NFL Relocation History: Every Team That Moved and Why
The full NFL relocation history since the 1970 merger, from the Raiders and Colts to the Rams, Chargers and Las Vegas, and how owners vote on a move.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL History & Records26 min read
- Owner votes needed to move
- 24 of 32
- Las Vegas vote
- 31-1 in 2017
- St. Louis settlement
- $790 million
- Seasons Los Angeles went without a team
- 21
On the night of March 28, 1984, a line of Mayflower moving vans pulled into the Baltimore Colts' training complex in Owings Mills, Maryland. By morning the team's equipment, files and furniture were on the interstate to Indianapolis, and a city that had watched Johnny Unitas for seventeen seasons woke up without a football team. No other image in NFL relocation history has stuck the way those vans have.
The short version of the record is this. Since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger, ten franchise moves have taken an NFL team to a new market: the Raiders to Los Angeles in 1982, the Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, the Cardinals to Arizona in 1988, the Rams to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995, the Browns' franchise to Baltimore in 1996, the Oilers to Tennessee in 1997, the Rams back to Los Angeles in 2016, the Chargers to Los Angeles in 2017 and the Raiders to Las Vegas in 2020. A move needs the approval of three-quarters of the league's owners, 24 of 32 under the NFL Constitution and Bylaws, and the club usually pays a relocation fee that is shared among the others. Almost every move on the list came down to one thing. A stadium.
Every NFL relocation since the 1970 merger, in order
The ten moves fall into three waves. The first, from 1982 to 1988, came after a court decision broke the league's ability to block a move. The second, from 1995 to 1997, was driven by a stadium-building boom in which cities that had not yet built competed with cities that had. The third, from 2016 to 2020, was about two markets: Los Angeles, which had been empty for two decades, and Las Vegas, which had never had a team.
| Season of first game | Team | From | To | Name afterward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Raiders | Oakland | Los Angeles | Los Angeles Raiders |
| 1984 | Colts | Baltimore | Indianapolis | Indianapolis Colts |
| 1988 | Cardinals | St. Louis | Phoenix area | Phoenix Cardinals, Arizona from 1994 |
| 1995 | Rams | Anaheim | St. Louis | St. Louis Rams |
| 1995 | Raiders | Los Angeles | Oakland | Oakland Raiders |
| 1996 | Browns franchise | Cleveland | Baltimore | Baltimore Ravens |
| 1997 | Oilers | Houston | Tennessee | Tennessee Oilers, Titans from 1999 |
| 2016 | Rams | St. Louis | Los Angeles | Los Angeles Rams |
| 2017 | Chargers | San Diego | Los Angeles | Los Angeles Chargers |
| 2020 | Raiders | Oakland | Las Vegas | Las Vegas Raiders |
Two details in that table need explaining. The Rams of 1995 left Anaheim, not Los Angeles proper; they had moved from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium in Orange County in 1980, a shift inside one metropolitan market that the league did not treat as a relocation. And the Baltimore Ravens are not, for record-keeping purposes, the old Browns. That arrangement is the strangest settlement in the league's history and has its own section below.
The Raiders appear three times. No other franchise comes close. Al Davis took the team south in 1982 and back north in 1995, and his son Mark Davis took it to Nevada a quarter of a century later. The Rams appear twice, and so does Los Angeles as a destination: three franchises have moved into the market since the merger, and two have left it.
- 10Franchise moves since 1970
- 3Moves by the Raiders
- 24Owners needed to approve a move
- 21Seasons Los Angeles went without a team
Counts franchise moves to a new market since the 1970 merger; stadium changes inside a metropolitan area are excluded.
A move inside a market, such as the Giants crossing the Hudson River, is a different thing entirely and is covered in the last section of this guide. For the deeper roots of each club and the order in which they joined the league, our guide to the oldest NFL teams still playing goes back to the 1920s.
How a move is approved: the vote, the window and the fee
The governing text is short. Article 4.3 of the NFL Constitution and Bylaws says no club may transfer its franchise or playing site to a different city, inside or outside its home territory, without the prior approval of three-quarters of the member clubs. With 32 teams that means 24 votes. An owner who abstains does not help the applicant, because the threshold is a share of the membership, not of the votes cast.
Around that sentence the league built a procedure after the Raiders case taught it that a bare vote was legally exposed. The current version is the league's Policy and Procedures for Proposed Franchise Relocations. It does three things.
