Chuck Todd Thinks The Las Vegas Raiders Will Be Southern California’s Team

Filling in for Peter King over at Sports Illustrated’s NFL offshoot, MMQB, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd thinks the team who is going to come out on top of the #FightForLA isn’t the Los Angeles Rams or the Los Angeles Chargers...

I think the Raiders are going to kill L.A. football.

Neither the Rams nor the Chargers will ever be “L.A.’s team” now that the Raiders are going to Vegas. The Raiders’ home games are going to become an event for L.A.’s celebrity class, especially if Derek Carr & Co. end up being as good as they are projected to be in the next few years. And that’s going to translate into making the Raiders Southern California’s “it” football team—not the Rams or the Chargers. Someday, the NFL will regret not stepping in to save the Chargers in San Diego; they could have helped finance a stadium; they didn’t need another taxpayer-funded boondoggle; they could have done this themselves and made a great fan base even more attached to the Chargers. The Rams, on their own, will still struggle to compete for L.A.’s attention, but it will be even harder to re-establish their roots while competing against the Chargers and the Vegas Raiders.

Todd isn’t a sports journalist. Or analyst. Or blogger. Or whatever.

But Todd’s job is, essentially, to read tea leaves for a living. Not saying he always gets everything right or anything akin to that, but his job is to understand the national climate.

As the #FightForLA gets underway, it’s worth remembering that while the Raiders might be the odd man out geographically in LA, they’ve got the historic fan base to match (and per some pundits, outmatch) the Rams’ while offering a superior brand of football.

Not the friendliest take for the Rams’ return to LA from the desk of Meet the Press...