The National Football League season is underway, with the opening game last night, and a full slate of games this weekend, but you’d have to look pretty hard and pretty long to see any evidence of it here in San Diego.
That’s what happens when you are no longer a city that has an NFL team. The team that used to be here, that was here for some 55 years, before the owners decided to thumb their noses at the city and its fans that supported them for all those years.
And now as they open their second season playing in that tiny soccer stadium up there in L-A, here in San Diego, very few seem to care.
So few in fact it seems, that if you asked people around town if they know the team that used to be here is playing their season opener at their little home up north this Sunday, it would be hard to find people who even knew that.
That’s what happens when the team that used to be the talk in their former hometown in early September turns its back on you. You can hardly hear a murmur among fans in San Diego about that team now.
Oh, the team that was here for more than five decades before raising a finger at us here, has tried to attract fans from San Diego, trying to lure them with hype and promotions, to drive up there and to pay the overpriced cost of an NFL ticket, but there are no signs of even mini-caravans taking the bait.
So here we sit in San Diego as the NFL season here kicks off to the sounds of silence…not even thinking much about that team that told us they didn’t care about us. For most fans, it seems that feeling has become mutual.
(Photo of Philip Rivers possibly wishing he were still playing in San Diego from Getty Images)