STAY IN THE GAME. If we're not in the game, we get nothing. Stay in the game.

That's what the Chargers executives kept telling each other. Kroenke had land, money and, most of all, the shrewdness required to relocate. He was willing to sacrifice his relationship with Rams fans and with the state in which he was raised -- something that Spanos, for all of his fights with San Diego politicians, seemed reluctant to do. Spanos needed help. So Richardson suggested that he partner with Mark Davis on the Carson project. For years, the Chargers and Raiders, both of whom play in baseball venues built in the 1960s, had failed to persuade their communities to help offset the costs of new football-only stadiums. If two teams moved together, Richardson said, it would help solve the league's "California dilemma," as owners called it.

Most owners liked the eccentric Davis, now 60, even if they knew him only as the quiet guy with the bowl cut who had pushed his father Al's wheelchair through hotel lobbies at league meetings. Still, many wondered whether Davis, who never had an official job with the Raiders until he assumed control of the team after his father's death in 2011, was up to the challenge of shepherding a stadium project alone. He had turned down many offers to partner with the 49ers at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, and for years, the Davis family had resisted offers to buy the team and move it south. During one such lunch meeting in 2010, two Los Angeles businessmen pitched a lowball offer to Al Davis, who started laughing. "F--- you," he told them. "Get the hell out of here." And he went back to eating his lunch.

So on Feb. 19, 2015, six weeks after Kroenke's Inglewood announcement, the Raiders and Chargers proposed their Carson project, a football-only venue, unlike the epicenter planned for Inglewood, and financed mostly by Goldman Sachs. Looking back now, some around the league wish that Goodell had locked the three owners in a room and forced them to cut a deal right then, avoiding the battles and hurt feelings that would unfold. Instead, Goodell allowed the NFL's messy form of democracy to run its course, appearing strangely detached in meetings. He said almost nothing while Grubman, who, like Goodell, declined to comment for this story, appeared to be too close to Kroenke; some involved in the process said they had expected Grubman to be strictly neutral. The disjointed process was leading to discontent among owners, at a time when, with football's long-term future a constant topic of debate, solidarity was needed.

The stage was now set for a showdown. On Aug. 11, 2015, the league's owners convened at the Hyatt Regency, in a Chicago suburb, for a special LA meeting. For the first time, both sides presented their proposals.

When you guys moved the team from St. Louis to Phoenix -- it wasn't about the money?" As Bidwill tried to answer, Jones moved in for the kill: "You did it for the money. - Jerry Jones to Michael Bidwill, president of the Arizona Cardinals

The Carson team went first. During its presentation, Grubman paced in the back of the conference room, drinking coffee.

The Rams contingent went next. Grubman moved to the front of the room and took a seat at the commissioner's table. The presenters showed off a model of their football oasis, and Mark Davis stared at it in awe.

Saints owner Tom Benson posed the first question about Inglewood, asking why owners should defray the costs of the extra real estate developments -- up to $200 million in league loans available for new stadiums -- that would benefit only Kroenke. But before Kroenke and Demoff could say a word, Grubman jumped in to answer the question, explaining that Benson misunderstood the amount of money the league would contribute.

The pro-Carson owners couldn't believe that a league official appeared to be speaking on behalf of the Rams' proposal. That moment, along with persistent rumors that Grubman wanted to work for Kroenke in Los Angeles, cemented in the minds of some owners that he was an agent for Inglewood.

Later in the meeting, Bears chairman George McCaskey asked whether Kroenke would be willing to share the stadium with a second team. Kroenke reminded the owners of a 2012 memo from Goodell that mandated that any LA stadium be built to house two teams. Kroenke said he could quickly draw up a lease if necessary.

Some of the owners on the NFL's six-person Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities -- Richardson, Rooney, John Mara of the Giants, Robert Kraft of the Patriots, Clark Hunt of the Chiefs and Bob McNair of the Texans, most of whom were considered the old guard and supported Carson -- were offended. Spanos' family had always put the league first, and now Kroenke had declared that if it were necessary to take on a second team, the Chargers would be relegated to a tenant, junior-partner status. Kroenke considered his invitation to be sincere. He had extended a hand as far as he could, given the agreement between Spanos and Davis for Carson.

