The NFL may have taken over as America's No. 1 sport, but in the No. 2 media market, the league surprisingly remains absent. This week, ESPN.com investigates the mystery of how the NFL lived and died in Los Angeles.

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Maybe none of you were listening when the judge said the Raiders had to stay in OAKLAND, for the rest of the contract. Which is what 10, 11 years? So quit with the supposition and come back with the facts about the move.
Mike Mittleberger
Albany, Ore.
Editor's note: Al Davis has a pending lawsuit with the city of Oakland and Alameda County and could settle out of court for the right to break his lease. He would then be free to move the Raiders.

Please don't let the Raiders return to L.A. They will not be supported by an L.A. audience. If the NFL decides it wants to return, it should be with an expansion team that has the money to pay for its own stadium and salaries, and not to try to borrow and beg for public funds. It's not going to happen here.
Mark Daily
Agoura Hills, Calif.

Send the Raiders back to Los Angeles. Have Al Davis drop the lawsuits, agree to sell part of the team to L.A. investors, rebuild the LA Coliseum and before you know it you will have the fans in the L.A .Coliseum parking lot tailgating and cooking dogs again. L.A. and the Raiders are made for each for each other ... It is their destiny to continue the marriage from hell.
Brett Benson
Roselle, Ill.

Anyone but the Raiders. In fact, I'd rather have no team than the Raiders.
Jason Green
Aliso Viejo, Calif.

John Semcken's comments downplaying the apathy of L.A. towards the NFL, claiming that 60 percent of every city has no interest in the NFL, are all just dung. Look at your own feedback here! Practically everyone whose comments have been posted who is from the L.A. area has demonstrated a pointed, even proud and defiant disinterest in the NFL returning to their city. And yet THESE are not even typical people. They're people who care enough about the NFL to be reading ESPN's NFL pages and replying in the first place. If these interested, committed fans don't care about having a team, how much more so for the AVERAGE Los Angelian? You could not get fans in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Green Bay, or New York to talk this way.
Rich Yampell
Stoughton, Mass.

People think L.A. is not a sports town and that isn't true. Bring a losing team here and they will fail. To me, all efforts should be on returning the Raiders to L.A. Who cares what the city thinks if a stadium is going to be privately financed? They shouldn't have any say.
Ruben Hinojosa
Los Angeles, Calif.

Quite possibly L.A. might end up with the Arizona Cardinals. I couldn't imagine the irony of having the Cardinals move from St. Louis to Phoenix, only to move to Los Angeles to replace the Rams, who moved to St. Louis to replace the Cardinals.
Omar Parks
Tempe, Ariz.

I find your series very well thought-out and enlightening. In your review of the teams that may be considered candidates for relocation, I noticed there was no mention of either the Jets or the Eagles. I've heard of stadium difficulties for both of those teams as well. Public posturing aside, one might think that these two teams might well be added to the list.
Wayne Bottomley
Los Angeles, Calif.

Ah, L.A. Perhaps one of the most fickle markets in the country. The greedy nature of its inhabitants doesn't help either. Do I need to remind you where Hollywood is? The epicenter of "one minute you'r ehot, then your not."
JM Harper
Moscow, Idaho

Until the NFL quits letting Al Davis play them for a fool, there will be no change in what happens in L.A. He has that area tied up and keeps letting all these other Cailifornia cities beg him to bring his underacheiving goons to their city.
Greg Hoppes
Colorado

I don't consider myself to be racist. I do see that with the huge influx of Latinos that the interests of the city is changing. The majority is rapidly becoming Latino therefore other sports like soccer are gaining in popularity. I feel that an NFL team will do well here. It is just hard to spur interest in someone who didn't grow up watching the game like we did. Maybe the NFL needs to address this issue.
Brett Hand
Lomita, Calif.

As to why the Los Angeles market is apathetic: When football was in L.A. it was such a poor product for so long that over the years people just lost interest. A whole generation has grown up never seeing any L.A. football team even make the playoffs. Fans still show up to watch the good games, but you need a consistently high quality product if you are going to win back fans.
Ian Burnap
Los Angeles, Calif.

Why should I watch the boring NFL when we have two great college teams (USC and UCLA)? As far as I am concerned, football has never left L.A. I will always take Saturday afternoons over Monday Night Football!
Scott Rhodes
Costa Mesa, Calif.

I have been a Rams fan for 15 years. When the team moved from L.A. to St. Louis, I was crushed but before long, I was rooting for the same hapless Rams in some different city thousand miles away. ... I concede that a city can single handedly support a franchise (see the Browns) but at the same time I would like the NFL and the media to realize that there are football fans from Angola, Ind. to Omaha, Neb., that would follow their team to Japan if necessary.
Jeff Nettleman
Cincinnati, Ohio

Asking a city to contribute public funds to build a stadium is like building a movie theater for Disney. The owners have the money and could do it themselves. So far, L.A. is one of the few cities to have the strength to stand up to the billionaire owners' quest for more cash.
Brian Johnson
Los Angeles, Calif.

Paul Tagliabue is solely to blame for L.A. not having a team. His lack of vision and leadership has hurt the NFL in so many ways. Lack of foresight cost loyal fans in Houston, Cleveland and other cities their teams. If Tags had looked at the situation when Carolina and Jacksonville were added, he should have added teams in St. Louis and Baltimore. The NFL could have prevented teams moving to those cities. With the television money, the NFL could have become partners with the owners in building new stadiums in key markets. Tagliabue just doesn't understand that the future isn't now, and that you can't sacrifice it for immediate gain.
Robert Raines
Baltimore, Md.

