The owners of the National Football League met last Tuesday in Houston and decided that the city of Saint Louis was no longer worthy of being a football town, allowing Stan Kroenke to relocate the franchise back to L.A. So just 21 years after their arrival, the St. Louis Rams no longer exist, and instead will return to being the Los Angeles Rams.
This is the second time in the past thirty years that the NFL has abandoned the city of St. Louis; the first time being when the Cardinals left for the desert in 1988. Since the Cardinals have never been in St. Louis since I’ve been alive, this was my first time going through the betrayal of a sports team. Knowing how terrible it feels now, it can only be so much worse for the people who’ve been through this twice.
Looking back at the entire process now, it seems fairly obvious that the NFL never really wanted the Rams to stay in St. Louis. Given the opportunity to increase the money in their pockets, they jumped at the chance to move them.
Even with all the work that the Saint Louis NFL Stadium Task Force did to try and keep the Rams, which included getting land, naming rights and acquiring public funding, the NFL didn’t care. The only statement they gave in the decision was that it's inadequate and the Rams were justified in seeking relocation.
What’s even worse is that after saying the Task Force’s effort was not good enough, the NFL rewarded Oakland with extra funding to build a stadium, when the city of Oakland had no practical stadium plan in place, only concepts and ideas. So what is the NFL trying to say here? Are they trying to say that if a city is willing to put up hundreds of millions of dollars to keep a team, like St. Louis did, they will instead reward the city that did little to nothing? The answer is yes, as long as the league and the owners in particular will increase their profits.
The hardest thing for me is that as long as I’ve been a Rams fan, which is pushing fifteen years, they’ve been pretty bad. That hasn’t stopped me from attending Rams games, watching highlights, reading any news about the team, hoping the turnaround was just around the corner or arguing with other NFL fans about why the Rams are awesome. So when Kroenke came out and said that the fans didn’t support the Rams it hurt because I know Rams fans have done just about what anyone else in our situation would do.
Part of the onus has to fall on Kroenke and the Rams. In the past 14 years, from the end of the Greatest Show on Turf to today, the Rams have had one of the worst records in the NFL, had only one winning season and went to the playoffs just twice. We’ve gone through six different head coaches and years of terrible drafts, but still we stuck with our team.
We didn’t do it because we liked to watch losing football, we did it because the Rams were our team. And to reward us for remaining loyal after years of losing, Kroenke decides to move the team while blaming the fans and the city for driving him to relocation. That’s not fair to a city that cares deeply about our teams.
After all of this, I’ve come to realize that the NFL really doesn’t seem to care about the fans. And I for one don’t care about the NFL.
