Arch, or in the Gaslamp District, they will all be the same image -- people who thought they mattered to the teams they devoted their time, hearts and cash to, and were wrong to think so.
If playing the felt on a rigged craps table is for you, then by all means turn up next Tuesday. Just know that the painted lines, the dice, the high-rollers around the table and even the drinks resting on the rail and wobbling perilously close to you all matter in this scenario more than you do to the people who matter. You’re the kids on College Gameday, only you’ll be treated with far more contempt.