The filing window
A team that wants to move must file a formal relocation application, and the policy sets a window early in the calendar year, after the regular season, for doing so. In January 2016 the Rams, Chargers and Raiders all filed within days of each other, which is why that month produced the Inglewood decision. A club cannot announce a move in October and play somewhere else the next week; the window exists so the league can review the case and so the home city has a final chance to respond.
The factors owners are told to weigh
The policy lists the considerations an owner should apply: the extent of fan support in the current city, as measured by attendance and other evidence; whether the existing stadium is adequate and whether the public authority has offered to fix it; whether the club has negotiated in good faith; the club's financial performance; and the effect a move would have on the league as a whole, including its television contracts and the balance of teams across regions. These factors are not a scoring system. They are the vocabulary in which a relocation is argued, and the paper trail the league can show a court if a city sues.
The relocation fee
A team that moves into a market worth more than the one it left is expected to share the gain. The fee is set by the owners and paid to the other clubs, not to the league office. The headline figure quoted when the Rams and Chargers were approved was $550 million each, payable either in a lump sum or in annual installments; reporting in July 2017, once the schedules were set, put what each of the two would actually hand over at $645 million. The Raiders' fee came in far lower.
Why the Raiders paid roughly $270 million less than either Los Angeles club is not something the league has explained on the record. The market they were entering was smaller, and the clubs voting on the fee had just watched two of their number pay for the biggest television market in the country outside New York.
The step-by-step sequence looks like this.
- Negotiate at homeThe club must show it tried to reach a stadium agreement with its current city and public authorities.
- File the applicationInside the window after the season, the club submits its relocation proposal and supporting evidence.
- Committee reviewLeague staff and an owners' committee examine the market, the stadium plan and the effect on the league.
- Owners voteThree-quarters of the 32 clubs, 24 votes, must approve at a league meeting.
- Fee and conditionsThe owners set the relocation fee paid to the other clubs and any conditions attached to the move.
A simplified outline of the league's relocation policy; the order of committee review and owners' meetings varies from case to case.
The fee is the part with the largest effect on behavior. A team that moves for a better stadium in a bigger market pays its partners for the privilege, which turns 31 owners from neutral referees into interested parties. How the money each club receives from national sources is shared is covered in our explainer on NFL revenue sharing.
Al Davis, the Coliseum and the antitrust verdict of 1982
Until 1982 the league believed it could stop any move it did not like. Then Al Davis proved it could not.
The story starts with the Rams leaving the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for Anaheim in 1980. The Coliseum Commission, a public body, was left with a 90,000-seat stadium and no tenant, and it went looking for one. Davis, whose Raiders had been arguing with Oakland over improvements to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, was willing. The league rule then on the books required a unanimous vote of owners for a team to move into another team's territory, and the Coliseum Commission had already sued to challenge it before Davis signed on.
On March 10, 1980, the owners voted on the Raiders' move. Twenty-two voted no, nobody voted yes, five abstained and the Raiders did not take part. Davis said he would ignore the result, signed a lease at the Coliseum and joined the Commission's lawsuit, arguing that the league's veto was an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act: 28 separate businesses agreeing among themselves to keep one of their number out of a market. The courts kept the team in Oakland while that was litigated, so the Raiders played the 1980 and 1981 seasons at the Oakland Coliseum.
The first trial, in 1981, ended with a hung jury. The second, in 1982, did not. A federal jury in Los Angeles found for the Coliseum Commission and the Raiders, and the team played the 1982 season at the Coliseum. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the liability verdict in 1984, and a separate damages phase followed.
What the court actually decided
The appeals court did not say the NFL can never control relocation. It said the league's rule as written, applied as it was applied to the Raiders, was an unreasonable restraint because it had no objective standards attached. That distinction matters. It is the reason the relocation policy described above lists factors at all. A vote taken against stated criteria, with a record of why, is much harder to attack than a vote of owners who simply did not want a competitor in Los Angeles.
The practical effect for a decade was the opposite of what the owners wanted. Every owner with a stadium complaint now knew the league's no carried legal risk. The Colts went in 1984 and the Cardinals in 1988, and the league did not attempt to stop either by force.
The Raiders' Los Angeles years produced a Super Bowl, the 1983 season's title won in Tampa, and some of the franchise's sharpest teams. They did not produce the stadium Davis wanted. The Coliseum was old, large and difficult to fill, and the luxury suites he said had been promised were never built. In 1995 he took the team back to Oakland, which offered a renovated stadium, and the second Raiders move in thirteen years went through without a court case.
