101, 1/26 … Albert Breer on re-location (re-location thread)

Dak wrote:

Let’s look at it this way. You have a girlfriend. You’ve been in a committed relationship all along, but you just haven’t tied the knot. She says she wants to stay with you. But, she wants security, and you’re pretty happy the way things are. You realize that you have to do something more in your life to keep her, maybe get a better job, or sock away more money so you can buy a dream house for the two of you … somewhere really nice to raise a family. But, she’s stopped talking to you about the future, and maybe you think, well, she just needs to think more about what she wants, exactly.

But, unknown to you, she’s met another suitor who has some really nice assets to offer her. She’s been socking away her own money, and plenty of it, and now she’s thinking about greener pastures. She doesn’t even come to you and tell you about her plans with this new suitor. You learn about it from some other people. You approach her, and she’s aloof and even avoiding your phone calls. What’s going on? Is the relationship over? She tells you that she wants to take day by day and see what happens.

Not a perfect analogy, but pretty close to the STL-SK-LA triangle. The bottom line is that SK stopped working on the relationship with St. Louis, and while the St. Louis leaders could have done more to entice him to stay, they also were working on the assumption that SK can’t just up and move without trying to work out the stadium situation in St. Louis. He didn’t inform St. Louis at any time that he had no intention of working on a St. Louis stadium, but rather he was working on an L.A. plan. The St. Louis contingent was naive for thinking that SK would work with them, I guess, but it’s true also that NFL bylaws say that SK was SUPPOSED to give it the old college try before declaring that it couldn’t be done. After a disagreement on the dome upgrade, SK hasn’t worked with St. Louis leaders at all. They couldn’t even get him on the phone. The state’s governor couldn’t get him to return calls.

So … it’s a double cross. And, here’s the thing: Every time I hear a St. Louis fan talk about the situation, their eyes are open now to what SK is doing. He’s moving forward and onward to LA, St. Louis fans be damned.

It will make for an interesting year of lame duck football. I expect attendance to be pretty low. And, that will also play into SK’s favor, as well.

I’m really down about the NFL because of this. I don’t know how much I’ll be invested in the league when the Rams move. I didn’t feel this way until now, really. My feelings continue to change, evolve, shift … and add the New England cheating stuff, and it’s just so obvious the NFL is full of crap. There is no integrity in this league.

Good stuff, Dak.

But…you started the relationship story without
an analogy about how the girlfriend got to St.Louis
in the first place….. take the story back to 1994, 1993, etc. 🙂

w
v

Well, yeah, I’m looking at this from a St. Louis Rams fan, so no, I don’t know the particulars of how Georgia fled L.A.

Yes, there was a stipulation that gave the Rams the opportunity to get a new stadium upgrade after 20 years. Local leaders knew they were going to have to play ball with Kroenke. Problem is, Kroenke took his ball to the West Coast before they really got playing.

Like I said before, SK could have bought land here to build a stadium. He did not. He bought in L.A. instead. He never gave any indication that he wouldn’t negotiate in good faith.

rfl wrote:

Dak wrote:
“Yes, there was a stipulation that gave the Rams the opportunity to get a new stadium upgrade after 20 years. Local leaders knew …

This.”

You know, there’s another aspect of all this. The original building.

Snow and I live up here in Minny. When the Metrodome was built, it was done on the cheap. The Twin Cities took great pride in building the cheapest stadium around and fitting 2 teams into it. Such a deal!

The problem is that it was a bad stadium. Within a year or 2, people were talking about building a better stadium. The Twins built a much nicer stadium and now the Vikings are doing so. We have seen about 20 years of roiling controversy over the need to replace a really lousy stadium.

Now, the Ed is not that bad. But the complaints have swirled around it for a long time. I dunno the specifics. But I can’t imagine the Ed wasn’t built as something of a bargain. Discontent may well have been built in.

Of course, I am not personally complaining. I don’t think cities SHOULD pay for stadia. Let the filthy rich owners pay for it.

I’m just saying that, if you are going to use city money to lure a team, you better know that if you don’t build a jewel of a stadium with room and infrastructure for upgrades, you are going to start facing static for stadium inadequacy within a few years of the opening. And you’ll have it all to do again.

Just sayin’ …

It was a decent stadium when it was built, but almost every franchise has built a new stadium since then. I won’t say that leaders in St. Louis were ever proactive in tackling the stadium issue, but I also think they expected to deal with it during a negotiation period that was quickly truncated by Mr. Kroenke.

