The Big Lead

NFL Crowds In Los Angeles Were a Downright Embarrassment In Week 2

By Ryan Phillips

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The Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers both had home games on Sunday, the first time LA had two local NFL teams play at home in more than two decades. With 18.1 million people in the surrounding area, both team sshould have packed their stadiums with rabid fans, right? Ha, nope.

We’ll start at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Rams were hosting Washington. The crowd was…well, less than ideal.

Here are some tweets about the crowd:

USC sold out the Coliseum Saturday night for their overtime win over Texas.

So OK, the Rams had a pitiful crowd, that means a lot of local fans must have been checking out the Chargers first home game in Los Angeles, right? Yeah, that’s a no.

The Chargers and Miami Dolphins drew the following crowd:

Some tweets about the crowd:

Yes, the 27,000-seat StubHub center had plenty of visibly open seats for the Chargers first regular season home game in Los Angeles, and roughly half the filled seats had Dolphins fans in them.

Meanwhile, 43,040 San Diegans showed up to watch San Diego State beat Stanford Saturday night. Yes, a mid-level college football game got 43,000-plus in San Diego and the Chargers can’t find 27,000 of their own fans in LA.

Both games should be packed with LA fans. The NFL told us the city was dying for the league to return for two decades. There are 18.1 million people to draw from and the two teams can’t get 80.000 of their own fans combined.

The Rams were allowed to move because Stan Kroenke was building his own stadium without public money. The Rams also still had fans in Los Angeles.

Logically, that move made sense, despite the fact that St. Louis got absolutely screwed in the deal.

The Chargers were allowed to move because they somehow convinced the NFL they had a “robust” fan base in Los Angeles and needed to protect their interests there. That was an outright lie, but Roger Goodell and company must have bought it. Clearly the Chargers never should have moved, but the Rams aren’t exactly lighting the world on fire in attendance either.

This is a massive embarrassment for the league and everyone not associated with these two teams saw it coming.