By D.J. Wilson
George Bernard Shaw wrote that there were two tragedies in life: not getting what you want and getting what you want. The Irish-born playwright died in 1950, so he never was subjected to the St. Louis Rams, yet his take on life could just as easily apply to the local pro football scene.
Back in 1995, a sizable and noisy segment of St. Louis desperately wanted a National Football League team. Eight years after the football Cardinals left town for Arizona, those despondent fans thought it was a tragedy that on Sunday afternoons St. Louis was on the outside looking in on The Cities That Really Matter. Now that these folks have an NFL team of their own, they know what Shaw meant. It was tragic before the Rams arrived, and oh baby, it’s tragic now.
How did this happen? It seems like only a year ago—not eight—that Kurt Warner threw that 73-yard bomb to Isaac Bruce and Mike Jones made The Tackle and the Super Bowl XXXIV winners cruised down Market Street. If you have that memory, treasure it. A replacement is not on the horizon.
Listen to any sports chat show, and you’ll hear it: The Rams suck, Scott Linehan is an idiot and why does my life have no meaning? (The two observations are stated; the question is implied.) But let’s get this straight: There are reasons for the Rams’ decrepitude, and they have little to do with whoever happens to be coach. With this disease, the coach is the symptom, not the virus. To diagnose the Rams’ real problem, you have to look at their origins: How they got to where they are, who runs the team and how they run it—and whether anything is likely to change.
Original Sin
Disobeying the Almighty may have had some short-term benefits for Adam and Eve, yet the Bible hints original sin has a long-term downside. In the case of the refugee Rams, the team’s ownership took the forbidden fruit of relocation, doing so against the protestations of the almighty NFL commissioner at the time, Paul Tagliabue.
Overzealous St. Louis NFL junkies—and their leaders—crafted an offer that the Rams’ owners could not refuse. The sale of permanent seat licenses (PSLs), tariffs that fans have to pay before they are able to buy tickets to those seats, brought in $74 million for the Rams; $26 million went to the city of Anaheim, $13 million went toward relocation costs and $10 million went to the league as part of the relocation fee levied by Tagliabue on the team’s majority owner, Georgia Frontiere.
The Rams also got what they didn’t have in Los Angeles: a share of parking and advertising signage revenues, a publicly financed new training facility and the use of a new domed stadium. The downtown dome carried with it a $24 million annual note paid entirely by taxpayers; half is paid by state taxes, and the city and county each pick up one quarter. That meant that over the 30-year mortgage, city, county and state budgets would pay out a total of $720 million for what is now called the Edward Jones Dome.
What St. Louis did to get the Rams in 1995 is often cited by progressive academics as something akin to public-policy pornography. It was an extreme example of the prevalent bad idea that it makes economic sense to use tax dollars to subsidize pro sports teams. In this twisted lottery of public funds, the Rams won the Powerball sweepstakes: free stadium, free training facility and millions on top as a gratuity.
Of course, this all sounded good at the time. After all, the sudden influx of cash at the time of the move and the reduced operating expenses afterward were major factors in the Rams’ ability to spend money to sign players they probably could not have afforded if the team hadn’t moved. (Frontiere admitted as much the day of the Super Bowl victory when she said that the revenue from the move helped make the Super Bowl happen by enabling her “to pay the players more.”) In less than five years, they had lured Dick Vermeil out of retirement to the “new” Rams, traded for Marshall Faulk and stumbled across mad genius Mike Martz and Cinderella man Kurt Warner. Not much of that would have happened if they had stayed on the Left Coast.
But you can only sustain that high for so long. Now that it’s been 12 years since the Rams unpacked their carpetbags, the financial and psychological benefits from that move have faded. They’ve had their binge. Now all that’s left is a long hangover.
The economic and emotional uptick has long since been spent, financially and fan-wise. Those checks have been cashed. The only way to replicate a similar boost of revenues and get a change of scenery would be to move again. L.A. and other cities await.
Absentee Landlords
Frontiere, despite being a St. Louis girl who went to Soldan High School, has lived most of her life somewhere else. She owns the Rams, but who runs them? John Shaw and Jay Zygmunt have been in cahoots at the top of the Rams’ organizational chart for more than 25 years. Some might call that experience; others would call it atrophy.
The Rams have moved to St. Louis, yet Shaw, the team’s president, still lives in L.A. His absence seems to be more than geographic, because he seldom attends away games. And when he states, as he did in November, that he wasn’t “100 percent sure what to do” about the Rams’ losing ways, it has to make you wonder whether he’d have a better idea what needed to be done if he were around the team more.
