After USC's 55-21 loss to Stanford, it seems like everyone in the college football world is trying to figure out what's wrong with Trojan football. I'm going to take a look at a few explanations I've heard in the past few days:

1) Matt Barkley is the problem

First off, Matt Barkley is as good as any true freshman quarterback I've ever seen. He's leagues ahead anyone else I've seen play the position at such a young age.

Secondly, I don't see how you can blame him for any of USC's losses. He didn't play in the Washington loss, and the Trojan defense did nothing to stop Oregon and Stanford.

Third, USC has as little depth at receiver as they've had in years, with the offense desperately missing Damian Williams, tight end Anthony McCoy, and fullback Stanley Havili when they were out.

There's no question Matt Barkley has struggled lately, and some would say he's regressed in recent weeks. I still wonder if Mitch Mustain would have been a better choice (I know Aaron Corp wouldn't have been), and I think the coaching staff has overhyped the freshman. But Barkley has proven himself enough in my eyes, and USC has not lost three games because of him.

2) All of Pete Carroll's good assistants are gone

This is becoming a hip thing to say, but I think it's an unfair scapegoat. I would agree that the offense hasn't been the same since Norm Chow left. But coaches like Ken Norton, Pat Ruel, Todd McNair, Jethro Franklin, and Rocky Seto are either experienced coaches or people who are very familiar with Pete Carroll. Only play-caller Jeremy Bates is really all that new, and I'd argue he's doing a better job than most of his critics.

Any good program is going to lose assistants to other jobs. It comes with the territory. But the names I listed above aren't idiot know-nothing coaches.

3) The defense is horrible

Since the fourth quarter against Notre Dame, the USC defense has barely looked like a facsimile of its former self. Despite having nine new starters, the Trojans didn't give up two touchdowns in a game until Week 6. Since then, Oregon State, Oregon, and Stanford have almost moved the ball at will against USC.

The defense has had some injuries, but that's never hampered USC before. This is an epic collapse that I simply cannot explain. Despite the offense's inconsistencies, I can say the defense has been consistently bad. The talent is there, but I think there has to be a deeper issue.

4) The gap has closed between USC and the other Pac-10 schools

This is true, but it isn't a valid excuse for USC's struggles. Oregon has always had an excellent football program, and as long as they have Nike money flowing in, they'll get great players. Mike Riley and Jim Harbaugh have done tremendous jobs at Oregon State and Stanford in recent years, while Jeff Tedford still has a good program at Cal. Arizona and Washington seem on the rise, and you can never count out Dennis Erickson at Arizona State.

I think USC has actually recruited too much depth at certain positions, and it's led other good players who want more playing time to go elsewhere in the Pac-10. That being said, USC still has considerably more talent than any other Pac-10 team. They've done a great job of recruiting nationally.

The other Pac-10 schools might be more familiar with USC than tough nonconference opponents whom USC routinely pummels. But when you have the better players, you shouldn't lose.

5) The program has become too complacent

I think this a valid concern. In the last few years, I've seen USC players act with a sense of entitlement. I didn't see that in Pete Carroll's first few years when players were trying to prove themselves and the program was building an identity.

I'm sure Pete Carroll is still working his team hard in practice. But a sense of confidence has been replaced by cockiness. And I was horrified to see the way USC gave up in the fourth quarter against Stanford. Personally, I think Pete Carroll needs to establish a new mental approach for his team.

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Before people panic too much, it's worth mentioning that USC is 6-3 and not 3-6. Every program, including Florida, Oklahoma, LSU, and Texas has an off-year once in a while. Pete Carroll's consistent excellence has been beyond remarkable. That doesn't excuse this year's disappointments. But it should allow for some perspective. USC football is still as talented as any team in the nation, and it will be back very soon.

Should someone be thrown out of the army if their business card identifies the bearer as an "SOA" (soldier of Allah)?

Probably not, but that, along with a number of other warning signs should have indicated that Major Malik Hasan's reported request to leave the army should have been granted before he went 9/11 at Ft. Hood.

