Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll was once the football king of Los Angeles, so his opinion seeing the NFL relocate two franchises to Los Angeles is not to be taken lightly. And yes, he certainly has an opinion on the news that the Chargers will join the Rams in Los Angeles.
“I think it’s hard having one, so it’s going to be harder having two,” Carroll said Thursday, according to The Seattle Times.
Carroll, of course, coached the USC Trojans during a terrific run that saw no competition from the NFL. The return of the Rams this past NFL season brought the league back to the city for the first time since the Rams and Raiders skipped town after the 1994 season
The Rams left St. Louis with the intention of making a home in a brand new state-of-the-art football stadium currently in development. The Chargers will join the Rams in the same stadium eventually. In the meantime, there is a lot of football overload in Los Angeles between the Rams and Chargers, UCLA, and perhaps the biggest football draw in 2017, the USC Trojans.
Having room for all of that is going to be difficult to manage, and it may not go as well as the Rams and Chargers hope (more so for the Chargers, as their first 24 hours have proven).
“I’ve heard some rumors that they’re going to play at the (StubHub Center). It’s a beautiful stadium, just not very big (estimated capacity of 30,000 for the Chargers). It’ll be interesting,” Carroll said. “It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens and I think it’s an extraordinary challenge for the people of the area to figure out their allegiance and what they’re doing.”
The Chargers may have started out in Los Angeles for one season before moving to San Diego, but that was in 1960. At least the Rams have some history in Los Angeles that could be drawn on. The Chargers are purely in this for the stadium and really have their work cut out for them in Los Angeles, which probably has more Raiders fans than Chargers fans anyway.
“It will be fascinating to see what happens,” Carroll said. “It’s an enormous experiment.”
That it certainly is.
