Burwell: Beginning of End of NFL in STL?

Burwell: St. Louis needs to move now to keep Rams
• BRYAN BURWELL

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bryan-burwell/burwell-st-louis-needs-to-move-now-to-keep-rams/article_ff6a32c7-b5f3-53aa-a262-8b84a6b2be51.html

It’s early September in Football America, and even in baseball-obsessed precincts such as St. Louis, the start of the NFL regular season has been known to whip its pockets of football diehards into heightened states of uncontrolled fanaticism. Baseball lovers may have a more notorious literary class elevating their athletic obsessions into romantic dream-like states. But NFL freaks have never let a lack of literary cache stop them from professing their undying loyalty to King Football religiously in sold-out football cathedrals every autumn Sunday.

Yet as the Rams open the 2014 regular season at home inside the Edward Jones Dome, the fanatic energy that should grip the downtown streets this Sunday morning with tailgating in the parking lots and a block-party buzz on the Broadway plaza is mixed with an unmistakable sense of a buzz kill permeating the air.

A lot of Rams loyalists are wondering if they’re gathering here for the beginning of the Last Roundup. The team’s lease agreement with the Convention and Visitors Commission, which runs the Edward Jones Dome, expires at the end of this season. That creates the rather anxious dynamic in which owner Stan Kroenke is free to play the high-stakes game of franchise free agency whose ultimate course could lead to the departure of the Rams as early as next season.

So instead of the overriding theme of the ’14 season being whether or not the Rams can survive the loss of quarterback Sam Bradford, make a major breakthrough and compete for the playoffs in the rugged NFC West, we’re dealing with the confusing machinations of a deal that is neither art nor science, just a big and complicated mess.

This is our maddening game of shadows. It’s layered in a labyrinth of confusing state and local politics, cloaked in blankets of complicated, secretive big-business ambitions, mixed with the history of a city and region that has so many great individual ideas but so few brilliant, all-encompassing plans. The fate of the Rams is about so many things that you’ll have to excuse me for a moment while my head swims.

Let’s just start with the most basic question that everyone wants to know and take it to the less obvious one that everyone should be discussing.

Question No. 1: Is this the beginning of the end for the Rams in St. Louis?

No one knows for sure. I’m not even sure Kroenke has made that decision, though there is a lot of well-informed speculation out there suggesting that he already has chosen Los Angeles over St. Louis. Yet based on his negotiating history, Kroenke tends to always have a plan but doesn’t execute it until the last possible moment. And for all those sources who say they know what he’s going to do? Well, Kroenke has a very tight circle of trust and he’s not likely revealing his strategy to anyone who would dare spill his moves before he executes them.

So let’s deal with far more important questions:

Is there a movement out there — or a smart local business or political leader — that can create a wide-sweeping regional plan that would prove to be a benefit to the entire region of greater St. Louis? And does anyone believe that a massive stadium and multipurpose real estate development surrounding it should be a part of that regional vision?

If we just stop looking at this as a Kroenke issue and decide if this is bigger than the Rams owner, then maybe we’d be onto something. St. Louis has historically been known as a town full of piecemeal, scatter-shot visions that seem to forever dot the city’s landscape — Northside up here, Ballpark Village down there, Gateway Arch project over there, Washington Avenue around there — but nothing that connects all these ideas into an all-encompassing renewal plan that merges all these dots into one harmonious urban dream of a unified St. Louis of the future.

I see what is happening in Oakland, where the city has at least put together something to bring to Raiders owner Mark Davis as an incentive to keep him from relocating the team back to LA. Maybe the plan will fall apart, but it’s worth looking at what they are at least proposing.

Is there anyone out there with the gumption and vision to make it happen for St. Louis?

Are there enough people out there that want it to happen?

Is there anyone out there who understands how to make it happen?

Stop looking at this as a stadium issue and instead envision it as a larger plan that will revitalize the entire region. The most troubling part of the political heel dragging that St. Louis is infamous for is that it plays right into Los Angeles’ hands. The more St. Louis waits, the more Gov. Jay Nixon proceeds with trepidation, the more incentive it gives Kroenke to find a way to put LA in play.

The thing I wish would happen now is for someone in power to declare if we actually want to keep the Rams. If we do, then stop messing around. Put a deal on the table for Kroenke to consider. Give him some of that valuable land that is along the Mississippi riverfront from the new bridge all the way down to the shadows of Busch Stadium. Land, land, land, land. That’s what billionaire real estate developers value most. Give him some land and let him join in a vision to expand the Gateway Arch project to even greater and spectacular proportions.

The trouble is, nothing ever is this easy in St. Louis.

The history of this town seems to doom it to self-destructive heel dragging and fractionalized defeatist thinking. People are more concerned with their own futures instead of concentrating on what’s best to stem the sagging fortunes of this perennial underdog region.

Does anyone out there believe that the Rams are a needed and irreplaceable asset to the region?

Ultimately, I wonder if the best possible solution to keep St. Louis as an NFL city is out-of-the-box thinking by commissioner Roger Goodell. Maybe this is a bit of far-fetched dreaming, but let’s just assume that the one thing that Kroenke values the most is the chance to build his ultimate football palace in LA, create a massive real estate development surrounding a Jerry World-like structure that would house a franchise that would become one of the more valuable in the NFL, the economic equal of the $3.2 billion Dallas Cowboys?

What if it doesn’t matter to him what the logo on the helmet says, just as long as the mailing address ends with “Los Angeles, California”?

So what do you give to the multi billionaire who has everything?

Why not the expansion rights to LA?

Would Kroenke value LA more than he values holding onto the Rams? If he really is that guy who repeatedly said how important it was for him to help bring the NFL back to Missouri, then maybe he’d want to be some sort of local hero and sell the Rams to a prospective owner who wants to keep them here and as a reward from the commissioner, the league cuts him a deal to let him become an expansion owner of a new Los Angeles team?

Just add that to the long, long list of wise guys with ideas. Maybe someone with a plan can string them all together and secure St. Louis’ NFL future. But time is running out.

Running out in a hurry.