The Mayflower vans and the Colts' night out of Baltimore
The Colts' departure is the one move fans of other teams still invoke when their own owner starts talking about a new stadium. It happened fast, in the dark, and under legal threat.
Robert Irsay had owned the Colts since 1972 and had complained for years about Memorial Stadium, a multipurpose bowl on 33rd Street the Colts shared with the Orioles. He had talked to Phoenix and to Indianapolis, among others. Indianapolis had something Baltimore did not: the Hoosier Dome, a domed stadium already under construction downtown, plus a lease and financial package designed to land a team.
In late March 1984 the Maryland General Assembly moved to stop him. A bill giving the city of Baltimore the power to take the Colts by eminent domain, the doctrine governments use to acquire private property for public purposes at a court-set price, was moving through the legislature, and the state Senate had passed its version. If the bill became law while the team was still in Maryland, the city could file to seize the franchise.
Irsay did not wait. Indianapolis officials helped arrange the vans, and on the night of March 28 into March 29 the team's property was packed and driven west. By the time the bill was signed, there was nothing physically left in the state to seize. Baltimore did file an eminent domain action afterward, and the litigation that followed, including the question of whether a city could condemn a team that had already left, ended without the Colts coming back.
Why it still matters
Two lessons came out of that night. Cities learned that a legislative threat aimed at an owner can accelerate the very move it is meant to stop. And owners learned how much a fan base will forgive a league and how little it will forgive an owner. The Colts' records, the name and the horseshoe went to Indianapolis, where the team won a Super Bowl after the 2006 season. Baltimore had no NFL football for twelve seasons, until a different owner made the same journey in reverse.
The NFL was not consulted in any meaningful sense, and after the Raiders verdict it had little appetite for testing whether it could stop Irsay. It is fair to say the Raiders case made the Colts move possible. It is also fair to say that no rule the league has written since would have stopped an owner willing to leave at night.
Cleveland in 1995 and 1996: the move that left a name behind
Art Modell stood on a stage in Baltimore on November 6, 1995, and announced he was moving the Cleveland Browns. The next day, Cleveland voters approved an extension of a county tax to pay for renovating Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The timing was not a coincidence anyone in Ohio has forgotten.
Modell had owned the Browns since 1961. The team was one of the best-supported in the league, with crowds filling a lakefront stadium that had been built in the 1930s and was shared for most of its life with baseball's Indians. When the Indians moved into their own ballpark in 1994, Modell lost a source of stadium income he had relied on, and he said the city's stadium plans had come too late and offered too little. Baltimore, still without a team after the Colts, had money set aside for a new football stadium at Camden Yards and offered him a lease on it.
Cleveland's reaction was unlike anything the league had seen. The city sued. Fans organized. Advertisers withdrew. Members of Congress introduced bills to limit franchise moves. The Browns played the rest of the 1995 season in a stadium full of people who had come to protest the owner rather than cheer the team.
The February 1996 settlement
What the city, the league and Modell agreed in February 1996 has no precedent in American professional sports. Its terms, in outline:
| Item | Where it went |
|---|---|
| Players, coaches and front office staff | Baltimore, with Modell's franchise |
| The Browns name | Stayed in Cleveland |
| Colors and logo | Stayed in Cleveland |
| Team records and history back to 1946 | Stayed in Cleveland |
| A team on the field | Promised to Cleveland by the 1999 season |
| A new stadium | Built on the lakefront site with public and league money |
Modell's franchise began play in 1996 as the Baltimore Ravens, a name chosen in a fan poll and taken from the Edgar Allan Poe poem, Poe being buried in Baltimore. In the league's official record the Ravens are a franchise founded in 1996. The Browns were treated as a franchise in suspension for three seasons and returned in 1999, owned by Al Lerner, with their history from 1946 intact.
So when someone asks whether the Browns moved to Baltimore, the honest answer has two halves. The organization moved. The identity did not. The Ravens won the Super Bowl after the 2000 season, five years into their official existence, and the record book credits that title to a five-year-old team.
The Cleveland settlement became a template that has never quite been used again, partly because no later city had the leverage Cleveland had. The Browns' history was one of the oldest and most decorated in the league. Few departed markets could claim the same, and the league has not offered the same terms since.
