Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News notes the irony of the NFL Network originating out of Los Angeles, which remarkably still doesn’t have a home team.
Hoffarth writes:
It’s 10 years after the fact, and the NFL Network’s now-sprawling Culver City compound continues to remain the only tangible evidence the league has any sort of interest in being part of Los Angeles.
As an entertainment platform, for sure.
As a franchise homestead? From one righteously profitable move does not another logically follow.
Months before the NFL Network officially launched Nov. 4, 2003, league officials scouted locations in Burbank, Hollywood and Manhattan Beach before deciding to plop down on a commercial lot and use about 28,000 square feet of combined space for Studio A and Suite 100 on an eclectic stretch of Washington Boulevard, next to an Islamic mosque, across the street from an elementary school and just a few blocks from the famed Sony Pictures lot where decades earlier “The Wizard of Oz” was made.
Sure, if the NFL only had a heart, a brain and the nerve a franchise would be back here by now. But what’s to say the NFL Network’s presence isn’t the gift that just keeps on regifting for this region of interest?
“Did I think we’d have a team here by now?” said NFL Network executive producer Eric Weinberger, one of a handful of employees part with this operation from the start. “Sure, but that was never part of the idea of having the network here.
“At the time, the plan was to have the signature show here — ‘NFL Total Access’ — and get celebrities to come in. This was an entertainment-meets-football kind of shop. We fell in love with the sound stages and also with the fact that we were very close to the (LAX) airport so it was very efficient for everyone. It’s just kept growing and we haven’t looked back.”
Later in the story, Hoffarth writes:
So how and where will this network stretch further into the next decade?
During a network 10th anniversary special Wednesday, Eisen put that question to a panel of Willie McGinest, Michael Irvin and Steve Mariucci.
“We work here in L.A. — Culver City — I want to see a team here,” Mariucci said. “I used to coach for the Rams down when we were in Anaheim. Rich, we gotta have a team here. That’s gotta happen here soon.”
Save that piece of video for the network’s 20th anniversary special. It could be a collector’s item.
Yes, by 2023, the NFL probably will have two teams in London, but no teams in the nation’s second largest market.