In any case, the question of split loyalties inside the military, especially during a time of war, is urgent and troublesome. I first learned of it while working on my book, Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, about two girls killed by a Marine after the Gulf War in Twentynine Palms, California. Some of the Marines I spoke with during the 90s - well over ten years ago - told me about radical Saudi clerics trying to recruit them in the supply lines in Kuwait. Mostly these suitors offered money; some offered the idea of a religion that would treat converts fairly (the pitch was often directed to African Americans, but no one was exempted, according to what Marines, both black and white, were telling me). Now remember - this was before 9/11, and I reported the information in my book, which was first published in early 2001 (and recently re-issued in a new, updated edition).

When I first learned that members of the US military were being approached by Islamic clerics, I wasn't really surprised; this is war, I thought, and offers to join the other side or take the first step in a shift of allegiance are probably routine. But the news was curious, and for a time, I wondered where it might lead. Then a few years after the attacks on New York and DC, there came a deadly incident in Kuwait: Muslim soldier Sgt. Asan Akbar fragged three tents of sleeping army officers and senior NCO's at an American base in that country. I wrote about it for Slate and also reported that Beltway sniper and former sergeant John Muhammed (executed last week and under arrest by then) may himself have waged a similar fragging incident while he was in the army during the Gulf War.

Split loyalties inside the military involves a lot of tribes. While writing Twentynine Palms, I found out that there had been a riot between Crips and Bloods, inside the same battalion (!), on the base at Twentynine Palms. It had to be broken up by mp's. What would happen if that fight had erupted in an actual war zone? I wondered. During the course of my research, I also heard that the Aryan Brotherhood was inside the armed services, along with other gangs, just like in the outside world, and then a few years later, the physical evidence emerged: American gang graffiti was found at various Iraqi War locations, adding to the ancient glyphs that characterize the region - themselves inscribed by vanished tribes marking their turf.

Solving the problem of tribes within our own military tribe is beyond my pay grade. But as Christopher Hitchens points out in his latest Slate piece,
"Hard Evidence," members of other communities among our guardians - blacks, Jews, Catholics - have not been involved in attacks on their brothers and sisters, although they may have disagreed with policy or various wars over the years. For sure, one way not to solve the problem is to ignore what certain influential Islamic clerics have been saying to their burgeoning flocks for years - and fail to take note when people announce their beliefs on that strange modern contrivance known as business cards.

We say all sorts of things about ourselves on our cards. Some of us are "Scorpios," we tell the world. Others are "entrepreneurs." Still others wrap it up visually with an image of an animal or an organization logo. What we say so quickly tells a lot - if only about the choice that was made in what to put on the card. It's what we want people to remember about us when they find our cards in a mess of stuff in their wallets. Where did Major Hasan leave his cards? I wonder. Was it in a stripper's g-string at the local club he visited often? On his desk at Ft. Hood, next to a box of tissues for distraught patients? I wonder who saw it, what they made of "SOA," and if mention of the tell-tale card was entered in Hasan's file. As the short story writer Ellen Gilchrist has written, "The truth has a biological urge to come out." Alas, this time around, no one was listening.

After a tough year of financial woes that had more to do with mismanagement than the bad economy, MOCA put on a huge gala opening to celebrate its 30-year retrospective. Over a thousand of L.A.'s brightest lights in the entertainment and art worlds turned out for the party, which featured Lady Gaga in a seven-minute original performance.

Brad and Angelina were there, as were James Franco, Eva Mendes, Chloe Sevigny and Gwen Stefani with husband Gavin Rossdale. They perused the contemporary art in the galleries along with David Hockney, John Baldessari, Frank Gehry, Takashi Murikami and Ed Ruscha.

Cocktails were served, live lounge music was played and then the guests filed into a huge tent festooned with red velvet and crystal chandeliers. Lady Gaga's image was everywhere, her striking face featured in Russian revolution-era posters inside and outside the tent, and her performance piece, created with the collaboration of artist and needlepointer Francesco Vezzoli, was dedicated to and inspired by Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes.

Dressed to the nines in a hat designed by Gehry (echoing the Disney Hall silhouette), dress by Prada, mask by Baz Luhrmann and Kewpie doll makeup, Ms. Gaga sat at a pink Steinway decorated by artist Damien Hirst as members of the Bolshoi Ballet danced along a catwalk. Lady Gaga was more subdued than usual at the high end event, for which a ticket ran in the thousands. After the show, the Damien Hirst piano--with Gaga's prints all over the ivories--was auctioned off and the winning bidder, gallery owner Larry Gagosian, took it home--or perhaps to his gallery--for $450,000.