Zooey wrote:

I don’t know, man. Maybe you should be more pissed at your politicians than at Kroenke. That’s a multi-billionaire businessman there, and St. Louis took him for granted, seems like. That stadium pitch was a year late. The Ed upgrade pitch was a complete bullshit waste of time.

Food for thought.

Yeah. I think that’s a fair assessment.

Zooey wrote:

Well, yeah, I’m looking at this from a St. Louis Rams fan, so no, I don’t know the particulars of how Georgia fled L.A.

Yes, there was a stipulation that gave the Rams the opportunity to get a new stadium upgrade after 20 years. Local leaders knew they were going to have to play ball with Kroenke. Problem is, Kroenke took his ball to the West Coast before they really got playing.

Like I said before, SK could have bought land here to build a stadium. He did not. He bought in L.A. instead. He never gave any indication that he wouldn’t negotiate in good faith.

Dak, I am feeling your pain. I don’t know, though, that it is entirely fair to say Kroenke never played ball with St. Louis. (It might be, but I don’t know for sure one way or another). But I will say this: as you say, “local leaders knew they were going to have to play ball with Kroenke.” So…why didn’t they start earlier?

I don’t remember the exact timeline, but it seems to me that St. Louis could have seen this coming, and could have worked sooner. It seems like they didn’t kick into gear until the Ed upgrades were ruled inadequate. At that point…they may have been too late. Shouldn’t they have had a plan right THEN? They KNEW when the year-to-year lease option kicked in. If they KNEW that they were not going to be able to comply with the Top 25% clause in their deal with the Rams, why the hell waste all that time pretending like that was serious discussion? Don’t you think Kroenke can look at that preliminary chapter of the “end-of-the-lease agreement” as a complete waste of his time? I mean…the deal was Top 25%. And St. Louis proposes something that clearly is NOT top 25%. They reject Kroenke’s Top 25% counterproposal.

If I am going to sell my ’65 Mustang, and I’ve given you the right to be the first one to make an offer, and you offer me $7K on a car worth $20K hoping that I like you and will settle for something in between…well, I don’t know if you get to be pissed off at me when I put it on Craigslist for $20K and stop taking your phone calls.

I gave you the first shot, and you jacked with me. You are not the only market for my car, so don’t treat me like a rube.

Maybe St. Louis was naive to count on the hometown discount, and took Kroenke for granted here. I have an inkling that what I’ve said above is exactly what Kroenke is going to say before the owners vote. Essentially, Kroenke dealt with St. Louis, and St. Louis didn’t get their shit together in time.

I don’t know, man. Maybe you should be more pissed at your politicians than at Kroenke. That’s a multi-billionaire businessman there, and St. Louis took him for granted, seems like. That stadium pitch was a year late. The Ed upgrade pitch was a complete bullshit waste of time.

Food for thought.

Well, when you say local politicians, you’re talking about a loose conglomeration of city, county and state … and they kind of let the Convention and Visitors Bureau go through the paces. So, yeah, I see that the local effort was slow. I know they weren’t proactive. I just think the assumption was that SK was going to play this negotiation all the way to the end before deciding he’s hauling his team to L.A.

And, it is his team. St. Louis couldn’t build a stadium without his cooperation. And, there is no cooperation. As soon as SK came up with a valid plan to build an L.A. stadium, that was that. It’s not buying a car … it’s upgrading the stadium that you built for the franchise in the first place. And, you’re not talking about a private sale with private money, you’re talking about using taxpayer money. And, you have to go through the paces to show that you weren’t giving away public funds to a billionaire unnecessarily. You have to show good faith.

Now, you’re talking about public financing for a guy who can easily build a colossal stadium project on the West Coast, which makes the sale to the public even tougher.

My analogy wasn’t perfect. I didn’t take into account that this is not a private negotiation. This is a City that has to go through the paces to show that it’s being fiscally responsible before committing any type of public funding for a project that will enrich a very rich man. And, while the politicians are going through those paces, slowly as government often does, SK wasn’t returning phone calls to let everyone know, you know what, nevermind, you screwed the pooch by not kowtowing to my demands much earlier.

Yeah, STL’s leadership was slow to respond … but by SK staying silent, it had to make it difficult to move forward. SK could have started purchasing land and building his own STL stadium, for that matter. It’s not like anyone from L.A. was leading SK by the hand.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 11 months ago by Dak.

joemad wrote:

If I am going to sell my ’65 Mustang, and I’ve given you the right to be the first one to make an offer, and you offer me $7K on a car worth $20K hoping that I like you and will settle for something in between…well, I don’t know if you get to be pissed off at me when I put it on Craigslist for $20K and stop taking your phone calls

Just curious… is it a fastback? in fairness to Dak, if it’s coup, 7K is in the ballpark…….

