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Professional American football, especially its established top level, the National Football League (NFL), has had a long history in Los Angeles, which is the center of the second-largest media market in the United States. Since the 1995 departure of the Raiders and Rams, Los Angeles has been by far the largest U.S. market without an NFL team. It is currently more than double the size of any other North American market to receive serious consideration for a team. The NFL and other professional leagues have had multiple teams in Los Angeles between 1946 and 1994, all of which originally played home games in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Currently, the nearest team for the area is the San Diego Chargers. In 1946, the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference started play, lasting four years before folding with the demise of the AAFC. Also in 1946, the Cleveland Rams became the first NFL franchise to locate in Los Angeles. The Rams moved to Anaheim Stadium in 1980, and left Southern California altogether in 1995 for St. Louis. The American Football League (AFL) founded the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960, who subsequently moved to San Diego the following year. The Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982, only to return to Oakland after the 1994 season.〔McDonald, Jerry – Raiders' exodus ... no crying in SoCal. Oakland Tribune, Jun 23, 2005〕 There were problems with filling all of the 90,000-plus seats in the Coliseum to avoid a television blackout in the Los Angeles area.〔 The lack of an NFL team in Los Angeles is an issue the league and the city have been working on to resolve since the Raiders and Rams left.〔(Roski plans to unveil plan to get a franchise for Los Angeles ). Associated Press, April 18, 2008 〕 One key sticking point had been whether the Coliseum should be the primary venue for a new team, or whether a lower capacity NFL-specific stadium should be built in the area.〔 In November 2007, the then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that the policy of requiring the NFL to relocate to the Coliseum will change and other options will be explored. ==The early years== The first NFL team to name itself after the city of Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Buccaneers in . However, this was a road team, based in Chicago, made up of Californians, primarily University of California and University of Southern California alumni. Historian Michael McCambridge said that the Buccaneers became a road team because the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had banned pro teams from its stadium. However, the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the era before modern air travel must have also been a factor in the decision to base the team in the Midwest. The upstart American Football League also featured a similar Midwest-based road team of West Coast players, the Los Angeles Wildcats. Both Los Angeles teams performed respectably on the field but folded after the 1926 season. Ironically, the Wildcats' last game was an exhibition in San Francisco against the Buccaneers in January 1927.〔(Schedules and scores of the teams in the 1926 American Football League ) – “Ghosts of the Gridiron”〕 The first major professional football team to actually reside in Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Bulldogs, who operated both as an independent and as a member of several other leagues from approximately 1934 to 1948, in its later years reduced to minor status. The NFL had actually admitted the Bulldogs to the league for the 1937 NFL season, but reneged on the agreement because of travel concerns (the great distance between the Bulldogs and every other team, plus having to cross the Rocky Mountains in an era when travel by airplane was still a rare and hazardous endeavor, proved to be too much of a risk for the NFL to be willing to take). The Continental Football League, a second-tier professional league active in the late 1960s, included the Orange County Ramblers among its teams. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the National Football League in Los Angeles」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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