Before the meeting ended, Jones, as would be his habit, took control. He delivered a rollicking, profanity-laced eight-minute endorsement of Kroenke's monumental vision, saying in his Arkansas drawl that whichever owner returned to Los Angeles, he needed to have "big balls."

It was awkward and hilarious. Everyone, including Kroenke, tried not to laugh. But it was also a welcomed sentiment for the new-money owners such as Dan Snyder of the Redskins and Jeffrey Lurie of the Eagles, who backed Inglewood. "If you want to do it right," Jones continued, "you have to step up."

With a final vote scheduled for Jan. 12, 2016, in Houston, only five months away, the Carson supporters knew they were in trouble. Making matters worse, Spanos and Davis had argued with each other about Carson earlier that day in front of other owners. Still, Jones sensed Spanos had enough support to prevent Kroenke from going to Los Angeles alone. After the meeting, Jones approached Spanos on the tarmac where a handful of owners had parked their planes.

"I want you in LA with Stan," Jones told Spanos.

Spanos was noncommittal. He had no interest in partnering with Kroenke.

Meanwhile, a few old-guard owners had another idea to help their friend. If Carson was going to succeed, the project needed a star.

By The Numbers Inglewood HKS Inc. Boss Stan Kroenke, Rams owner, net worth $7.6 billion

Capacity 80,000

Planned Completion Date 2019

Cost $2.7 billion, privately financed

Total Area 298 acres

Focal Points and Perks Will be part of a mixed-use development complex, including a 6,000-seat performance venue, a 300-room hotel, 890,000 square feet of retail space, 2,500 residential units, 25 acres of parks and space for the NFL Network.

SHORTLY BEFORE THE Chicago meetings, Bob Iger received a call from Jerry Richardson. The Panthers' owner wanted to meet the Disney CEO, but Richardson didn't identify the topic -- only that the sit-down should be conducted under strict secrecy. An Iger confidant suggested that Richardson was inquiring about his interest in perhaps replacing the wounded Goodell, but Iger suspected otherwise.

After all, a year earlier both Goodell and Kraft had asked Iger whether he'd be interested in getting involved in a team that could move to LA, tapping into his local expertise and gravitas. The topic came up again in April when Iger ran into Mark Davis at a Clippers game, a meeting that led to a few discussions about Iger buying a share of the Raiders. And so when Iger and Richardson met on Aug. 5 for two hours in Iger's office in Burbank, Richardson asked Iger about the market. One team or two? Carson or Inglewood? They agreed to stay in touch.

Over the next few days, Iger researched the Carson site online, noting its proximity to a cross-section of freeways. Richardson and Iger met two more times, talked often on the phone and traded email. Iger liked the fact that Carson would be an open-air stadium, unlike the roofed one Kroenke wanted to build. He also preferred parking lots rather than the garages proposed at Inglewood that would limit tailgating and make game-day traffic a mess. "This is great," Iger told Richardson. It was exactly what Richardson wanted to hear. So he asked whether Iger would be willing to talk with Spanos and Davis about it.

In early October, Iger met with Spanos at the Shutters hotel in Santa Monica. A month later, Disney's board of directors approved Iger's involvement. On Nov. 11, it was announced that Iger had become the nonexecutive chairman of Carson Holdings, the joint venture between the Chargers and Raiders, with an option to become a minority owner of one of the franchises after the stadium was completed.

Goodell, who privately preferred the Inglewood site but had pledged to remain neutral, told a friend that Iger's involvement was a potential "game changer" for Carson. Having helped negotiate billions of dollars of rights contracts with the NFL, Iger and some of the owners were acquaintances. He knew how the league worked. Many owners who had considered Kroenke to be a Los Angeles lock worried that now he might lose.

By The Numbers Carson Manica Boss Alex Spanos, Dean Spanos and family, Chargers owners, net worth $1.689 billion, and Raiders owner Mark Davis, net worth $500 million. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger, who oversaw the project.

Capacity 65,000

Planned Completion Date 2019 (but won't be built now)

Cost $1.8 billion, privately financed

Total Area 168 acres

Focal Points and Perks 850,000 square feet for commercial, entertainment and other uses, a farmers market and a 350-room hotel.

