Dean Spanos made the mistake of leaving San Diego on Thursday.

The NFL made the mistake of allowing him that opportunity exactly one year earlier.

The league granted the Chargers an option to move to Los Angeles thinking Spanos would go back and make a good-faith effort in San Diego. Maybe even two.

He hardly tried.


Of course, San Diego’s civic leaders and citizenry would have needed to go along. They didn’t, not enough.

There may be no end to the bickering and finger pointing over where blame lies.

Stop.

Plenty of people tripped along the way, but the fault ultimately lies at Spanos’ feet.


All along, even as they insisted he wanted to stay in San Diego and that several other owners were trying to convince him to do so and even might help in some way, NFL sources would caution that Spanos might just be done with the fight in San Diego and decide to give up.

Still, though, even that caveat came with a caveat. There was a deeply held belief that Spanos lacked the temerity to make the move. Sometimes, people would couch that opinion by saying something about him being “a team player” who does what is best for the league. Others speculated that his seeming inability to make a decision would ultimately keep Spanos paralyzed.

There is another theory – that Spanos made the move out of spite.

He got embarrassed in 2016, his Carson stadium proposal going from seeming favorite to pathetic also-ran in a matter of days, as owners who had publicly and privately endorsed the Chargers’ and Raiders’ project were moved to approve the Rams’ Inglewood stadium.


And the truth is, Spanos is a famous holder of grudges over much smaller things than public humiliation. He was angry at everyone in San Diego who crossed him or even didn’t unequivocally support him. It hurt him all throughout the supposed 16-year process, right up to the end.

That Spanos took his franchise and decided to become a squatter in the middle of the nation’s second-largest television market, likely increasing the wealth of his entire extended family, as a matter of revenge might make sense if Spanos had such chutzpah in him.

This move to L.A. wasn’t standing up, it was slinking away.

These are not the bitter musings of a columnist left without an NFL team to cover. I made sure to share similar sentiments last month and even last year, writing this deal could have been done if Spanos were a bigger man.


He wasn’t. He’s not. He never will be.

Those of us who thought Spanos would keep the Chargers where they belong were wrong.

We should have acknowledged not just the possibility he would leave but the probability that day would come. We failed to consider apprehension’s practically inevitable outcome: giving up.

Spanos did what every coward eventually does. He took the easy way out. He walked away rather than continue to engage a solution. In essence, it got too hard for daddy’s little boy.


If his proud declaration to “Fight for L.A.” goes anything like his pathetic fight for a way in San Diego, the Rams have nothing to worry about.

The Chargers are owned by the Spanos family. Alex Spanos bought the team for $80 million. His wife and children now own a $2.08 billion business that is supposedly going to be worth more than $3 billion. That math helps justify the move from a financial standpoint.

So, too, does the fact the Chargers will be playing virtually rent-free in a stadium fronted by Rams owner Stan Kroenke. The Chargers’ contribution to construction will come in the form of them paying slightly more than 80 percent of their portion of non-football revenue. But they get to keep their game-day revenue, which includes ticket sales, sponsorships and parking.

Whether the Chargers can win enough to capture a substantial share of the easily bored L.A. market is impossible to know. But even with a $650 million relocation fee, payable over 10 years and for which they can borrow $325 million on a 30-year note, the Spanos family’s financial risk is almost nonexistent.


And while most Chargers fans would presume to find Dean Spanos’ picture next to “foolish” in the dictionary, it is more aptly found next to “fearful.” (Some might argue there is at least one other place his likeness could appear, but we will keep this clean.)

For whatever other arguments and explanations for why the Chargers moved – Mark Fabiani always wanted them to is one possibility increasingly difficult to deny; NFL owners were not prepared to offer more money to help bridge the funding gap is one reality – the Spanos family’s risk aversion is what this decision came down to.

They could borrow half a billion bucks or so in a city with 20 Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood studios, major law and accounting firms and various other corporate wealth they think will lap up their premium seating and sponsorship deals.

They couldn’t borrow $200 million or so in San Diego, with about one-tenth the corporate wealth and all the responsibility for cost overruns and any other associated risk.


It is too kind to call Dean Spanos a millionaire pauper. But the U-T and common decency do not allow me to use a different P-word.

It is also easy to spend other people’s money, to say Spanos should have taken that risk.

But he said he wanted to stay. He made sure enough people knew that he was “anguished” by the possibility of moving that we would all know, too.

Had Measure C been better than a bogus try, Spanos could say the things he is now about San Diego without them being truth twisting. Were Spanos to leave in 2019 if a broadly crafted initiative failed, he could have been a sympathetic figure rather than a pathetic one.


Instead, fear drove him to make a decision.

The sad thing for San Diego is that the move just might work out for the Chargers. Boldly predicting they will forever flail in Los Angeles is easy and en vogue, but it is not a certainty.

However, a team leaving a fan base loyal enough to care deeply after 56 years of habitual mediocrity and two years of threats has been swallowed by the yawning of L.A., a vast wasteland where middling teams go to be ignored, is a terrible look for the NFL.

The Chargers’ mistake is the league’s mistake.


Though only the fans of a team once known as the San Diego Chargers will pay for it.