FanHouse EdRoski

LOS ANGELES -- Ed Roski wants your NFL team.

The billionaire real estate developer from Southern California is closely tracking the stadium and hometown dysfunction that plagues the three California franchises in San Francisco, Oakland and San Diego. He knows where fans are weary, where facilities are second-rate.

He's got bull's-eyes centered on Buffalo, Jacksonville, Minnesota and St. Louis, too.

Give Roski your poor, your tired, your NFL huddles and masses longing for a state-of-the-art outdoor facility. Bring them to the City of Industry in the San Gabriel Valley, where he is convinced the fruitful Los Angeles market will welcome you.

This is obviously very premature and speculative, but following up on the news that billionaire developer Ed Roski wants to build an NFL stadium in the Los Angeles area, The Hater Nation has an interesting point:

the stadium could start construction this fall and be ready by 2011. The same year the Raiders could get out of its lease in Oakland.

Hmm. The Raiders left Los Angeles to return to Oakland in 1994, and the speculation that the Raiders would leave Oakland to go back to Los Angeles started almost immediately afterward. But most of that speculation hasn't been backed by anything as strong as a billionaire developer saying he wants to build an NFL stadium in L.A.

There's also speculation that the team to relocate to Los Angeles could be the Vikings, Chargers, Bills or Jaguars. My best guess is that the Bills wouldn't move to Los Angeles because the NFL would rather see them move to Toronto if they're going to move at all, but that the Raiders, Vikings, Jaguars and Chargers -- probably in that order of likelihood -- could all move. One way or another, the NFL wants to put a team back in L.A., and if there's a good stadium deal in place, Al Davis would love for that team to be the Raiders.