Even though the NFL (National Football League) season is still at least 5 months away, there has been steady talk in the League office as to when Los Angeles will receive another football team. Now, there’s so much talk about what team may or may not move to LA (The Vikings, The Chargers, The Cardinals, The Saints, The Colts) and where the heck they’d even play (The Rose Bowl, Somewhere in lowly suburb,Carson, or Hollywood racetrack or even a new stadium downtown near Dodger Stadium), that I’m getting migraines just trying to keep up with it.

Now, local career LA politician, Mark Ridley-Scott, won’t shut up about the Coliseum being back in the mix. This, of course, is where the Raiders used to play and easily one of the biggest crime areas in the city. The dead give away should be the street name: Martin Luther King BL. For all our non-American friends out there, every MLK Bl. is situated, usually, in one of the most violent areas of that city. And, although Raider fans never cared much (and most of them are thugs), the NFL doesn’t want any problems so i think you can count the Coliseum out of this one.

What would be my perfect scenario is if they put one up Downtown (i used to hate the idea but I’ve come around), congesting traffic that much more, which would force the city to seriously install a decent pub. trans. system that doesn’t just go 6 blocks. I know downtown is congested (there are officially more stadiums downtown than skyscrapers…ok, just foolin’), but what the heck…let’s push it to the limit. I’d love to see the Indy Colts bolt for Cali and then we’d have Peyton Manning as our future Hall Of Fame QB. With Tony Dungy as coach, we couldn’t lose.

See, American football is top shelf, MODERN and commercial. It’s built to last. Sure, they wear pads but only because you have millionaires to deal with; you want em alive cause they bring the fans in. This isn’t like Aussie Rugby, which is about 10 min. from becoming Neanderthal-like “Hunter-Gather” play every time i watch a game. Now, I don’t mean to take anything away from people-especially when they don’t have much-but in America, we have the YANKEES, the LAKERS, the 49ERS, the COWBOYS, the RED SOX..i could go on forever…even David Beckham has come around and is talking about possibly playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club. Yep. Read ’em and weep. Even HE’S sick of it all. And Cricket? Do I even need to go there? So imagine how I feel, having had no football team here since 1994. Bummed. Majorly bummed, dude.

Mike Randle