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NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay


duma

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tl;dr: The Best Fans in Baseball are spoiled rotten. Houston put up with absolute garbage for far longer, as did Cleveland. Don't give me that fragile market crap-the bottom fell out for attendance before the bottom fell out on the field.

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
On 1/2/2011 at 9:07 PM, Sodboy13 said:
Today, we are all otaku.

"The city of Peoria was once the site of the largest distillery in the world and later became the site for mass production of penicillin. So it is safe to assume that present-day Peorians are descended from syphilitic boozehounds."-Stephen Colbert

POTD: February 15, 2010, June 20, 2010

The Glorious Bloom State Penguins (NCFAF) 2014: 2-9, 2015: 7-5 (L Pineapple Bowl), 2016: 1-0 (NCFAB) 2014-15: 10-8, 2015-16: 14-5 (SMC Champs, L 1st Round February Frenzy)

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I was listening to the MNF pregame show on the radio and either Kevin Harlan or Jim Gray said, "They're expecting a full house in St. Louis tonight" and both mentioned that "there's no baseball" in reference to the ALCS, which struck me as odd.

I raised an eyebrow at "full house," went about my business and tuned into the TV in time to see the game-ending pick 6 and hear some of the postgame comments about the lack of fans.

So, did everyone just assume that "no Cardinals game + 1999 tribute = full house"? Or was there just that many no-shows?

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tl;dr: The Best Fans in Baseball are spoiled rotten. Houston put up with absolute garbage for far longer, as did Cleveland. Don't give me that fragile market crap-the bottom fell out for attendance before the bottom fell out on the field.

Not sure why I bother if you won't even read it, but that's just not true.

Attendance fell a few thousand short of full house for the final game of 2006. Then the Rams went 6-42 (and 15-65, worst five year stretch in pro sports history). The bottom fell out in the stands when the bottom fell out on the field. Anything said to the contrary is a falsehood.

As for Houston, they did have a franchise roughly as garbage as the Rams, and you know what? They had really bad attendance until they were good. Then they weren't, they had a stadium issue, attendance wasn't good, and they moved.

The history of the Houston Oilers takes Rams fans off the hook more than it makes them look bad.

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I was listening to the MNF pregame show on the radio and either Kevin Harlan or Jim Gray said, "They're expecting a full house in St. Louis tonight" and both mentioned that "there's no baseball" in reference to the ALCS, which struck me as odd.

I raised an eyebrow at "full house," went about my business and tuned into the TV in time to see the game-ending pick 6 and hear some of the postgame comments about the lack of fans.

So, did everyone just assume that "no Cardinals game + 1999 tribute = full house"? Or was there just that many no-shows?

Probably a combination of thoughtlessness, the idea that everyone should go to NFL games no matter the product, and probably blind optimism by the Rams front office. All one had to do was look at stub hub (actually, I'm assuming, I didn't look) to see that despite a sellout, attendance wasn't gonna be much better than it has been.

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Serious talks to keep the Rams in St. Louis are reportedly underway (and perhaps have been all along): http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bryan-burwell/burwell-efforts-heat-up-to-keep-rams-here/article_f46291bd-4bf0-5654-9e0a-195da8fd2df2.html

Note, however, that this information is no more concrete than any other report. The information is vague and the sources are unclear. But the writer himself is reputable (though not any more or less than the writers of some other recent reports).

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Serious talks to keep the Rams in St. Louis are reportedly underway (and perhaps have been all along): http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bryan-burwell/burwell-efforts-heat-up-to-keep-rams-here/article_f46291bd-4bf0-5654-9e0a-195da8fd2df2.html

Note, however, that this information is no more concrete than any other report. The information is vague and the sources are unclear. But the writer himself is reputable (though not any more or less than the writers of some other recent reports).

Interesting location. A quick look at Google Maps makes it appear that there is room on the riverfront between the casino and bridge.

The timing of the leak makes sense. They are getting close to the point of no return. We'll see.

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From CBS Sports:

Raiders, Rams would be L.A.-bound already if not for NFL

http://mweb.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24758737/rams-raiders-would-be-los-angeles-bound----if-not-for-the-nfl

This confirms what we've said in here for at least a year: The NFL is running the show, not individual teams.

Also:

Farmers Field is an "extreme longshot"

Kroenke's land could become the NFL's land

Rams-Raiders or Raiders-Chargers work, but not Rams-Chargers because Kroenke and Spanos are both real-estate guys, while Davis is just along for the ride

Teams are being advised to call the NFL's bluff, but if they do, they won't get the votes to relocate

Chargers haven't shown same motivation as Rams, Raiders

"Any deal in L.A. has to be good for all 32 teams, not just one or two"

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A lot of this stay-or-relocate talk is going to be pure-speculation until the Rams have played their final home game of the season. And we may not hear any more real news until the playoffs and Super Bowl are over.

The Rams and the NFL are wise enough to not piss off potential ticket-buyers, so they surely won't break any pro-moving news when there's tickets and merchandise to be sold. They're going to "say all the right things" until the offseason.

