January 19, 2016 [LINK / comment]
Rams will move back to L.A.
Last week,* the National Football League announced that the Saint Louis Rams would relocate to their previous home in Los Angeles. The San Diego Chargers were given an option to relocate to Los Angeles as well, subject to an agreement over sharing a stadium with the Rams, and if they don't exercise that option, the Oakland Raiders will receive the option. For the next three seasons, while a new stadium is built in the suburb of Inglewood, the Rams will play in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had been their home from 1946 until 1979. In the announcement, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hailed the move as a boon for Los Angeles and for the NFL. He said the new stadium in Inglewood would set a new standard; see NFL.com. Rams owner Stan Kroenke spoke at length about reasons, acknowledging that there will be hard feelings in St. Louis, as well as legal challenges.
This news puts a definitive end to any hopes of renovating L.A. Memorial Coliseum with an upper deck inside the existing bowl, much like what Chicago did with Soldier Field. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena had been considered a more likely temporary for an NFL team in L.A. In 2010 a proposal was unveiled to build a new football stadium in the City of Industry, located several miles east of downtown L.A., and in the fall of 2012, the Los Angeles city council gave preliminary approval to a proposed new football stadium which would be located in downtown L.A. None of those proposals came to fruition, however. Fortunately, no one seems to have suggested moving the Rams back to Angels / Anaheim Stadium, where the Rams played from 1980 to 1994.
The sketches of the Inglewood stadium indicate a multi-level behemoth similar to AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, but with a massive glass dome similar to the new stadium being constructed for the Minnesotas Vikings. With the beautiful climate in Los Angeles, why do they need to play football inside?? Yesterday the Chargers and Rams began discussing the Inglewood stadium issue; see ESPN. Inglewood is home to a casino / horse track complex.
* On January 11 I wrote, "The issue will be decided when NFL owners meet next month." Obviously, the meeting occurred earlier than I expected.
And so, the text on the Memorial Coliseum page has been updated to reflect this news. Also, as was the case on the Jack Murphy Stadium page recently, I deleted the link to www.stadiumsofnfl.com, which is now defunct.
Football at Turner Field (+ update)
Just before Christmas, it was announced that Turner Field would be sold (pending negotiated terms), so that Georgia State University could convert the stadium into a venue for football. See ballparkdigest.com; hat tip to Mike Zurawski. So that means it won't be "in Limbo" after all.
And of course, that also meant I had to do a new diagram variant for Turner Field, which in turn led me to make "a few minor repairs." The upper deck entry portals are smaller than before, the roof is a bit thinner, and the peripheral structure which contains ramps and elevators on the south side of the stadium is now angled properly.
Adios, Al Jazeera
Only a week after Ryan Zimmerman of the Washington Nationals and Ryan Howard filed a libel lawsuit against Al Jazeera America for its dubious report that they had used performance-enhancing drugs, the Qatar-based news organization announced it will shut down operations of its U.S. branch. Coincidence? The closure could simply be a side-effect of declining oil prices. See the Christian Science Monitor. The whole idea of a news organization having a strong affiliation with a particular religion was unsettling to some people.
Web page upgrades
As I was getting started on some long-overdue upgrades to my Web pages (transitioning from HTML 4 to HTML 5, more specifically) this afternoon, I inadvertently caused the Stadiums superimposed page to become non-functional. Eegads! After a couple hours of trouble-shooting, I fixed the glitch, and I hope it will be smooth sailing from here...