Ms. Gaga's costume pieces will be auctioned online to add to the $3.5 million the museum raised with the gala. "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years" will be free to the public for the coming week to see the real stars--Rothko, Warhol, Bengston, Baldessari, Rauschenberg and friends.

All photos by Iris Schneider. Click to view larger.

From the top: Lady Gaga performing, Mendes and Baldessari, Hockney, Stefani and Rossdale, Ruscha.

A pitched battle to prevent the world's largest garbage dump from being built next to Joshua Tree National Park has been won in the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, thanks largely to Donna and Larry Charpied, a pair of jojoba farmers who live in a trailer at the park's edge and filed the first briefs opposing the project almost twenty years ago, after reading how-to legal books and pouring their own money into the lengthy campaign.

In recent years, a coalition consisting of the Desert Protection Society and the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice joined the battle, and Oakland attorney Stephan C. Volker argued the case against the Bureau of Land Management and Kaiser Eagle Mountain, Inc. "The land trade BLM approved here would have literally 'trashed' a spectacular national park whose outstanding natural values have earned it designation as a World Biosphere Reserve," Volker said today. "Shy of Yosemite Valley, I cannot think of a worse place to dump LA's trash for the next century than the fragile desert wilderness adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park."

I concur. In fact, I met the Charpieds some time ago, during my many moons of wandering through Joshua Tree National Park, and through them, I have learned much about a place that has become so crucial to my life, and theirs. Over the years, they have taken me on hikes into remote areas of the park, shown me secret petroglyph sites known to few moderns, walked with me down Pleistocene trails, and spoken quietly of the very jojoba plants - Adam and Eve - that spawned their beautiful, little farm in the Colorado Desert. Like many sacred things, the plants cannot be viewed, but they are somewhere in the environs, living their ancient lives together. From these plants have flowed the most wonderful oil, through their descendants, who pour out the park's wonders into an old still at the Charpieds' farm, then fill a mini-assembly line of pretty bottles that pop up at farmer's markets around southern California or are available for purchase right here.

I've been using the organic oil that Donna and Larry make since I met them, and I consider it a magic elixir from the desert - regenerating for skin and hair, and who knows what else? Like a mad prophet, I've extolled the miracle in various publications, and have also chronicled the Charpieds' battle to save the Promised Land at length - first in the now-defunct Buzz Magazine (where the article was buried because the editor feared the subject of garbage would repel readers), and then more recently in my book Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango, and also for the Mother Nature Network (which picked up a piece I first wrote for Plenty Magazine - another vanished publication).

The case to stop the dump took months to make its way through the Ninth Circuit and we were all beginning to wonder what this meant. At a time when the wilderness is under siege in so many ways, would Joshua Tree National Park be the next on the triage list? For the moment, the answer is a resounding no - the place where the streets have no name will remain so, unsullied by refuse, preserved for next Wednesday, and the Wednesday after that, and we can all say thank you to a pair of jojoba farmers who live in a trailer and make oil from a plant that shares its home with the desert tortoise, the raven, the coyote, the mighty rocks, the carpets of stars, and all the fine things that flourish and endure here - and help us do the same, wherever we are.

"Advice for Greenies in a Complicated World"

Dear JJ:

My wife and I are buying a car for our youngest son, who turns 17 next month. We're committed as a family to a low carbon footprint, so my wife drives the Lexus SUV hybrid, I drive a Tesla Roadster, and our twin 18-year-old sons each drive a Toyota Prius. We're hanging on to our 2002 Range Rover (I confess), but only for emergencies! Which 2010 eco-car do you recommend?

John Jr.'s Dad
Brentwood, CA

Dear John Jr.'s Dad:

While I admire your devotion to your kids, it's always good to recall--especially in the Los Angeles region--that a hybrid car is a car. So is a Tesla. It is not a magical environment-cleaning machine that sails into the sky under cover of darkness to gobble up carbon whenever President Obama--or even Al Gore--flashes the green bat signal. Legend to the contrary.

A Prius emits 4 tons/yr of CO2 if your teenager drives an annual average of 15,000 miles. That figure accounts for the vehicle's entire life cycle, from the ore mining and steel manufacture stages to freeway commuting and recycling. While he'll burn 320 gallons of gas each year to drive it, the manufacturing process itself has already burned up 113 million BTUs (equivalent to 905 gallons of gas)--a carbon debt equivalent to 41,630 miles, or three solid years, of driving.

