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Breaking: The Rams will return to California.

Technically, they will. In August, the Rams will practice with the Cowboys in Oxnard. Not as a precursor to a preseason game between the two teams, but as a coincidentally situated joint venture.

So why did the Cowboys want to bring the Rams to town for the August 17-18 sessions?

“With the initial focus groups and the initial [look-sees], the Rams are a very popular team in Southern California,” owner Jerry Jones recently said, via Jon Machota of the Dallas Morning News. “And so one of the reasons that it was attractive to us to work against them is because they have that good flavor. It is certainly not a reach at all to say that fans remember the Los Angeles Rams, and that is not a reach. So that makes them a good partner to practice with in the Los Angeles area.”

That could be a fancy way of saying that Jones wanted to give the Rams a chance to return to California on a trial basis in August, in the hopes of gauging local reaction. And if local reaction is overwhelming positive, it becomes another data point that favors the Rams being one of the teams that returns to L.A. once the music stops on a three-way dance with only a maximum of two seats available.