interesting read here.the NFL will not be able to stop kronke form moving the Rams back as you can see.
amazing how people around here don't have a clue what an anti trust lawsuit is which is what Kronke can file against them and will easily win in court if he decides to move them this year.
and we know he WANTS to move there,so I see this happening sometime before july first,again got to remember,davis did not move the raiders back to Oakland till the end of june in 95.
"A successful antitrust suit against the league could have cost the owners more than $1 billion"
Something interesting I found when I was going through some boxes. I found some back issues of Lindy’s Football Annuals and I found the 1995 edition. Included is an article about the Rams move to St. Louis and a re-cap of how it came about. I thought considering that history looks to repeat and that our St. Louis counterparts keep making some outrageous claims, I thought it would be good to refresh ourselves with some pertinent facts.
“When Carolina and Jacksonville were awarded National Football league franchises in the fall of 1993, St. Louis was left out in the cold.
It appeared that the city, which had been without NFL football since the Cardinals left for Phoenix in 1988, would have a long wait before the sport would return.
A fractured ownership situation that included murky questions concerning the lease for a new stadium being built in downtown St. Louis, made it seem unlikely that the city was capable of attracting another team.
However, several months later, when the Los Angeles Rams let it be known they were interested in leaving the West Coast, St. Louis swung into action. A settlement was negotiated over the lease problem. And a group that dubbed itself FANS, Inc., with former U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton at the helm, began wooing the Rams.
What followed were months of negotiations. At several points, impasses were reached. But Eagleton persisted. In St. Louis” favor was the new stadium, which would be ready midway through the ’95 season.
Finally on Jan 17, the Rams announced their intention to move to St. Louis. All St. Louis had to do was sell 46,000 personal seat licenses (PSL’s) which gives the buyer the right to then buy tickets. That would raise more than $74 million that would be used to facilitate the move, including paying off about $27 million on bonds the Rams would owe on Anaheim Stadium if they moved.
The fans of St. Louis responded in remarkable fashion. Orders were received for 72,000 licenses – within two weeks. The only bad news was that many fans would be shut out.
All that was then needed was approval by NFL owners. That seemed to be a slam dunk, That wasn’t the case. Many owners wanted a piece of the PSL pie. The league wanted the Rams to contribute to a stadium trust fund that would help replace them in Los Angeles. There was concern over Fox television, which would be losing its NFC team in the L.A. market.
When no agreement was reached at league meetings in Phoenix in March, owners voted against the move. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue insisted “money is the least of the issues.” Yet, negotiations continued.
One month later, at a special meeting in Dallas, the move was approved after the Rams agreed to pay $46 million (up from an offer of $26 million). Still, Tagliabue continued to insist the decision wasn’t about money.
“It did not come down to a money deal with the Rams,” Tagliabue said, after the owners voted 23-6-1 to approve the move. “That is a completely erroneous implication and had very little to do with it. There will be no money paid to the other member clubs of the league. There is a payment called for to the league which may go to NFL charities, or may go to a stadium trust fund. But (money) was the least of our concerns.
However, the Rams had threatened to move anyway and file suit against the league. A successful antitrust suit against the league could have cost the owners more than $1 billion.
Even Tagliabue acknowledged, “The desire to have peace and not be at war was a big factor.”
Said Jonathan Kraft, son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, “About five or six owners didn’t want to get the other owners into litigation, so they switched their votes.”
Which means, quite clearly, this was all about money. It doesn’t matter whose pocket the bucks go into. Money was the issue and money was at the core of every negotiation that took place in the entire process.
Aside from the $46 million, $29 million of which was considered a relocation fee (almost four times what Cardinals owner Bill Bidwell paid when he moved), the Rams agreed to pay 50 percent of any losses claimed by Fox TV up to $12.5 million. The Rams also agreed that if the NFL expands in the next 10 years and a team is not put the Los Angeles area, they will forego a $13 million expansion cut.
As it was, Rams club president John Shaw thought the cost prohibitive. He seemed to be looking forward to a fight.
“I advised Georgia (Frontiere) and Stan (Kroenke) not to accept the NFL’s offer,” Shaw said. “I thought it had become too pricey. But it’s their team and it was their decision to make.”
Kroenke, from Columbia, Mo., became a part-owner of the Rams when the move was approved, having bought 30 percent of the club for $60 million.
In the end, the owners, including Frontiere, wisely realized it was better to take/pay the money and run rather than risk a disruptive lawsuit. After all, we also know lawsuits cost a lot of…money. It was also clear the owners wanted to exact a pound of flesh from the Rams, whom they consider opportunists.
We all know no other NFL owner would have done the same if they had the chance. Right?
- Howard Balzer”
