LOS ANGELES — The reboot of the once-and-again Los Angeles Rams will get a huge lift on Saturday, when they host the Atlanta Falcons in the first round of the N.F.L. playoffs.
Dave Stanley will be there, just as he was in 1986, the last time the Southern California version of this team hosted a home playoff game. “I’m so ready for this,” said Stanley, 57, a lifelong Angeleno who is part of a group of die-hard Rams fans who wear hollowed-out watermelons on their heads when they sit in a section at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum known as the Melon Patch.
Melon-heads like Stanley experienced two decades of N.F.L. diaspora while their beloved Rams played in St. Louis from 1995-2015. The Rams returned to the Los Angeles region in 2016, then pulled off a stunning turnaround this season, winning 11 games, compared with four in 2016, a feat nearly matched by the newly rechristened Los Angeles Chargers, who relocated up the 405 from San Diego this season and almost made the playoffs.
The teams’ resurgences came at a critical time. Less than 10 miles from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Rams are building a $2.6 billion stadium and entertainment district in Inglewood that the Chargers will also call home. The stadium is now a vast construction site a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. The teams will soon begin asking their fans to spend thousands of dollars on personal seat licenses, the unpopular permits that are required before they can spend thousands of dollars more on season tickets.
Convincing fans to spend hefty sums for seat licenses, season tickets, club seats, and nearly 300 luxury suites with price tags in the low-to-mid six figures, will be a far harder task than getting them to buy modestly priced tickets at the Coliseum or StubHub Center in Carson, where the Chargers play for now.
With licenses for the best seats potentially costing more than $100,000, Stanley and thousands of other loyalists are nervous they won’t be able to afford a seat in the new stadium. There are financial limits to his love for the Rams, fanatical as it may be.
Continue reading the main story“If they say, 10, 15 grand for a seat license, it’ll be DirecTV, here I come,” said Stanley, who works at hardwood specialty products company.
The success of those sales campaigns will amount to a referendum not just on the Rams’ and Chargers’ popularity, but on the wisdom of the N.F.L.’s decision to let two teams move to Los Angeles. If the stadium is perceived as a pricey and exclusive luxury, the league’s goal of reintegrating itself into the country’s second largest market could sputter further.
Attendance at Rams games fell 24 percent this year, as the novelty factor of their maiden 2016 season wore off. The number of households watching Rams games dipped six percent this season. The Chargers struggled to fill the 30,000-seat StubHub Center, a soccer stadium where Chargers fans were often outnumbered by fans of the visiting team.
“Everyone knows we’re the new kids of the block,” said Dean Spanos, the Chargers owner. “We knew coming up here there wasn’t going to be a red carpet rolled out for us. We have to earn our way in.”
Still, on the field, things couldn’t have gone much better the past few months. After the Rams’ dismal first season back in Los Angeles, the precocious rookie head coach Sean McVay secured the Rams’ first division title since 2003. Powered by quarterback Jared Goff and Todd Gurley II, an M.V.P.-caliber running back, the Rams became the first team in the Super Bowl era to have the highest scoring offense a year after having the lowest.
The Chargers lost their first four games, then won nine of their last 12, fueled by the league’s best passing game. If the team hadn’t lost three games by a field goal or less, it might have squeezed into the playoffs.
However the teams perform, N.F.L. officials say they are confident the city will embrace the league, even though the Rams and Raiders abandoned the region after the 1994 season. Many owners believe the market, with about 15 million residents, can support two teams. They say the N.F.L.’s flash and speed is a natural fit in the entertainment capital of the world.
Kevin Demoff, the chief operating officer of the Rams, echoed this view and shrugged off the early hiccups. He blamed the decline of the team’s television audience on competition. Certain games took place at the same time as Chargers games, or had to fight for eyeballs with the national game of the week. And while attendance fell, he said, the team is attracting a more devoted following, not just casual fans eager to say they attended a game.
“As you drive around the city, you see Rams car flags, and you know you’ve made it when you see car flags,” Demoff said. He described reviving and building a new fan base as a long-term process. “Like building the stadium, this is going to take years.”
