Report: League has discussed forcing AFC Championship game to L.A. Coliseum

I said this multiple times before and early this season (if I hadn’t deleted my twitter account I’d find the tweets) but I said multiple times that I wanted to see the Chargers make the playoffs, and do so with a record good enough to host a game, so that the league would be forced to make a very interesting, and embarrassing, choice.

I said it again after the Chargers beat the Chiefs in Kansas City in this article. How fun will it be to get a little revenge watching the Spanos family members responsible for dragging the team out of San Diego be forced to sound excited about the fact that the League is dictating to them that their “home” playoff game will be played at a stadium that isn’t their home stadium.

Well apparently, this exact thing is being discussed, according to this article from Jason La Canfora.

The league is reportedly worried about the AFC Championship being hosted in a 27k seat soccer stadium. So worried in fact, that they are even discussing a Sunday Night/Monday Night NFC/AFC Championship lineup in the event that the Rams and Chargers are both hosting so they can both play there and have time to reset the field.

Now, this is coming from La Canfora, who has been wrong before when citing unnamed “sources” as he does here. However, in this instance, his unnamed sources even offered up a quote.

“Playing a game of that magnitude in a stadium that small is a big issue to a lot of people around here,” one league source said of Dignity Health Sports Park. “There isn’t any plan in place to move it now that I am aware of, but there was a lot of talk about that when it looked like the Chargers might win the division. I would expect there to be conversations about that through the weekend as things happen.”

When you pair this report, with Russell Okung’s public accusation that Commissioner Roger Goodell doesn’t want the Chargers to host a game in their home stadium, it’s starting to look like more that a rumor.