Houston to Tennessee by stages, 1996 to 1999
No team has taken longer to arrive. The Oilers' move from Houston to Nashville ran across four seasons and three stadiums before the team took the name it carries now.
Bud Adams had founded the Oilers as a charter member of the American Football League in 1960. By the mid-1990s he wanted to replace the Astrodome, the domed stadium in which the Oilers had played since 1968, and Houston's political leadership was unwilling to build him a new one. In 1995 Adams agreed a deal with Nashville, which offered a new stadium on the east bank of the Cumberland River. Owners approved the move on April 30, 1996, conditional on a Nashville referendum the following week; the city's voters backed the stadium agreement on May 7 by a margin of roughly 59 percent to 41.
The new stadium would not be ready until 1999. What happened in between went like this.
- 1996, lame duck in HoustonThe Oilers played a final season at the Astrodome, already committed to Tennessee, before small and hostile crowds.
- 1997, MemphisRenamed the Tennessee Oilers, the team played home games at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, roughly 200 miles from Nashville.
- 1998, Vanderbilt StadiumAttendance in Memphis was poor, so the club moved its home games to the Vanderbilt University campus stadium in Nashville.
- 1999, TitansWith the new riverside stadium open, the team became the Tennessee Titans and reached the Super Bowl that season.
Seasons are listed by the year they began; the stadium in Nashville opened for the 1999 season.
The Memphis year was a failure by any measure. Memphis fans had wanted a team of their own, not a borrowed one passing through on its way to a rival city in the same state. Crowds were thin, and the team cut the arrangement short and went to Nashville a year early, sharing a college stadium until its own was ready.
The 1999 Titans then played one of the most remembered postseasons in league history, beginning with the Music City Miracle, a kickoff return lateral against Buffalo in the wild-card round, and ending one yard short against the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXIV. Two relocated teams met for the championship. The coincidence was not lost on anyone in Houston or Los Angeles.
Houston was without a team for five seasons, from 1997 through 2001. The league awarded the city an expansion franchise, the Texans, who began play in 2002 at a new retractable-roof stadium next to the Astrodome. The Oilers' records stayed with Adams' team, and when it became the Titans he retired the Oilers name rather than leave it for Houston's next club. How these and other clubs got their names is covered in our guide to how NFL teams got their names.
Los Angeles, the empty market from 1995 to 2015
For 21 seasons, from 1995 through 2015, the second-largest television market in the United States had no NFL team. That absence was not an accident of indifference. It was, for owners in other cities, enormously useful.
The empty market worked as a threat. Any owner negotiating with a city or a state over a new stadium could point to Los Angeles, and the threat did not need to be stated aloud to be heard. In 1996 Seattle owner Ken Behring went further than talk, moving some team operations to Southern California before the league pushed back and Washington state voters approved a new stadium plan that kept the Seahawks in Seattle under a new owner. Other teams' stadium negotiations in that period were conducted with Los Angeles somewhere in the background.
Several attempts to return failed. Proposals for a stadium in the city, in Carson and at the Coliseum came and went. The league considered awarding an expansion team to Los Angeles in the late 1990s and gave the 32nd franchise to Houston instead. The problem was always the same one: nobody was willing to pay public money for a stadium on the scale the league wanted, and no private builder had yet found land and financing together.
How the drought ended
Stan Kroenke, the Rams' owner, solved the land problem by buying it. In 2014 he acquired a large parcel in Inglewood that had been part of the Hollywood Park racetrack site, and in early 2015 he announced plans for a privately financed stadium there. The Chargers and Raiders answered with a joint proposal for a stadium in Carson.
The owners chose in January 2016. They approved the Rams' move to Inglewood by a vote of 30 to 2, and gave the Chargers a one-year option to join the Rams in the new stadium as a tenant, with the Raiders next in line if the Chargers declined. The Chargers exercised the option in January 2017, after San Diego voters had rejected a hotel-tax plan for a downtown stadium in November 2016 by a margin well short of the two-thirds it required.
Both teams played in temporary homes while the stadium went up. The Rams returned to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the 2016 through 2019 seasons, and the Chargers played in a soccer stadium in Carson. SoFi Stadium opened in 2020, with both teams as tenants, and hosted Super Bowl LVI in February 2022, which the Rams won. The sequence of cities that have hosted the game is set out in our guide to Super Bowl host cities.