Winning helps. According to Fanatics, the largest online seller of N.F.L. gear, sales of Rams merchandise jumped 50 percent this season, the largest increase after the Eagles and Jaguars.
Demoff insisted the new stadium, which won’t open until 2020, will help define the team in Los Angeles, and befit a league that has grown into a $14 billion-a-year juggernaut. Its scale and scope suggest as much. The 300-acre city-within-a-city will be 3.5 times larger than Disneyland Park in Anaheim.
During the 14 months since ground was broken on the site of the old Hollywood Park Racetrack, crews have moved more than six million cubic yards of dirt, enough to fill 600,000 dump trucks. More than 12,000 tons of steel have been erected, helping give shape to much of the lower bowl of the venue. Many of the columns that will support the roof that will cover the 70,000-seat stadium are now in place.
The building is designed to create the buzz needed to attract attention in a city that craves it. The stadium will include 275 luxury suites and 16,000 club seats, and an oval two-sided video screen that will hang from the roof. The teams are banking on these and other attractions to create a must-see venue.
“People in this market want to go to see people and to be seen,” said Amy Trask, who grew up in Los Angeles and worked for the Raiders for 29 years, including several years when they played here. “If the Rams and Chargers can make their ticket a sexy ticket, it will insulate them in the down years.”
Though the Rams and Chargers will share the stadium, and have their own locker rooms, the teams are, in many ways, not equals, Trask and others said. When they moved back from St. Louis, the Rams were greeted by fans like Stanley, who followed them during some of the 46 years they played in Southern California.
The team also had the advantage of announcing their move first. Rams’ owner, E. Stanley Kroenke, is financing the stadium. The Chargers, who will be Kroenke’s tenant, arrived a year later, after they failed to persuade lawmakers in San Diego to help them build a new stadium there. The team has shallow roots in Los Angeles, having played here just one year as part of the old A.F.L.
Spanos was encouraged by the team’s strong finish, which helped lift merchandise sales and the team’s following on social media.
But many loyalists from San Diego have not followed the team north. One San Diego resident was so angry at the Chargers that he raised $22,000 online to help pay for a billboard near the StubHub Center to criticize the N.F.L. and team for abandoning San Diego. The fan, Joseph MacRae, has also rented planes that flew banners over the stadium on game day, something he plans to do again on Saturday before the Rams-Falcons game.
“The message I’m trying to get across is that the N.F.L. really messed this up,” MacRae said. “People in San Diego are never going to root for a team in Los Angeles. No fan deserves to lose their team.”
For now, though, the focus is on the Rams. Though the team’s offense was understandably lauded, the team’s defense improved measurably under the new defensive coordinator, Wade Phillips, one of the great defensive minds of his generation. Phillips, who most recently created the Denver Broncos’ buzz-saw defense that won the 2016 Super Bowl, is 70 years old, nearly four decades older than his 31-year-old boss McVay, who is known as an offensive whiz.
Under Phillips, defensive tackle Aaron Donald has become a force of nature. Donald led the N.F.L. in forced fumbles, was tied for fourth in quarterback hits, and led all defensive tackles with 11 sacks.
On offense, Gurley led the league with 2,093 yards from scrimmage and scored 19 total touchdowns. Goff also had a talented group of receivers to throw to, including rookie Cooper Kupp, but also Robert Woods and Sammy Watkins. The Rams had the best kick returner in Pharaoh Cooper, the best punter in Johnny Hekker, and the best kicker, Greg Zuerlein, until he injured his back.
And with one of the youngest rosters in the league, the Rams have the potential to succeed for years to come, something they will desperately need to win over a city with little appetite for the mediocre that is still getting to know the team.
“The opening of the new stadium will be a panacea for a while, and people will be focused on ribbon cutting and flyovers,” said David Carter, the executive director of the Sports Business Institute at USC. “But you better have the right high-octane product that captivates market. Around here, if you’re not in, you’re out.”
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