OWNERS AND EXECUTIVES say the following weeks were among the wildest they had seen. They called and texted each other daily with sales pitches, demands and gossip. Almost nothing was out of bounds. Some Carson supporters weighed ways to try to jam up Kroenke, such as forcing him to pay the entire $550 million relocation fee up front while giving Spanos and Davis a payment plan. Undecided owners considered the price of their vote, whether it was changing their division and conference alignment, horse-trading a vote for a promise of future support for an ownership succession plan or a new stadium of their own. Others were convinced that some owners didn't even know where Carson and Inglewood were located. "Owners were all over the place," one team executive says.

By most estimates, Carson had managed to cobble together 18 votes, shy of the 24 required for relocation. The Rams moving alone to Inglewood had only about seven votes. Many owners thought Kroenke was hell-bent on trying to reach nine, just enough to prevent the Carson project from reaching 24 votes and keeping him in the game. The silent majority preferred the Inglewood site but liked Spanos better than Kroenke. Most owners wanted to avoid a Raiders return to Los Angeles, owing to Al Davis' burned bridges and the co-opting of the team apparel by gangs, concerns so deep that some wouldn't even consider Carson. "It's hard to get owners to move," Iger says now. "Each one is a boss in his own right."

And so the battle for Los Angeles became a battle between Richardson and Jones, two Jerrys with dueling powers of persuasion. Jones mostly worked the phones, trying to broker a partnership for the Rams and Chargers in Inglewood. On Nov. 27, Kroenke wrote a letter pledging to allow a partner, though it would not extend to the stadium's design or the surrounding development. It was a major concession, encouraged by Jones after calculating that Kroenke likely wasn't going to get 24 votes on his own. Spanos and Davis still refused to consider it, but Jones continued to push for support, convinced that the membership silently preferred it.

Richardson flew his private plane to visit several owners. Everyone around the league called it the Jerry Tour. He insisted that Carson was the better site and that the league not only would regret leaving St. Louis for a second time but would set an awful precedent by turning away the estimated $477 million in public funds for a new stadium that the state of Missouri was poised to offer. At times, Richardson's hard-charging style, delivered with a threatening tone and citing favors he had done for them, offended some owners. "He bullied people," a team executive says. "Some were turned off by his forcefulness."

It was clear that the owners were playing by their own rules -- and, as a league insider working with all three teams later said, "They make up the rules as they go." A news report said that the league would pledge an extra $100 million to help St. Louis finance a new $1.1 billion riverfront stadium -- a move that McNair, the Texans' owner and a Carson supporter, predicted would prevent the Rams from meeting the league's relocation guidelines. But days later, Goodell wrote a letter saying that the $100 million would not be available. And the night before St. Louis voted on the stadium package, Grubman called in to the show of local radio host Bernie Miklasz to describe St. Louis' new stadium proposal as "suboptimal" and say that Kroenke was "going to keep his options open." It seemed to validate what many had long suspected: He wanted the Rams to move.

It was chaos. The spectacle of NFL leaders undercutting St. Louis' attempt to keep the Rams, and the uncertainty in San Diego and Oakland, was becoming another public-relations disaster. Goodell privately expressed frustration about all three owners -- if they were elite, they wouldn't be trying to relocate in the first place, he told a friend -- but in the end, the commissioner supported their efforts to leave. A few days after all three teams filed for relocation, Goodell issued a 147-page report that called the efforts of all three markets to keep their respective teams "unsatisfactory and inadequate." It was an official green light for all of them to move, knowing that at least one team would be forced to crawl back home.

Soon news broke that Kroenke would build a stadium in Inglewood no matter how the owners voted, a charge the mayor of Inglewood denied but some around the league believed to be true. Many Kroenke supporters were furious that he would risk alienating owners so close to a vote. "There it is," said one executive of a pro-Inglewood team. "A big middle finger to the league."

All three teams privately vowed to abide by the membership's vote, and each of the three owners had to sign an agreement pledging not to sue if his relocation proposal was rejected. But by then the LA derby had become an open war, beyond anyone's control. Before a late-season AFC game, two owners met in a luxury box and wondered how the LA vote would turn out in Houston. "I don't know," one owner told the other. "Stan is more interested in blocking Dean than he is in finding 24 votes."