I am a lifelong fan of the San Diego Chargers.
Save your pity. Your groans of sympathy. Your attempts at jokes about how much the NFL sucks and doesn’t care about its fans. I don’t want any of it because fuck the Chargers. It’s time to be all about the future.
Chargers fans have been given a unique opportunity to honorably escape a franchise that has as little chance of success as the Cleveland Browns. We, the fans and the city of San Diego, should under no circumstances let it pass. And by “it,” I mean the Los Angeles Oakland Raiders.
First, a moment of reflection on the Chargers’ history to explain how I, a Chargers fan, would ever want the team’s blood rival as my new team.
I first became aware of the Chargers and the Padres at roughly the same time growing up in San Diego as a carefree young lad in the mid 1980’s. The Padres had just been to the World Series and were about to trade for Fred McGriff and Gary Sheffield. It was a heady, brown pinstriped time to be alive and a baseball fan in San Diego.
But the Chargers? Even then the team was a shit show and would remain that way for the foreseeable future. Yes, they made the playoffs a couple of times in the early 90’s, but those teams were still mostly garbage, relying on luminaries such as Marion Butts to carry the team. GM (at the time) Bobby Beathard saw to it that the team never had any meaningful draft picks for the better part of the 1990’s, and once his personnel acumen had made the team bottom out and get the number two pick in the 1998 draft, he used his only major pick in his tenure with the franchise to draft Ryan Goddamn Leaf.
Hang on. I sound too angry.
Before you say the words “Ryan Leaf” to me as an act of commiseration or attempt to grunt some kind of understanding, you should know that nothing you can say about the team’s largely pathetic history since 1984 will faze me.
Oh, there was a time I would poop in my hand and throw it at people who thought it would be high-larious to bring up the team losing 49-26 to the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIX, fat Natrone Means, Stan Humphries’ concussions, 1-15, Mike Riley, Ryan Leaf, John Butler dying, wide receiver David Boston’s in-no-way-steroids-aided 5.5 percent body fat at 238 pounds, firing Marty Schottenheimer after going 14-2, Norv Goddamn Turner and “continuity,” pissing away LaDainian Tomlinson’s career, pissing away Philip Rivers’ career, and whatever combination of Jackass and German amputee porn the 2015 incarnation of the team was. But I’ve grown as a person and largely come to accept that the franchise is what it is, and nothing is going to change it.
Now the team’s history is all just fodder for nihilism and gallows humor that only fans of some key franchises can understand. Why? Because I’m a lifelong Chargers fan. That (admittedly brief) list above is exactly what this franchise does.
There are no positive stories to counterbalance the team’s most recent 30 years of history. Even every small morsel of positivity for the fans has a huge turd sandwich as the entree. I’m emotionally bulletproof when it comes to this team. There’s too much shitty history for an entire generation of fans from the 1980’s to now. Even Browns fans of the same generation can still remember getting the team back after Art Modell took it from them. At least they have that.
And at the center of it all for the Chargers franchise, since 1984, has been the Spanos family. First Alex, and now his hilariously inept scumbag son. Wait, that’s not fair. Scumbaggery requires some level of self-awareness, which the younger Spanos clearly lacks.
If you want proof that the moneyed class in America isn’t a meritocracy, I need nothing more than the Spanos family to clinch my point because it is completely unclear how anyone this incompetent at running an organization and making business deals could become and remain as rich as they are. They have even botched moving the team out of San Diego so badly, they might have to stay for the 2016 season and then move to a city that doesn’t even want them. They took an NFL franchise, basically a license to print money, and screwed it up.
Wait. Still too angry. I come not to shoot hot fire at the Chargers but to make the case for moving on from them.
Make no mistake, the Chargers have valid reasons for leaving. Qualcomm Stadium is a hopelessly old dump. The NFL even refuses to hold the Super Bowl in Freaking San Diego because of it.
But you know who doesn’t care? The Raiders.
The team’s television market is relatively small compared to other franchises. But you know who doesn’t care? The Raiders.
The city of San Diego’s leadership has done a horrible job negotiating with the Chargers for a new stadium. You know who doesn’t care? The Raiders.
There’s also the small matter of getting voter approval for funding for a new stadium, and it’s not by any means guaranteed. You know who doesn’t care? The Raiders.
They would still “pounce” on San Diego despite jumping, cat-like apparently, into the exact situation that drove the Chargers out of town.
But why?
Because the Raiders, like Chargers fans should, recognize an opportunity to buy low. Yeah sure, there’s like 50 years of hatred between the Raiders and Chargers fans. San Diego fans have also just gotten dumped by a franchise that spent the last 30 years being generally terrible. The Raiders have been only slightly less terrible over that same stretch. Like any rebound relationship, there are flaws from the start.
But San Diego wants a team, and the Raiders want to be somewhere that doesn’t leak poop. It would also give San Diego fans a team that has actually made the Super Bowl this century, has won the actual Super Bowl in its history, and even lets the fans still hate an owner who’s a complete knob and a legacy child just like Dean Spanos. The Raiders also recognize the passion and loyalty that must exist in the San Diego area because most cities would have bailed on the Chargers long ago.
That last one is important. Having an owner who isn’t entirely competent, an organization that could kindly be characterized as chaotic, and one that has a checkered history of talent evaluation of its own still gives the San Diego fans a sense of danger in rooting for the local NFL franchise. After all, the city has a type, and you know San Diego fans can’t help sticking their metaphorical dicks in crazy one more time. And the Raiders bring plenty of crazy with them.
The Raiders bring an edge they have kept in Oakland and Los Angeles. They have a franchise identity the Chargers never had. If both the team and the city of San Diego are going to move on from their respective disastrous relationships, then it ought to be into situations in which they’re both wanted and needed.
San Diego never really wanted to lose the Chargers, but at this point, few people want them to stay since they have made it abundantly clear they want nothing to do with the city or the fans. The city and its football fans deserve better, and at this point it’s fair to say most of them have figured it out. Why not solve San Diego’s problem and the Raiders’ problems all in one move?
Most of all, San Diego fans ought to treat this like business, not personal. Be Michael Corleone, not Sonny. The two basic options available for San Diego to get a franchise other than the Chargers are the Raiders in 2017 or maybe even sooner or the Jaguars in God-knows-when. What better way to stick it to the franchise that just up and left the city than to get with its worst enemy?
The best part? The Raiders actually DO have fans in the Los Angeles area, unlike the Chargers. Remember, they used to call LA home too. It isn’t like N.W.A. was wearing all that Raiders gear because they supported the other Northern California NFL team. And any chance to snatch even a small number of LA fans from the Chargers makes this unlikely marriage between San Diego and the Raiders totally worth it.
San Diego Super Raiders. Unlike any Charger’s finger, it has a ring to it.
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