I realize that using as many resources as possible as efficiently as possible is becoming a popular league sport in many communities. I also sympathize that buses arrive in some parts of Brentwood about as often as rain. Still, in light of one of the most fundamental guidelines for Greenie consumers--when you consume resources, you consume resources, even if you've changed all your light bulbs and you're a major environmental donor--I can only gently recommend that you sell one of the four eco-cars rather than acquire a fifth.

Since the Lexus allows you to travel as a family--and since to ask you to part with your Tesla Roadster would be downright inhuman--I'd suggest that you ask John Jr. and his brothers to choose the Prius they like best and that you sell off the second. If the three remaining eco-cars might possibly suffice for emergencies, I'd then also encourage you to sell the Range Rover--ideally, if you can, to a certified car recycler.

Did you know that SUVs are up to 85% recyclable?--and that 2002 Rover, as you know, only gets 12 mpg. Which is admittedly in contrast to the more efficient 2010 models, which deliver 14 mpg, despite packing 130% more horsepower, the Sand Launch and Rock Crawl features that many people do find useful for commuting in the Santa Monica Mountains, and a dual-view infotainment touch screen.

Your Rover would, by the way, qualify as a clunker for the intermittent "cash for clunkers" federal program--as would of course any $90,000 2009 Rover that's been in use for at least a year. Unfortunately, though, that wouldn't allow you to reduce your multi-car fleet, since the program requires you to use the cash from your major gas-guzzler to put a brand-new moderate or minor gas-guzzler (with a huge carbon debt to manufacture it) on the road.

So instead, you could send all the Rover's iron, steel, zinc, aluminum, brass, copper, rubber, oil, plastics, and other resources off to do greener work in the world. The five 255/SSR18/XL tires alone could become shoes, mulch, fuel, asphalt, boat fenders, garden ponds, sandboxes, a basketball court, or an artifical reef.

You might consider using some of the proceeds you'll get from turning your SUV into scrap metal and a basketball court to throw a blowout backyard BBQ bash. Organic hot dogs! Tesla test drives! You'll want to make sure it's big enough to compensate for any loss of social status the three teenagers might potentially encounter now that they'll be sharing one Prius.

Then you can give the rest to John Jr., who can use it to buy his share of gas for the Prius, the mountain bike of his dreams, and an annual Metro and bus pass--which is bound to work somewhere in the L.A. area--with enough left over for a modest college fund.

Happy birthday, John Jr.!

Green Me Up, JJ is an occasional advice column. You can e-mail JJ with your burning questions about how to act and think environmentally smart in our complicated 21st-century world.

Steve Jones, the self-proclaimed Sire of Wilshire (a nod to the physical address of his former home at Indie 103.1 FM), is back on the air!

The former host of Jonesy's Jukebox is now hosting a two-hour program every Sunday at BBC 6, according to both MusicWeek and the BBC 6 Web site.

His first show, to which you can listen online, aired Sunday, Nov. 1. The show's title is "A Month of Sundays with Steve Jones."

You'll recall that Indie 103.1 went off the air in January, when pretty much all we heard from Jones appeared in a press release from MSOPR, the public relations company that represented Jones' group, The Sex Pistols. See LA Observed, Variety, LA Weekly and OC Weekly for more background.

-- TJ Sullivan

This year, for Halloween, my fourteen year-old daughter Franny wanted to dress up as a Swingers waitress - a hip, mini-skirted figure in fishnets and lug-soled boots. Halloween, for so many girls (and sadly, also grown women) is often an excuse to wear skimpy outfits, and I was proud of my daughter for finding a newer, hipper iteration on the over-played sexy kitty/sexy witch motif.

Here's what made her costume choice scary: I had once, in the long-ago days of yore, before I had ever borne a single daughter --- been an actual Swinger's waitress. Back in the sepia-tinted days of the early '90's, I had lived the dream of serving tofu scrambles to the Hollywood hung-over. My daughter's sassy dress-up notion was the uniform I crawled into at 5:30 every morning for the breakfast shift. Her Halloween fantasy was once my grinding, bleary, time-to-make-the-smoothies reality.