Going into the 1999 season, the Rams were the only NFL team outside the expansion Baltimore Ravens that had yet to have a winning season in the decade, which made for the worst record in the NFC and the second-worst record in the league. Even with their 13-3 record in 1999 that led to the Super Bowl win in 2000, they won only 35 percent of their games in the ’90s.
To be fair, the Rams didn’t have much momentum when they moved to St. Louis; in fact, they were backsliding. In the two years prior to heading to St. Louis, they were 9-23. They were a lousy team, and they brought with them the front office management that had made them a lousy team. “But, but … they’ve made two trips to the Super Bowl in their 12 years in St. Louis,” you might say. Well, those two seasons have to be seen as anomalies made possible by players and coaches who are all but gone.
Bad Drafts
The only saving grace for having a lousy season is getting a high draft pick; it’s one way the NFL tries to prevent the same poor teams from always getting beat down. Yet the Rams’ current doldrums don’t hold much promise, because the team rarely does well in the college draft; two of their biggest stars, Will Witherspoon on defense and Marc Bulger on offense, were both free-agent signings.
The best use of draft picks by the Rams—outside of drafting Torry Holt in 1999 and Steven Jackson in 2004—was trading two picks in April 1999 to Indianapolis for Marshall Faulk. The Rams don’t have a core of players they drafted that is leading them anywhere. Even the much-ballyhooed and lately oft-injured Orlando Pace is basically a wash. When Pace played in ’06, the Rams were 3-5; without him they were 5-3. And this season, he suffered a season-ending injury in the first game.
The numbers on the other draft picks don’t lie. Of the 35 players picked from 2000 through 2003, only two are still on the team. That would be linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa and “long snapper” Chris Massey. Of all the players drafted by the Rams since the team moved to St. Louis in ’95, only four have made it to the Pro Bowl.
The Dull Dome
Possibly the most visible mistake the Rams made was unavoidable once they decided to move to St. Louis. After playing a few games in the since-demolished Busch Stadium, the Rams stepped into their drab downtown home, known today by its currently leased name, the Edward Jones Dome. The idea for a downtown dome was sold to the public as part of the convention center, even though the full function of the dome is rarely used for conventions.
From a football fan’s perspective, the dome doesn’t have much going for it. Grainy video replays on small screens, too many noxious commercials, lousy halftime shows, typically overpriced concessions and few if any ongoing game-day traditions make the dome uninteresting, if not annoying.
When compared to other stadiums, the Ed Jones Dome suffers. In November, Sports Illustrated’s website ranked NFL stadiums by “fan value experience,” and the dome ranked 27th out of 32. In its assessment, the site pointed to “poor lighting” and “out-of-place pop songs” (and that was before Jackson’s complaints that the dome needed more hip-hop). Other gripes centered on commercials and Jumbotron shows played during timeouts and between plays that “take the crowd out of the game.” It said the football team “deserves better crowds and football crowds deserve a better atmosphere.” In these rankings, tradition-heavy outdoor fields such as the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field came out on top. Of course, watching the tradition-heavy Packers probably adds to the ticket-buying fan experience.
Such rankings are whimsical, though the Rams do have that escape clause in their lease that says if the Jones Dome isn’t judged to be in the top tier of NFL stadiums, the Rams can bolt. Of course, it’s never been adequately explained who will do that judging. Yet assurances have been made all around that upgrades are in the works: More sunlight will be let into the dome, and the sub-par video screens will be replaced.
In the winning years, the Greatest Show on Turf may have blocked out the vapidity of the venue. That was then. Indeed, in the first 12 years of the Rams in St. Louis, only one game was blacked out on TV due to a non-sellout. In the ’07 season, three games have been blacked out. This moved Los Angeleno Shaw to say in November that the Rams would not have moved if he thought St. Louis couldn’t support an NFL team. Yikes. So it’s occurred to him, too.
When the Rams left Los Angeles, the naïve observer pitied the pro football fans in L.A. They had lost their team. Actually, those fans lucked out. The vast majority of NFL fans don’t bother with the expense and nuisance of actually attending games, opting instead to watch them on television. From one point of view, when the Rams left L.A., most fans were better off: With no team in the market, they got to see better games on TV.
Maybe the question should be “How were the Rams ever good?” rather than “Why are they so bad?” The glib answer to that intractable question could be this: They traded for Marshall Faulk, they drafted Torry Holt, they benefited from Dick Vermeil’s comeback bid, they stumbled into the mad genius of Mike Martz and Kurt Warner came out of an Iowan field of dreams.
Now Faulk and Vermeil are retired, Martz turned out to be as much mad as he was genius and Warner’s playing for Bill Bidwell’s Cardinals. The buzz is gone from the Rams, yet they remain. The Rams are the only team to win NFL titles in three cities: Cleveland, Los Angeles and St. Louis. Could a fourth be in the cards?