I appreciate that, but I’ll stick with my little economy car. 🙂

Dak wrote:

Well, when you say local politicians, you’re talking about a loose conglomeration of city, county and state … and they kind of let the Convention and Visitors Bureau go through the paces. So, yeah, I see that the local effort was slow. I know they weren’t proactive. I just think the assumption was that SK was going to play this negotiation all the way to the end before deciding he’s hauling his team to L.A.

And, it is his team. St. Louis couldn’t build a stadium without his cooperation. And, there is no cooperation. As soon as SK came up with a valid plan to build an L.A. stadium, that was that. It’s not buying a car … it’s upgrading the stadium that you built for the franchise in the first place. And, you’re not talking about a private sale with private money, you’re talking about using taxpayer money. And, you have to go through the paces to show that you weren’t giving away public funds to a billionaire unnecessarily. You have to show good faith.

Now, you’re talking about public financing for a guy who can easily build a colossal stadium project on the West Coast, which makes the sale to the public even tougher.

My analogy wasn’t perfect. I didn’t take into account that this is not a private negotiation. This is a City that has to go through the paces to show that it’s being fiscally responsible before committing any type of public funding for a project that will enrich a very rich man. And, while the politicians are going through those paces, slowly as government often does, SK wasn’t returning phone calls to let everyone know, you know what, nevermind, you screwed the pooch by not kowtowing to my demands much earlier.

Yeah, STL’s leadership was slow to respond … but by SK staying silent, it had to make it difficult to move forward. SK could have started purchasing land and building his own STL stadium, for that matter. It’s not like anyone from L.A. was leading SK by the hand.

I think it is fair to say that Kroenke didn’t try very hard. He didn’t spend time trying to leverage St. Louis into a better proposal. So it is easy to wonder how early in the game he started flirting with the Los Angeles move.

I would guess he began thinking about Los Angeles as the florists were arranging the flowers for Georgia’s funeral. If you are considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars in something, you probably think through the “growth potential.” And he may well have concluded early on that there was nothing St. Louis could do – given the economy – that would be competitive with “growth potential” in Los Angeles. In which case, the convention center’s anemic proposal was nothing more than a Welcome mat in front of Los Angeles. It gave him the pretext. Because, certainly, once that was ruled on officially, Kroenke did not talk to the city again. And if he was trying to use LA for leverage (and nobody thinks he is, as far as I know), he would have kept talking to St. Louis.

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:
If you are considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars in something, you probably think through the “growth potential.”

I don;t know about that. I think that’s SK. There are owners who actually think of their teams as belonging to a community, and that’s real to them.

Sure. Several of them are family businesses. But SK isn’t unique, either.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by zn.

SK is a corporate shark. He’s cold and calculating. That’s obvious NOW. But, there was a time when you could still maybe believe the words out of his mouth about how he wanted to keep the team in St. Louis. He said that a LOOOONG time ago. And, until pretty recently, Demoff kept talking about how the Rams were committed to St. Louis, which sounded pretty sincere. Since the L.A. stadium story, we haven’t heard boo from Demoff, so I’m imagining that’s when he got the memo, too.

I think it is fair to say that Kroenke didn’t try very hard. He didn’t spend time trying to leverage St. Louis into a better proposal. So it is easy to wonder how early in the game he started flirting with the Los Angeles move.

I would guess he began thinking about Los Angeles as the florists were arranging the flowers for Georgia’s funeral.

Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt that one bit. Only Silent Stan knows for sure.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by Dak.

It would be nice if every team was owned publicly like Green Bay.

How the hell did that ever happen, btw?

Green Bay is the only team with this form of ownership structure in the NFL, which is in direct violation of current league rules stipulating a maximum of 32 owners per team, with one holding a minimum 30% stake. The Packers’ corporation was grandfathered when the NFL’s current ownership policy was established in the 1980s.

So the league doesn’t want any more community-owned franchises. The Packers demonstrate that a community-owned team can be very profitable, so I wonder why the league cares how the ownership is structured?

InvaderRam wrote:

yeah. the rams should be publicly owned. screw these billionaire owners.

So, u are calling for revolution,
then?
“Free the Rams!” ?

w
v

wv wrote:

So, u are calling for revolution,
then?
“Free the Rams!” ?

w
v

sure. why not?

interestingly. 2 of the richest sports teams in the world are owned by the fans. real madrid and fc barcelona.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fan-owned_sports_teams