Ever the enabling mom, I took Franny and her sister on a pilgrimage to the original shop on Beverly Boulevard where I once slaved worked. Our mission: to cop a Swingers baseball T (that Franny might scissor into fabulous, rib-revealing shreds) and one of the wee, blue Dickies uniform skirts that had once barely covered my ten extra pounds as I bent over to wipe down tables. We settled into a booth and were approached by a fresh-faced, tattooed waitress not much older than my eldest.

"What can I get you?"

We ordered our grub and then I launched into my odd, back-storied request; "My daughter wants to be a Swinger's waitress for Halloween..."

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today signed a bill that effectively approved construction on a new football stadium in the City of Industry. This is truly a landmark day for those who have been yearning for the NFL to return to LA, myself included, since the Rams and Raiders left 15 years ago.

For years, the biggest hurdle to NFL football in LA was the lack of a stadium. The city government in Los Angeles was only willing to get behind the Coliseum, a site the NFL desperately did not want. City politics helped kill perfectly legitimate plans in places like South Park and Chavez Ravine. (The latter led Peter O'Malley to sell the Dodgers, which ultimately put us in the bizarre situation we're in today with the McCourts. For the record, I blame Mike Hernandez and Mark Ridley-Thomas for that, but that's a conversation for another day).

There's a laundry list of other failed stadium plans. A plan for the Raiders to move to Hollywood Park fell apart because Al Davis didn't want to wait for it to be built. A plan to renovate the Rose Bowl was rejected by the Pasadena City Council. A plan in Carson failed because partially because it was on a toxic waste dump. Other stadium proposals in Anaheim, El Segundo, and Lynwood never materialized.

But now, thanks to the incredible work of Ed Roski and Majestic Realty, we are as close as we've ever been to a modern football stadium in the greater L.A. area. Make that the state of California actually, as all three NFL teams in the state play in aging stadiums. I'd argue that today is also a victory for development and progress in California, as we showed that eight homeowners in Walnut are not enough to stop a project that will create jobs and benefit the region economically. In fact, those who are upset about the environmental exemption granted by the governor neglect to mention that the proposed LEED-certified stadium would actually be better for the environment than what would go there otherwise.

The biggest remaining hurdle now is getting a team to move here. Now that there is an actual stadium plan approved, expect relocation talks to get serious. The hope is that a team could move to the Coliseum or Rose Bowl in 2011, and the new stadium could be completed by 2013. Of course, relocation could be complicated by existing stadium leases and I am unsure what kind of deal Roski wants to work out in order give him at least some ownership stake in a franchise. There are seven teams that could potentially move to L.A. and I'll take a look at each of them.

San Francisco 49ers: The Niners are the least likely team to move among the seven. The team has been working for a long time on a new stadium in Santa Clara. It's possible that could fall through. But even if that were the case, the Niners are the dominant team in the Bay Area, there is a ton of history with the franchise, and one would reason that the Niners would exhaust every Northern California option.

Oakland Raiders: The organization is completely unstable right now, and it wouldn't surprise me if Al Davis were admitted to an insane asylum at some point. In the meantime, he's in a horrible stadium in Oakland with a lease that expires after the 2010 season. The NFL wants the Raiders to consider sharing a stadium in Santa Clara with the 49ers; however, the team has never given a definitive answer to that idea.

Rumors have persisted for years that anyone from Dean Metropoulos to Ed DeBartolo would like to buy the Raiders and move them south. Al Davis only owns 26% of the Raiders and he is not in great health, so anything could happen there. The Raiders also have as sizable a fan base any NFL team in L.A.

But part of the problem with the Raiders is their brand. When they played in the Coliseum, the Raiders name was synonymous with gang violence. Families stayed away from the Silver and Black. Players were afraid to let their kids attend their games in person. Even the NFL wouldn't allow Monday Night and Sunday Night games to be played at the Coliseum because they thought it wasn't safe.

It's true that USC football and continued development in the region has helped change the perception of the Coliseum and the surrounding area. But it will take a lot to change the perception of the Raiders. Perhaps a new owner with the right personality and the right marketing plan can make a difference, but it won't be easy.

San Diego Chargers: They might be in the best position to move of any team in the NFL. The Chargers can get out of their stadium lease if they're willing to pay a fee that decreases every year. They've been trying to get a new stadium in San Diego for a long time, and as far as I know, there aren't any serious proposals on the table. Still, it remains to be seen how much of a stake the Spanos family would be willing to give up, and at least publicly, they remain very committed to staying in San Diego. I think the NFL would like to keep a team there too, if possible.

