The Los Angeles Rams weren’t always the Los Angeles Rams. They weren’t always the St. Louis Rams or even the –gasps– Los Angeles Rams either. In fact, they started as the Cleveland Rams back in 1936. Good for you if you correctly knew there were no rams in Los Angeles. Oddly, there aren’t any Rams in Cleveland either. The team is actually named after the college Fordham as they are named the Rams.1 No one cares about that though…
The Rams left Cleveland for LA in 1946 and in doing so made the NFL the first professional sports league to reach from New York to California. They won a championship in 1951 then did a whole lot of nothing for a long time while stretching their legs in the roomy 100,000+ capacity confines of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That juicy LA market was all theirs to bask in…at least for awhile.
In 1982 though, the Oakland Raiders decided they wanted in on that big old stadium themselves. The Rams had actually moved out of the Coliseum to share the Angels stadium in Anaheim. This was important because the NFL unanimously blocked the Raiders from moving to LA. Owner Al Davis then sued the NFL and was joined by his future landlord, the Coliseum, in the suit. The Raiders won and took their two recent Super Bowl win with them to the City of Angels. The Rams immediately become second class citizens in their own city.
The next decade was a drag of blackouts, poor decisions, and a loss of relevance. They tried to parlay that cocktail of misery into a new stadium, but the plan of begging without leverage didn’t work and the Rams began to get city-curious. They wanted to move to St. Louis (despite it being the 18th biggest media market compared to 2nd) but were stonewalled by the NFL. Before another lawsuit could be filed, the NFL changed its mind and the move was allowed to proceed. St. Louis was already building a new stadium in hopes of luring an NFL franchise but had missed out on a mid-90s expansion team to Charlotte and Jacksonville. Ironically, Al Davis used the same threats and reasoning to move the Raiders out of LA and back to Oakland the same year. All of a sudden, the second biggest market in the US went from two teams to none.
Not long after the move, the Greatest Show on Turf was formed with Dick Vermeil guiding the Rams and former grocery clerk Kurt Warner to Super Bowl glory. The show eventually dimmed its lights though and from 2004 to 2015 the Rams wouldn’t sniff the playoffs or even an above .500 record. They were a combined 61 games under .500 in those years. Of course, this was the city and the stadium’s problem and not bad ownership.
Despite being a native Missourian, owner Stan Kroenke had a move all planned out. The terms of the Rams move to St. Louis included a provision with the city to keep the Edward Jones Dome in the top 25% of stadium amenities. When the Rams felt this was not being upheld, an arbitration panel was brought in to make the determination. Not only was the stadium behind, not only would it take an impossible $700m to bring it up to snuff, but the panel awarded the Rams attorney’s fees too. At that point, the stadium lease reverted to a year-to-year agreement and the Rams were free to do as they pleased (pending league approval). Well, wouldn’t you know it, Kroenke just happened to have a giant parcel of land in Inglewood, California that would be perfect for a football stadium! SoFi Stadium was basically immediately under construction and the Rams were back to the Coliseum for a few years before their new football palace could open in 2020.
For their efforts, the Rams even got a paying roommate this time in the Chargers. Because the Chargers left their fanbase behind in San Diego only to become the other team in LA, they are now the second-class citizen and the Rams are of the privileged class.
Photo:CanonStarGal, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- According to Wikipedia, Fordham fans used to chant “one damn, two damn, three damn, FOR-DHAM” but then changed all the damns to rams because they wanted it to be much worse ↩︎
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