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For what it's worth....

Rich McKay (President of the Falcons, a higher-up on the NFL's Competition Committee) has a weekly segment on the Falcons radio broadcast. Generally, the discussion has more to do with the goings-on with the league than the team, especially the off-field aspects of football: the business side.

McKay mentioned that the topic of Los Angeles has been discussed for years and years at these owner's meetings. Obviously, the league has an interest in the #2 market in the US. However, the impression he got about a team in Los Angeles was that "it's becoming more of an issue of when, not if", and that he felt Los Angeles is getting a team sooner than later.

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I pretty much take every report with a grain of salt at this point, no matter the source, and no matter how sure they appear to be.

Here's a doozy of an excerpt:

There aren't any endarounds to be had, and while some outside counsel -- like banks, law firms and consultants -- may be advising an owner like Davis or Kroenke to go ahead and push the issue to a vote. They figure the NFL and its owners wouldn't vote a move down and send an already financially handcuffed club back to a lame-duck market.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Every team in the NFL makes a pretty solid profit. The idea of any team being financially handcuffed is a bit laughable. This is especially true in the case of the Rams where Stan Kroenke ranks as one of the wealthiest owners in sports. While he isn't operating within the greatest building and isn't drawing in the most fans, he still has a very favorable lease as far as the money it allows the team to make.

And the "lame-duck market" is an interesting statement as well. These are more lame-duck teams than they are lame-duck markets. It is after all the team making the decision whether or not to commit to a market, not vice versa.

In any case, La Canfora's information could be good. But either he and/or his source(s) seems to have a particular angle on this, and I'm not sure it's not influencing what he's perceiving as the facts.

We'll have a better grasp of things after the season. Maybe.

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As best I can tell, there's a state rep and a uS rep on the ballot, but nobody has used that as a platform. The St. Louis County Executive is on the ballot in St. Louis county, but to my knowledge, neither candidate has campaigned with regards to the Rams.

This does come from the recent Bryan Burwell piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, so maybe there's something to this thinking. Or maybe other politicians are just preoccupied until after the election?

The silence from local negotiators does not mean they haven’t been working feverishly to put a deal together. According to these sources, that silence could be broken with the completion of next month’s midterm elections. What local negotiators have been working on, and could be prepared to publicly discuss within the next month or so, is a proposal for an open-air stadium along the St. Louis riverfront between the new Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge and the Lumiere Place Casino and Hotels.

By the way, just to clarify (probably again) for those not familiar:

St. Louis City (where the Dome currently is, as well as where the suggested location above is), operates as it's own City-County. St. Louis County surrounds St. Louis city on the Missouri side and is it's own entity containing 90+ mostly small municipalities. On many major developments like stadiums, they partner on the funding (sometimes with the state as well), even though the development sits in just one.

There's a long history to why that split occurred, why it has never quite been changed, and issues that it has led to (the socio-economic issues we've seen play out in STL the last few months are largely rooted in this, be it the city not being part of the county or there being SO many small municipalities within the county). There is a significant push to change this in some way in the near future, but for now they're still completely separate entities that sometimes play nice (and other times do not).

It's truly it's own issue, but I just wanted to point that out because it could have a bearing on how or if things get funded.

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I'm not going to say the teams are "financially handicapped", per se, but I think the point about calling the NFL's bluff on a relocation vote is that if a team can't get a favorable stadium deal done, that is unlikely to change if the NFL blocks a move to the most likely relocation candidate city.

There are really only three teams in play for a move right now, so I'm not sure what the league gains by denying a move over some undotted i's.

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Los Angeles has already worked; many teams used the threat of relocation to leverage new stadiums in their current cities. Now it's more or less worthless as a threat for the next fifteen years or so, and the NFL isn't going to waste the market until then.

That's why the only teams now in play are teams with genuinely dire stadium situations, teams that very well might actually move.

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There aren't any endarounds to be had, and while some outside counsel -- like banks, law firms and consultants -- may be advising an owner like Davis or Kroenke to go ahead and push the issue to a vote. They figure the NFL and its owners wouldn't vote a move down and send an already financially handcuffed club back to a lame-duck market.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Every team in the NFL makes a pretty solid profit. The idea of any team being financially handcuffed is a bit laughable. This is especially true in the case of the Rams where Stan Kroenke ranks as one of the wealthiest owners in sports. While he isn't operating within the greatest building and isn't drawing in the most fans, he still has a very favorable lease as far as the money it allows the team to make.

I agree it seems odd. The only way that statement makes any sense is if it's referring to things like PSLs, in-stadium retail outlets, upscale food options and other things that can raise millions of dollars every year but aren't subject to revenue sharing. That's why we have the "first tier" language in the lease, after all. The Rams are definitely falling behind the rest of the league in these types of revenue streams.

I wouldn't think those things mean a whole lot to a gazillionare owner, but sometimes they're the most cost-conscious of all. Rich people don't get that way, or stay that way, leaving money on the table. But we'd need context; what's the quote from?

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