Jacksonville Jaguars: If I'm NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, I'm looking at a team in a tiny market like Jacksonville that won't sell out a single home game this year on one coast, and I'm looking at an unserved market with 17 million people on the other coast, and I'd be wondering "how do I get them to move?"

I lived in Florida for two years, and I'd bet the Jaguars rank about fourth in the Jacksonville pecking order -- below Florida, Florida State, and Georgia college football. Certainly Jaguars attendance would bear that out, as the team appears to be nearing a crisis situation.

Moving the Jaguars to LA seems to make perfect sense. Even the name "L.A. Jaguars" has a nice ring to it. Unfortunately for LA though, Jacksonville has one of the toughest leases to break in the NFL. The team can only break its lease if it loses money for three consecutive seasons or if a judge determines that the city has not properly maintained the Jaguars' stadium.

On the first point, the Jags may very well be able prove financial losses at their current pace. But doing so would require the team to open its books to the public, something that sports teams almost never want to do, and the NFL might not even allow it. On the second point, the city has paid millions on improvements to the Jaguars' stadium, and it even hosted a Super Bowl as recently as 2005. Even if the Jaguars found a way to get out of their lease, they might have to pay up to $50 million in rent owed to the city in a lump sum.

The lease was negotiated by Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver, who is a Jacksonville guy and wants the team to stay. But he is also nearing 80 and has also openly talked about selling.

Perhaps a solution can be reached for the Jaguars to move to LA, especially since Jacksonville would appear to have little strategic value to the NFL. But for now, I still wonder why the league granted Jacksonville an expansion franchise over Baltimore and St. Louis back in 1993.

St. Louis Rams: I would absolutely love it if the Rams moved back to L.A. I grew up a Los Angeles Rams fan, and I have to admit -- as bizarre as this sounds -- that I miss them. TJ Simers recently wrote an article joking about how he didn't want the Rams back here because they're a terrible team right now. But good teams generally don't move, and in the NFL, bad teams can improve quickly. On-field performance is the least of my concerns right now.

The Rams have a storied history in Los Angeles, dating back to the days of Bob Waterfield, Norm Van Brocklin, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Deacon Jones, Eric Dickerson, and Jackie Slater. Despite what Simers might argue, the name Los Angeles Rams has cachet in this city, and at least has a historical brand to sell.

The Rams have a clear out-clause in their stadium lease in 2014 and have a murky ownership situation. After Georgia Frontiere died, control of the team went to her children Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez. Rosenbloom has made it clear that he'd like to keep the Rams in St. Louis, although I'm not sure why. He lives in Los Angeles where he's a Hollywood producer who made the Shiloh the dog movies. Still, him and his sister have been fielding offers the 60% share of the Rams that they own (Rush Limbaugh's interest became very public), and it might be difficult to find a buyer who wants to keep the team in Missouri when it would figure to be more profitable in Los Angeles. Still, 2014 is a long time from now.

Minnesota Vikings: I would be surprised if the Vikings left Minnesota, but it's certainly plausible. The Vikings' stadium lease expires in 2011, and persistent efforts to build a new stadium have born no fruit. The organization has expressed clear frustration with the state legislature for several years now. If significant progress is not made soon, then Vikings will surely take relocation seriously.

Still, it's hard for me to believe that given the deep emotions Minnesotans feel for the Vikings, that the team would leave. They have a rich tradition in the Twin Cities. However, the same could have been said about the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts, and they both found a way to leave. It would be interesting to have two Purple and Gold teams in L.A. that originated in Minnesota. Of course, if the team could always change its name if it moved here.

Buffalo Bills: The Bills are in a complex situation in Buffalo. The city is not what it once was, and it simply cannot support an NFL team. Bills owner Ralph Wilson recognizes this and has reached a deal to play several home games in Toronto each season until the team's lease expires in 2012.

Wilson just turned 91 though and has said he will not give the team to his children. That could leave the Bills for sale and open the doors for an L.A. buyer. Still, it's also possible that the team could wind up playing more games in Toronto, or even move there under a new owner. Additionally, Roger Goodell is from Western New York state and would like to keep a team there. If the Bills did move to L.A. though, then a name change might be a good idea.