http://www.rotoworld.com/teams/nfl/cle/cleveland-browns

Browns OC John DeFilippo is interviewing with the Rams on Tuesday.
According to the Sacramento Bee, DeFilippo could also be in the running for the 49ers’ coordinator position if Tom Coughlin is hired. The Browns are trying to keep DeFilippo in-house as they search for a new coach, but he could be lured away before Mike Pettine’s replacement is identified.

Kroenke, the ‘victim’? That’s the story he’s telling in LA

Sam Farmer and Nathan Fenno Los Angeles Times

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/kroenke-the-victim-that-s-the-story-he-s-telling/article_dac6eab5-b41d-57f2-9497-a21cd94fa4b5.html

LOS ANGELES • Stan Kroenke emerged from a white jet at Van Nuys Airport a few minutes before noon Wednesday as he returned to California for the first time as owner of the Los Angeles Rams.

Less than 24 hours earlier in Houston, NFL owners voted to allow Kroenke to move the Rams from St. Louis to L.A. for the 2016 season.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times — Kroenke’s first since his plan for a multibillion-dollar stadium in Inglewood became public more than a year ago — the owner discussed his final pitch to league owners, the emotional relocation process and his ambitious vision for the site of the former Hollywood Park racetrack.

He also he could not “sit there (in St. Louis) and be a victim.” (Scroll down for the full Q-&-A transcript.)

“If we didn’t have the perspective of 40 years of doing this, I don’t think any reasonable, rational person would ever do this,” said Kroenke, a billionaire real estate developer and sports mogul, owning NBA and NHL teams in Denver along with English soccer team Arsenal plus other sports-related businesses. “But because we look at it a certain way, we’ve been through so many of these projects, and we’re long-term investors. That’s why we did what we did and stuck our neck out that far.”

He added: “You don’t get too many shots like this in life.”

•’Silent Stan’ speaks – a profile from 2010

• Jaguars owner not interested in move to St. Louis

• Hochman: Time for St. Louis to rise and shine

• BenFred: After Rams ripoff, STL should rethink importance of NFL

• Consensus among regional leaders: St. Louis is done with professional football

Kroenke, 68, told jokes, slapped his knees in excitement and teared up at one point in the interview. He appeared relieved to put the drawn-out relocation process behind him and focus on the return of the Rams to the city they left after the 1994 season.

He seemed relaxed and confident and looked as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

Kroenke believed that detailed renderings of the sleek, low-slung stadium project and surrounding mixed-use development helped sway owners to overwhelmingly support his vision over a rival stadium project in Carson.

“One of the most important things that nailed it (Tuesday) is that we just kept showing them pictures,” Kroenke said. “People love pictures. And what those pictures showed was the thought and the development and the plan, and the depth of the thought.”

Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ top executive who helped make the presentation at the meeting, kept his event credential and room key as mementos of the historic occasion.

Kroenke said he had no badge and he left his room key in the hotel.

“But we got something much more important,” Kroenke said. “We got L.A.”

Question: What has this experience been like so far?

Kroenke: This thing, it is a process, and it’s arduous — the NFL makes it arduous, and they should. Relocating a team should be hard. And now we get to focus on things we like to focus on.

Q: After so many false starts and pretty pictures over the last 21 years, can you blame people who might doubt this will actually get built?

Kroenke: Oh, it’s going to get built. At one point (Tuesday), I was going to tell the ownership about 4,500 pages of plans. Kevin got up there and said, ‘ 6,700 pages of plans.’ So I told the ownership, ‘Wow. We were at 4,500 and now it’s 6,700.’ In other words, this costs real money.

Q: After you won the vote, you went out with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his son Stephen, the team’s general manager. What did you talk about?

Kroenke: They just kept repeating it: ‘The Los Angeles Rams. The Los Angeles Rams.’ You could tell they loved that, they loved that history. If you look around the league, those guys are connected in a we’re-going-forward way. But they love that history of the Rams.

Q: What role did Seahawks owner Paul Allen play in Houston?

Kroenke: He goes to the big meetings. Paul told me he was coming. He called three times. He got interested in it. Paul knows L.A. He knows how important it is. Paul gets all the metrics, the Internet stuff, how you promote with the millennials. L.A. is hugely important for the league.

When I started working on this two years ago, I took Paul through the whole thing. I said, ‘This is what I think we can do here. I’m not sure we can do it all, but here’s what we’re working on.’ He was always interested. Then once we got to a certain point, he definitely got it. He got how good it was.

