AP

Back in October, PFT got the ball rolling on the notion that an NFL franchise would be rolling to Los Angeles within the next 12-24 months. Only two months later, a relocation seems inevitable by 2016, at the latest.

“There is no way we’re sitting here next year and there’s not a team moving,” an unnamed source “with as much intimate knowledge as anyone about this highly secretive, extremely tense situation” told Kevin Acee of U-T San Diego. “I’d be shocked.”

Acee takes an excellent look at the possibility that the Chargers will be the team to move. From a trio that also includes the Rams and Raiders, the thinking is that up to two could move to Los Angeles. For each franchise, it would be a return to L.A.; the Rams and Raiders left after the 1994 season, and the Chargers moved south after spending 1960, the first year of the AFL, in Los Angeles.

Acee also cites “credible talk” that two of the three teams will form an alliance aimed at helping both get to L.A. That could be the Rams and Raiders. Either way, Acee writes that Chargers owner Dean Spanos recently has been focused on “preventing and/or beating those two teams to Los Angeles.”

For the Chargers, the stakes can’t get much higher. If they stay put, two other NFL teams may infringe on territory the Chargers have spent two decades cultivating — and the Chargers could end up stuck in San Diego in a dilapidated stadium that, as Acee writes in the first paragraph of his article, “smells like urine and stale beer in certain of its cramped corridors.”

As the current season ends, the music will be getting louder and louder. When it stops, the Rams, Raiders, or Chargers could be forced to stay in their city, or find a new destination.