Las Vegas: the 31-1 vote and three more seasons in Oakland
The Raiders' third move was the first one to take an NFL team into a market that had never had one. It was also the most heavily subsidized.
The money came from the state of Nevada. In October 2016 the Nevada Legislature, in a special session, passed Senate Bill 1, which authorized $750 million in public financing for a domed stadium in the Las Vegas area, raised through an increase in the room tax charged at Clark County hotels. Tourists, in other words, would pay for it. No residential property tax or local sales tax was involved, which helped it pass.
That figure was the largest public contribution to an NFL stadium at the time it was approved. The rest of the cost fell to the Raiders and the league, with a loan from a bank replacing an earlier plan for casino owner Sheldon Adelson to invest.
On March 27, 2017, at the league meeting in Phoenix, owners approved the move 31 to 1. The single no vote came from the Miami Dolphins. There was little debate about Las Vegas as a market, which had long been treated as off-limits because of legal sports betting, and much more about the money on the table, which no city in California had come close to matching.
Three more seasons in Oakland
The approval came three seasons before the stadium would be ready, and the Raiders stayed in Oakland for all of them. They played 2017, 2018 and 2019 at the Oakland Coliseum, a lame-duck team in front of a fan base that knew the end date. Oakland sued the NFL and the team in December 2018 under antitrust and contract theories; the case did not stop the move and the city did not prevail.
Allegiant Stadium opened in 2020, and the Raiders' first season there was played without fans in the stands because of public health restrictions during the pandemic. It hosted Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024.
The Las Vegas move closes the third wave, and it set a mark that every future stadium negotiation in the league will be measured against. The number on the table was $750 million of public money, and the place that offered it got the team.
The stadium terms behind every departure
Read the ten moves side by side and the common cause is not hard to find. Each departing city declined, or could not afford, the stadium deal the owner wanted. Each new city offered one.
| Move | What the old city would not or could not provide | What the new city offered |
|---|---|---|
| Colts, 1984 | A replacement for Memorial Stadium | A new domed stadium under construction |
| Cardinals, 1988 | A football stadium to replace a shared baseball park | A university stadium and the promise of a new one |
| Browns franchise, 1996 | A new stadium on Modell's timetable | A new stadium at Camden Yards on favorable lease terms |
| Oilers, 1997 | A replacement for the Astrodome | A new stadium on the Cumberland River |
| Rams, 2016 | A stadium meeting the lease's top-tier standard | Private land in Inglewood owned by the team's owner |
| Raiders, 2020 | A replacement for the Oakland Coliseum | $750 million in hotel-tax financing |
The Rams' 1995 move into St. Louis followed the same pattern. The Trans World Dome, which opened in November 1995, came with a lease clause requiring the stadium to rank among the top quarter of NFL venues by 2015. When it fell short, an arbitrator in 2013 sided with the Rams' upgrade proposal, which was far more expensive than the public authority's, and the lease converted to year-to-year. St. Louis offered a new riverfront stadium in 2015. Kroenke had already bought land in Inglewood. In his relocation application, the Rams argued that St. Louis could not support three major-league teams at the level the market needed, an argument the city took as an insult and later took to court.
Arizona fits the pattern too. Bill Bidwill's Cardinals had played for years at Busch Stadium, a baseball park, and Missouri and St. Louis did not produce a football-only stadium in time. The Cardinals moved to Tempe in 1988 and played at Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium until a new stadium in Glendale opened in 2006.
A judgment is in order. NFL relocation has never been primarily about fans failing to show up. Cleveland sold out. Baltimore had a long history of loud support. The owners who moved were chasing a building, and a lease that sent the building's income to the team, and they went wherever a public authority would provide it. Attendance figures appear in relocation applications because the policy asks for them, not because they decide the outcome.
Moves before the merger, from Decatur to Kansas City
Relocation is as old as the league. The early NFL was a collection of small-town and big-city teams on uneven footing, and teams moved toward money from the start. The founding years themselves are covered in our guide to when the NFL was founded.
| Year | Team | From | To | Later name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1921 | Staleys | Decatur, Illinois | Chicago | Bears, from 1922 |
| 1934 | Spartans | Portsmouth, Ohio | Detroit | Lions |
| 1937 | Redskins | Boston | Washington | Commanders today |
| 1946 | Rams | Cleveland | Los Angeles | Rams |
| 1960 | Cardinals | Chicago | St. Louis | Arizona Cardinals today |
| 1961 | Chargers (AFL) | Los Angeles | San Diego | Los Angeles Chargers today |
| 1963 | Texans (AFL) | Dallas | Kansas City | Chiefs |
The Staleys were a company team sponsored by the A.E. Staley starch company in Decatur. George Halas took them to Chicago in 1921 and renamed them the Bears the following year. The Portsmouth Spartans, from a small Ohio River town, were a genuinely good team that could not survive the Depression in a small market and became the Detroit Lions in 1934.
