Rams’ Latest Play Sends a Clear Signal : * During Talks Over Practice Field, Team Appeared to Be Negotiating Its Departure

It can never be very good news when a landlord and tenant cannot come to agreement, but when the former is the city of Anaheim and the Magnolia School District and the latter is the Los Angeles Rams, the prognosis in the current environment is downright unnerving.

The Rams have already said that they will exercise an escape clause in their Anaheim Stadium lease on May 3, and against that backdrop, negotiations collapsed over the lease for their practice field at Rams Park. It was the clearest signal to date that the Rams may be history in Orange County before too much longer. It is sad to contemplate the very real possibility that the team may really move to “greener pastures.” The Rams uttered perfunctory laments about looming eviction, but it really is hard to find too much fault with the city and the school district for their efforts to conclude an agreeable long-term lease arrangement at the team’s longtime headquarters, the former Juliette Low School.

More to the point, when you examine what went wrong with the discussions, it’s pretty clear that the issue turned on what it was the team would have to pay if it left. If it intended to stay, departure wouldn’t have been so serious an obstacle to concluding the deal for the practice site.

Somehow, in the dispute over who would pay how much for restoring the facility as a school lay the hard reality that the team was in fact negotiating its departure. It was a bit like a prenuptial agreement where the divorce is negotiated before the marriage, and in this case the divorce is such a real possibility that it casts a shadow over the wedding cake.

In any case, the Rams still are committed to the area for at least the next season, and there’s little doubt that they will have a number of agreeable short-term options at local sites. But the message from the Rams Park debate is that, beyond that, don’t hold your breath.