Dear NFL: Pick the Rams

After 20 years without a team in Los Angeles, the NFL suddenly finds itself with three willing franchises in the Rams, Raiders and Chargers. Theoretically any or all (or none) could be permitted to move. It all comes down to who can get a three-fourths vote of the 32 team owners, and you can be sure a lot of politics and consideration of self-interest will go into the respective owners' decision on each of the three requests. But the right choice is to bring back the Los Angeles Rams. I realize there are some arguments against this, one of which is that the Rams might have an easier path to a new stadium in their existing city than the Raiders or Chargers do in theirs. St. Louis seems willing to deal, although their numbers aren't close to what the Rams want - and Rams owner Stan Kroenke didn't just buy 60 acres of land in Inglewood because he thought the stadium talks in St. Louis were going well.

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The Raiders are the only team in the NFL that still has to share a stadium with its baseball counterpart, while the Chargers remain in Qualcomm Stadium years after the Padres had the opportunity to open Petco Field. Both of these stadiums are perfectly fine for hosting a football game, but the economics of today's NFL requires a stadium that can generate serious revenue from things like luxury suites and other amenities. Neither O.co Stadium nor Qualcomm really have these things to the extent the Raiders and Chargers need them. But the Rams have always been an awkward match in St. Louis, which is relatively small city at under 500,000 and is a poor geographic fit for the NFC West Division. Despite the fact that their only Super Bowl win came in 1999 - in the early years of the St. Louis era - the Rams' glory years were in Los Angeles. That's when they were a perennial NFL power and featured legends like Merlin Olson, Hacksaw Reynolds, Deacon Jones and Jack Youngblood. They had plenty of great players, but what they lacked was a plausible stadium situation. Their move in the 1980s from the Los Angeles Coluseum to Anaheim Stadium had the feel of a nomadic team that could never quite put down stakes and decide where home was going to be. That was a shame for a franchise that had a loyal fan base and a rich history of success on the field. It was a bizarre development in 1995 when the Rams bolted for St. Louis while the Raiders returned to Oakland after having taken up residence in the Coluseum in 1982. For a market the size of Los Angeles to suddenly be without even one NFL team made no sense on the surface. But the L.A. market is beset with unique challenges. It's big, yes, but it's very difficult to get from one part of town to the next because of heavy traffic and a garbled freeway design. So it's not as plausible as you might think for someone to drive from, say, Pasadena to Burbank. The Inglewood location should allow the Rams to not only draw well but earn strong peripheral stadium revenues while generating strong local television ratings. That's a huge consideration, since television revenues are the NFL's biggest source of income. If anyone questions the importance of the L.A. television market, just take a look at the astonishing $200 million a year deal the Dodgers just signed with Fox Sports West. Of course, you can watch the NFL in Los Angeles even without a local team, but the return of the Rams is sure to provide rocket fuel to local ratings with a metropolitan area population of more than 18 million.

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And by letting the Rams come home to Los Angeles, the NFL West would also be aligned as a true western division along with San Francisco, Seattle and Arizona. It's conceivable that we could see the Rams in Inglewood while the Raiders and Chargers share a stadium in Carson. I'm not sure that even the L.A. market is prepared to support three teams, and something has to be done about the Raiders' and Chargers' stadium situations. But with Kroenke owning the Inglewood land and prepared to move, there is no reason to keep the Rams in St. Louis. It's time to bring them home to Los Angeles. There should be one condition, however. These uniforms need to stay in St. Louis: Dear NFL: Pick the Rams Whoever decided to replace the sharp primary colors of the old Rams with this metallic monstrosity deserves to be traded to Cleveland. These are the uniforms of the real Rams, and this is what we should see when they take the field in 2016:

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