An NFL return to St. Louis is difficult to envision
By Nick Wagoner
http://espn.go.com/blog/st-louis-ra...l-return-to-st-louis-is-difficult-to-envision
EARTH CITY, Mo. -- After the St. Louis football Cardinals departed for Arizona in 1987, it took eight years before the NFL returned to the city in the form of the Rams.
Now that the Rams are on their way back to Los Angeles after garnering league approval for relocation Tuesday, the question of when -- or if -- the league will again put a team in St. Louis has resurfaced.
It's a question that has no definitive answer because something that's true now might not be true tomorrow any more than it might be 30 years from now. Not long after the owners approved the Rams' move, it was Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (of all people) who offered support for the city.
"Don't rule St. Louis out," Jones said. "It's got too much backbone, too much tradition. It's got a lot more heart. St. Louis is not only a great city, it is the heart of America. It just didn't have it right this time."
Those words almost certainly ring hollow in the Gateway City after Jones' clear and relentless efforts to help Rams owner Stan Kroenke get his Inglewood project approved and move his team out of town. They might carry even less weight for reasons that go beyond the fact that they came from an owner who actively worked against St. Louis in this situation.
In the hours that followed the decision to send the Rams to Los Angeles, the owners of the two teams most often connected to a potential move to St. Louis strongly shot down that notion.
Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis has repeatedly said he's not interested, and though he said he would look at just about every option for his team, that apparently didn't include St. Louis. Asked directly if he'd consider it, he simply responded "absolutely not."
Shahid Khan
Jaguars owner Shad Khan, who doesn't see his franchise moving to St. Louis, sees value in the effort the city put up to keep the Rams.
A few hours later in that same hotel lobby, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan, who has shot down rumors of a move to St. Louis on multiple occasions and -- more importantly -- invested a lot of money in his home market, followed suit when asked if he ever saw the possibility for the Jaguars to be in St. Louis, even well into the future.
"I don't see that at all," Khan said. "To me, it's like fate or destiny. It wasn't meant to be [for me] in St. Louis."
It's entirely possible that it may never be meant to be for St. Louis again. Although the last former NFL city to be abandoned and never get another team is Portsmouth, Ohio, way back in 1934, this is strike two for St. Louis. What's more, other markets such as London, San Diego and Toronto figure to be ahead of it in the pecking order for a team.
In Kroenke's application for relocation, he and his employees made it clear that they viewed St. Louis as a city that is stuck in the mud at best and regressing in a major way at worst when it comes to economics. Those points were often refuted by the St. Louis stadium task force, and even Forbes magazine offered opposition to some of the numbers to the study commissioned by the Rams. But apparently those numbers were solid enough for other owners to sit up and take notice.
Khan, who spent many years about two and a half hours from St. Louis in Champaign, Illinois, and who once watched as Kroenke exercised his right to buy the majority stake in the Rams at the last minute, said it's fair to wonder how St. Louis will be able to get the NFL back.
"The world is always changing," Khan said. "I lived not too far from St. Louis for many, many years. Just think about what St. Louis used to be. One of the big hubs, TWA and American, Ralston Purina and Monsanto, Anheuser-Busch. I'm in the auto parts business, I remember we had the Ford Explorer plant, [now it's] gone. The Chrysler minivan plant, gone. We still have the GM plant with the midsize, but the minivan has been moved out. It used to be a huge automotive center -- that's changed. All the corporate headquarters are gone too. So it's like, does it make sense? I think that's what you have to ask yourself. Does it make sense? Because if it is a smaller market, it has to be a private-public partnership. And it has to make sense for everybody."
Which brings us to the other side of the equation. St. Louis just went through a painstaking political process to raise the public funds to come up with a stadium offer to keep the Rams, only to sit helplessly by as the NFL flicked that offer aside. The league then promptly rewarded San Diego and Oakland, two cities that came nowhere close to the St. Louis proposal, a reprieve.
If you were St. Louis, would you really want to get back into business with the league after that?
The answer to that could very well be no. St. Louis mayor Francis G. Slay said as much Wednesday.
"At this point I'm so frustrated and disappointed with the NFL," Slay told reporters. "Why would anybody want to in any way even entertain any suggestions from the NFL after the way they dealt with St. Louis here? They were dishonest."
Like most things NFL-related, one can never say never. Time will heal wounds and eventually, there will be a team or teams that seek a new home. But it takes a lot of work and a whole lot of politicking to make that happen.
"I think what St. Louis and Missouri did was far, far better than not doing anything," Khan said. "Who are we to judge? But I think if you look at the result, it fell a little bit short but it's far better here to have tried and not succeeded than not trying at all."