George Preston Marshall's team played in Boston from 1932 to 1936, struggled to draw, and moved to Washington in 1937. The Cleveland Rams left for Los Angeles in 1946, having won the 1945 NFL championship, which makes them the only league champion to move the following season. Their arrival in Los Angeles also put the NFL on the West Coast for the first time.
The Chicago Cardinals spent decades as the second team in a Bears city and moved to St. Louis in 1960. That same year the new American Football League was founded, and two of its charter teams quickly moved: the Chargers from Los Angeles to San Diego after one season, and Lamar Hunt's Dallas Texans, who could not compete with the NFL's new Dallas Cowboys, to Kansas City in 1963, where they became the Chiefs. How the two leagues came together is covered in our explainer on the AFL-NFL merger.
A note on the Baltimore Colts of 1953: they were a new franchise, awarded after the Dallas Texans of 1952 failed, not a moved one, and the league's records treat them that way.
What the abandoned cities got
The outcomes for the cities left behind vary more than the moves themselves.
Baltimore waited twelve seasons after the Colts and then got a team by doing to Cleveland what Indianapolis had done to Baltimore. Cleveland got its name back and a reactivated franchise after three seasons. Houston got an expansion team after five. St. Louis got money. Oakland and San Diego, so far, have received neither a team nor a settlement from the league.
St. Louis and the $790 million settlement
St. Louis, St. Louis County and the Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority sued the NFL, the Rams and the league's owners in 2017. Their argument was that the league had broken its own relocation policy, which requires a team to negotiate in good faith with its home city, and that Kroenke's application had disparaged the city. The case moved through Missouri courts toward a trial, and in November 2021 the parties settled for $790 million. The question of how the league and Kroenke split the cost was argued over afterward between them.
The settlement did not bring a team back. It did, more than any court case before it, attach a price to treating the policy's good-faith clause as a formality.
Oakland has also been the departed city of two Raiders moves, which may be a unique distinction in North American sport. The team that left in 1982 came back in 1995, a return no other city has had from the same franchise and owner. The team that left in 2020 shows no sign of returning, and the Coliseum site's long future without an NFL tenant was settled the day the 31-1 vote was taken.
San Diego had the Chargers for 56 seasons, 1961 through 2016. Its options after 2017 were limited by the same arithmetic that had cost it the team: no stadium proposal carrying public money had ever cleared the two-thirds threshold a San Diego tax measure requires.
What does not count as an NFL relocation
Plenty of teams play somewhere other than the city on their jersey, and that has never required a relocation vote. The league's test is the market, not the municipality.
The New York Giants moved from Yankee Stadium and then Shea Stadium to Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1976. The New York Jets followed them there in 1984. Both teams now play at MetLife Stadium on the same site. Neither team changed its name, its market or its fan base, and neither move appears in a list of relocations.
The San Francisco 49ers moved in 2014 from Candlestick Park to Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, some 40 miles to the south. The Dallas Cowboys have played in Irving and now Arlington. The Boston Patriots became the New England Patriots in 1971 when they moved to Foxborough. The Buffalo Bills play in Orchard Park. The Lions played in Pontiac, Michigan, from 1975 to 2001. None of these counts.
Temporary homes after disasters
The other category is the forced move. After Hurricane Katrina damaged the Louisiana Superdome in August 2005, the New Orleans Saints played their 2005 home games in San Antonio, at LSU's Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge and, for one designated home game, at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. There was real worry at the time that the team would stay in San Antonio. It did not, and the Saints' return to the Superdome in September 2006 is one of the most remembered nights in the franchise's history.
In December 2020, when Santa Clara County barred contact sports during pandemic restrictions, the 49ers played their remaining home games at the Cardinals' stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Nobody treated it as a move.
The rule of thumb is simple. If the team kept its market, its name and its intention to come back, it did not relocate. Our hub for American football collects the site's other NFL explainers, from the rules to the record book.