Buffalo and Jacksonville, for two examples. But Buffalo is probably addressing its problem by playing some games in Canada. That will likely either prevent any move at all or facilitate an eventual move across the lake, either scenario probably knocks LA out of the picture.

Jacksonville’s season ticket base is awful, which is pretty bad for a team that had as much success early in their existence as the Jaguars did. It’s a small TV market whose economy is getting worse and the current ownership was rumored to be willing to sell pretty recently. Of all the teams that look like candidates to move, they seem like the best choice from an economic perspective. The problem is that the Jags are locked into a lease until 2030 and the NFL (which benefits from an anti-trust exemption) probably isn’t all that keen on pissing off members of congress (who can revoke that exemption) by breaking a lease 20 years early and leaving a city with an empty stadium that requires millions of dollars in maintenance. While that’s been done before, it hasn’t happened all that often recently and the last time it happened (Cleveland to Baltimore, Houston to Tenn.) the move was accompanied by a league promise to expand within 3 years to fill those markets again.

The Vikings lease happens to be ending (if I understand things correctly) at the same time that someone’s building a new stadium out in LA on spec. So the Vikings are getting the brunt of the “will they or won’t they” talk right now. Imagine how much worse it would be if Z really WANTED to move out of Minnesota, which doesn’t appear to be the case. If he did, your only hope would be Goodell stepping in to keep it from happening. As things stand, the teams appears to want to stay and I’m sure that the commissioner’s office wants to keep them there. If the State acts, the Vikes stay. It’s as simple as that.

The trouble is, the other team owners feel the Vikings aren’t pulling their share of the weight in terms of bringing in profits, they’re the ones pushing for EITHER a new stadium OR move to a better venue that will make more money. They feel that they’re carrying the Vikings, profit-wise. So approval within the owners group would probably go through.

The people of Minnesota need to demonstrate that they really want the Vikings to stay, and they’re willing to pay for a stadium to make it so. So far, they demonstrate ambivalence at best, outright hostility at worse (if one pays attention to the Trib). They just got done building two other, special-purpose stadiums for other teams, so the bias isn’t anti-sports, it’s anti-Vikings. A Super Bowl victory would change that, I think. Possibly the team’s showing this year will be enough, but without going all the way, I wouldn’t count on it. Too much hostility.

I’m not too keen on LA myself…. Virginia would be better. Never gonna happen, despite “Virginia Vikings” having a snappy sort of ring to it :).

The knock on LA is that the fans are fair weather fans. They show up when a team wins but don’t when they lose. Like that is any different than most franchises. But the Rams left and the Raiders left because they couldn’t make any money at the old stadium. There was 0 interest in building a new one. Now that they have been without a team and the stadium is coming both the NFL and the fan base are interested.

they have a stadium fund and they usually pitch in about 50 million.

Minnesotans, as a group, don’t show much interest in supporting the Vikings or even in wanting to keep the Vikings in Minny. Vikings fans here on the DN keep telling me that the Trib isn’t representative of Vikings fandom, but that’s the voice that the Minny politicos ‘hear’ from. And the majority of them would rather see the Vikings leave, than ante up a single penny for a new stadium.

Apparently they feel Gopher football will be sufficient.