FAKE RONJAN!!Which NFL Teams Should Move, and Where?
For the first time since the mid-1990s, we have relocation drama in the NFL. Three teams - the San Diego Chargers, the Oakland Raiders, and the St. Louis Rams - are vying for the right to move back to their once-home city of Los Angeles. (My thoughts on this mirror this NSFW take from Deadspin, but I suppose that is neither here nor there.)
While I am absolutely 100% out on the NFL as a consumer product, this development did get me thinking about an "optimal relocation plan" that maximized the number of large markets the NFL had teams in.
You could make the case that diversifying markets is the best growth plan for a league, and putting 32 teams in 32 distinct cities is the best way to maximize the total population that cares about the league. But that's not what the league is doing right now - they are looking to move up to two teams into Los Angeles to match the two-team NFL markets in New York City, the SF Bay Area, and the Washington-Baltimore metro area.
So here's my very simple approach. I'm going to look at the largest metropolitan markets as defined by Primary Statistical Areas. I'm going to take the top markets based on 2014 population estimates and decide which cities are given NFL franchises. And in order to allow for multiple teams in the same city, I'm going to grant a second team to any market that has at least 4x the population of the next most competitive city, assuming that fans will split their loyalties 75%-25%.
If we take this approach and determine 32 teams, here is who ends up losing their franchises:
- Green Bay Packers - #156 market; because of their shareholder ownership model (in which I'm an owner), this could never happen in reality
- Buffalo Bills - #53 market
- New Orleans Saints - #43 market
- Jacksonville Jaguars - #40 market
- Tennessee Titans - #35 market
- Cincinnati Bengals - #32 market
- Indianapolis Colts - #29 market
- Oakland Raiders or San Francisco 49ers - #5 market, too small to support both teams
- Los Angeles x 2 - #2 market
- Chicago's 2nd NFL team - #3 market
- Portland, OR - #19 market
- Orlando, FL - #20 market
- Sacramento, CA - #25 market
- Salt Lake City, UT - #26 market
- Columbus, OH - #28 market
- Oakland Raiders go to Los Angeles - easy call since this is in play right now anyway
- Tennessee Titans go to Los Angeles - only teams that have moved from larger markets to smaller markets seem to be interested in Los Angeles, so the Titans would qualify since they moved from Houston to Nashville
- Green Bay Packers go to Chicago - it's already a bitter rivalry, why not make it intra-city?
- Buffalo Bills go to Portland - a team with a history of losing could use a cross-country move, and Portland seems like a town that can help the franchise reinvent itself
- Jacksonville Jaguars go to Orlando - maybe they should have expanded there in the first place
- Indianapolis Colts go to Sacramento - honestly, it seems like no one wins in this arrangement
- New Orleans Saints go to Salt Lake City - I just made this move for the Utah Saints team name
- Cincinnati Bengals go to Columbus - because, let's be honest, this means they wouldn't really even have to move
-rj