cstu said:
The problem being, St. Louis doesn't have that kind of money lying around to sink into an NFL stadium.
A message was conveyed to the Rams by Kathleen "Kitty" Ratcliffe, president of the CVC -- which operates the stadium -- via letter in which she wrote her agency is "not in a position" to pay for a $700 million renovation.
Not long after, Jeff Rainford, chief of staff for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, told The Associated Press that city leaders were on the same page with the CVC and the Sports Complex Authority, which owns the stadium.
"It was a no-brainer," Rainford said. "There was nobody in St. Louis who thought that the Rams' proposal was a good idea, other than the Rams."
This is a problem.
Basically this franchise is now a free agent.
And so I don't think this is par for the course carousel game of chicken business. Basically given the modern realities of pro footabll the Rams cannot stay there if they do not get a new or renovated stadium.
It doesn't have to be L.A. either (in fact L.A. now mostly just seems to serve the purpose of boosting interest from home cities and other towns), it could be anywhere, London, San Antonio, Portland, Birmingham, Pottsville, wherever, now is the time if your city wants a team make a pitch; and now is the time for the Rams to either find a suitor and a real plan to move or shut up and stay in their tin can and admit Georgia Frontiere took a lot of cash up front while sacrificing the long term health of the franchise.
However, whatever amount the value of the Rams in St Louis might have risen since the move I'd have to guess that moving from the No. 25 market or whatever to the No. 2 market would automatically boost the value by a great, great deal.
As for the example about the Oilers and the fact that the team would be facing empty seats for 1-2 years, well that already happened in St. Louis when the Cards moved. The Cards faced crowds as low as 11,000 their last season, the people were not only apathetic about following a team on the brink of leaving them they did nonetheless care so they were also ticked off and stayed away (rightly). What the Oilers showed was that they could park themselves in
Memphis for 2 or so years while a stadium in a whole other city hundreds of miles away was being planned and then built. Actually the Cards more or less did the same thing, hanging around Sun Devil Stadium for many years until they finally got their shiny palace.