The NFL without a franchise in L.A. is like the UN without the United States. It is not complete. They can ignore L.A. in the short term, but they will have to address the issue eventually. If they don't, we will get another Al Davis or Bill Bidwell in L.A. That experiment already failed (see Raiders and Rams). The only solution is an expansion team.
Don
Santa Barbara, Calif.

Having been born and raised in Southern California, I can tell the sports public of America that this issue is way overblown. ... The main reason why us SoCals don't really care about not having a team is that we don't need a home team to watch the NFL. In this era of sports bars and Direct TV, not having a franchise in the city is no crying shame. We aren't missing the NFL because it isn't gone!
Richard Buffum
San Clemente, Calif.

My friends back in Southern California -- who by the way love pro football -- say they don't want to see a team go there because by not having a team in their market, they get to watch two games in the morning and two in the afternoon without leaving the house. Here in Atlanta, we usually only get one game in the morning and one in the afternoon.
George Ishkanian
Atlanta, Ga.

With all the money and people in the greater L.A. area, how could they not fill the stands and keep a team? Being from Wisconsin, a three-hour drive to see the Packers is not unusual or an inconvenience, its a privilege. Let's worry about good football, not TV ratings.
S. Conway
Milwaukee, Wis.

If the NFL wishes to put a team back in L.A. The NFL is going to have to foot the bill. I don't believe any L.A. tax payer is willing to pay more taxes for a sport franchise team that he/she will probably never get to see except on TV. The cost of the tickets to pay the players exorbitant salaries is cost prohibitive to the average wage earner in L.A. The NFL is not about football anymore. It's about money, as in any business.
Patrick Kelly
Melbourne, Fla.

If the league is worried about tapping the second-largest market and rejuvenating long-dead interest in professional football, they should consider offering 16 games, but no team to L.A. The Coliseum could host 16 games for different teams, similar to the setup of the Hall of Fame Game. This way, the NFL could test the L.A. market, renew interest in pro football and not have a long-term, money-intensive venture that would end up in court.
Tim
Portland, Mich.

Some NFL owners, I feel, are asking some of our cities for too much money for stadiums when the owners themselves are making hundreds of millions each year. ... There should be a penalty for leaving a city such as fines, lost draft picks, omitting a team from the playoffs and at least a one-year absence from the league. Maybe then, the owners will think twice before moving their team.
Darance Hayes
New Orleans, La.

Why do you suppose Cleveland is such a draw. Because it HAS a following. The fans there LOVE their team. L.A. clearly has demonstrated no feelings at all for any team. So, how can I as a fan of football CARE if they have a team or not? Football is a game of emotions, and L.A. is an emotionally dead city. Let them rest in peace.
James Conard
Green Bay, Wis.

Chris Mortensen has it backwards. L.A. didn't lose the NFL -- the NFL lost L.A. Greed by Georgia Frontiere, Al Davis and the NFL made L.A. fans tell them to go to hell, or Oakland and St. Louis. We had two of the worst owners in pro sports, who put mediocre teams on the field (remember Dieter Brock and Marc Wilson at QB?) and wouldn't spend a dime marketing their teams like the Dodgers and Lakers do. The Coliseum issue is a farce. Tell the 50,000 USC fans on Saturdays that its a bad place. Tell the 15,000 fans that go to Staples, about a mile away, that no one goes downtown. The only thing wrong with the Coliseum were the Raider fans, and they aren't any different in Oakland, except they don't go to games. If the NFL wants to come back to L.A., they need to find a way to make people want them, rather than telling us how much it will cost and where we must put the stadium. If they really want to come back, tell them to bring money.
Al Trenda
Los Angeles, Calif.

Listen: Even the people in L.A .don't care about pro football. A poll was taken there 14 months ago and 77 percent of the people polled said they didn't care if there was ever a pro football team in L.A. It's that simple. They have enough going on in that city.
Jason Cox
Philadelphia, Pa.

The NFL is more apealing now, with no local team(s) in Los Angeles, due to the variety of games available on TV where the majority of fans watch anyway.
Dave Moore
Simi Valley, Calif.

I lived in L.A. from shortly before the Raiders came until shortly after both teams bolted. I think it's probably a combination of reasons. The metro area is very diffuse. It is spread out over a large geographical area, and there's no real center of town. ... But the big thing I noticed among the professionals with whom I worked was that a large percentage of them came from somewhere else (as I did). They came from Chicago or New York or Cleveland or Detroit, and they held on to their old loyalties. They would rather go to a sports bar in Redondo Beach, for instance, one that catered to Bear fans or Cheeseheads, than they would go to a bad neighborhood to watch teams they didn't care about and fight traffic and pay exorbitant prices.
Ken Rosenberger
Decatur, Ga.

The world's worst bandwagon fans don't deserve an NFL club. The NFL would be better off sending a club to Chernobyl!
John Pond
Gresham, Ore.

I lived in L.A. during the years that the Rams and Raiders left the Coliseum (UCLA too!) and anyone who was paying attention could see how badly the Coliseum Commission messed up. A classic example of the pitfalls of a politically-controlled, decision-making process. Newly installed members basically told Al Davis that they did not have to honor agreements made by their predecessors. It was ugly.
Jo Whiles
San Diego, Calif.

Los Angeles provides a population base which can support local television and game attendance. The NFL doesn't need that. Only national television ratings can bridge the gap from the NFL to Los Angeles. The NFL provides a once-a-week attraction and community identity which Los Angeles does not need. Only luxury suites can bridge the gap from L.A. to the NFL. Until one or both of these factors becomes great enough, the NFL and L.A. will not reunite.
Bryan Baldridge
Los Angeles, Calif.