The Actually-Exciting, First Place Rams Still Can't Draw Fans in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Rams are in first place in the NFC West and are hosting their division rivals, the Seattle Seahawks today. They are an exciting young team, with a developing franchise quarterback (Jared Goff), a dynamic young head coach (Sean McVay), a phenomenal running back (Todd Gurley) and one of the best defensive players in the NFL (Aaron Donald). Why is no one showing up?

This was a huge game for the franchise in its season season in Los Angeles, so naturally fans should have been falling all over themselves to show up and support them, right? Well…not so much.

The Rams were fighting for clear supremacy in their division and to establish themselves as a legitimate contender in the NFC, and the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum was absolutely brutal. We’ve got the photographic evidence.

Here you go:

Here’s last year’s Rams-Seahawks game for comparison:

What the hell? That crowd is absolutely awful. And bear in mind, the Seahawks travel really well and there were reportedly a ton of them in the crowd today.

All along we’ve heard shifting narratives from the NFL about the two franchises in Los Angeles. First we were told there was a huge appetite for the league in the market with a population of 18.1 million. So much so that the league absolutely had to move two teams to the area to take advantage. When that proved to be untrue, we were fed excuses like “oh it wasn’t a good matchup,” or “oh it was a preseason game,” or “both teams were playing at the same time, so the crowd was split,” or my favorite “it was too hot.”

Then the narrative shifted to how LA only supported success and how winning would cure everything. Well, that narrative has clearly been blown up now. Now we’ve been hearing from the league that this is a decades-long process and a long slog that both the Rams and Chargers were prepared for. Which is absolute crap. The league expected instant success. What it has gotten has been repeated embarrassment. Now we’ll keep hearing, “oh, when they move into the new stadium everything will be fine” which is nothing but hopeful guessing.

The bottom line is that Los Angeles didn’t need the NFL and barely wanted it. At best it’s a one-team market and the team most people in the city wanted was the Raiders.

This will not get better with time. The Rams have a chance to make things work, but it’s going to be incredibly difficult. The Chargers? They’ll fail miserably and it’s already clear that’s going to be the outcome. Excuses will continue to pour forth from the franchises and the NFL, but there is no doubt everyone is having buyer’s remorse on LA. It’s a mess and an embarrassment, and there are no signs it will improve.