Q: Owners have heard these stadium pitches before. What was your theme in Houston?

Demoff: We started our presentation by saying this is the project you’ve waited 21 years for. This was the NFL’s greatest asset that they could give someone and they gave it to our group. That’s an awesome responsibility.

Q: How did owners react?

Kroenke: At the end of the day they gave it to us for the right reasons. That’s the right project. It’s that simple. I heard a lot of owners say, ‘That’s the right project. That’s what we need.’

Q: Did you get many texts or emails after the final vote?

Demoff: I’m obsessive about cleaning out my inbox. If I have five or six in there I feel overwhelmed. I had 122 emails and over 300 text messages. We beat Seattle in overtime in the opener and I got 40 texts. You hear from people who are so excited and you never knew they were Rams fans.

Q: Who reached out to you, Stan?

Kroenke: One of the first guys that texted me last night was Terry Fancher (Stockbridge Capital’s executive managing director and a development partner with the Inglewood stadium site). He was just so excited. He said, ‘ Stan, I just landed in L.A. You should see this town.’

He said, ‘You have changed this city.’ It was cool. … You know what I’m glad about? Certain people relied on us. This guy right here (motioning to Demoff with his voice cracking) … It’s emotional because a lot of good people relied on us. We came through for them. Didn’t know if we could. It’s never a sure thing.

Q: How do you feel about leaving St. Louis?

Kroenke: It truly is bittersweet. I grew up in Missouri, and there’s a lot of wonderful people in St. Louis and Missouri. I’ll always feel that way about Missouri. I never dreamed I’d be put in this position. But at the same time, you’re not going to sit there and be a victim.

Q: How did you first become interested in the Hollywood Park site?

Kroenke: In the summer of 2013, I really started looking hard. I knew the general lay of the land in Inglewood. To me, there was one obvious place, and it had been approved previously by the NFL: Hollywood Park.

I didn’t know if it would be put together or not. But I started looking. I was driving around at 5:30 a.m. That’s what real estate developers do.

Q: Why were you up so early?

Kroenke: That’s the best time because the traffic isn’t out, so you can get around quickly. I started looking at different sites to make sure I had them in my head. What do they look like? What could be done? How does the long term look for the areas? And when you drive up to Hollywood Park, it’s a great site.

Q: Kevin, do you remember getting that early-morning call from Stan?

Demoff: There are moments in your life you never forget. I was standing by the window in my office (in St. Louis) and Stan called. … I remember he said, ‘ This is an unbelievable site.’

Q: You’ve developed real estate for something like 40 years; what made the site so attractive?

Kroenke: I’ve done this countless times, literally hundreds of deals. You just look for certain things. For example, (at) Hollywood Park, there’s a Target store and development right next door. Starbucks is there. These are people we’re very familiar with. We do developments with them. For me it’s starting to click.

Q: Other owners described the stadium as “transformative.” What will be unique about it?

Demoff: This is the stadium of the future for the NFL and hopefully for other sporting venues. When you look — especially in L.A. — it’s a melting pot of NFL fans. You look at the Steelers bars and Redskins bars and Bears bars. You want to take that and put it into your campus and find ways that at every turn people can watch the other games.

L.A.’s become a fantasy-oriented, Red Zone-oriented, DirecTV-oriented culture. And I think our job is to blend that with now having a hometown team. To start to build that allegiance where you walk into the stadium and you never feel that you’re giving up everything else that’s going on Sunday but you still have the Rams right in front of you.

Q: Will the venue feature seats that show off L.A.’s celebrities like Jack Nicholson’s seats at Lakers games?

Demoff: You need Lakers seats. You need Dodgers seats behind home plate so you can see Larry King sitting right there. So we have sideline suites. Field suites. … They’re pulled out right up to the field. We’ve designed concepts throughout the stadium that allow entertainers to basically sit outside but in a way that allows them to be differentiated.

Q: So you want to include the entertainment industry in the stadium experience?

Kroenke: That’s part of L.A. You’d better be doing that. That’s how you engage the community, frankly. If we’re not doing that right, we’re not servicing the fans of L.A. You go to L.A., you better do it right or you shouldn’t be there. It’s complex, it’s complicated, it’s a big market, there’s a lot of competitive forces there.

Q: Can a team succeed in L.A. without putting a winning product on the field?

Demoff: You can’t just walk in and say, ‘The NFL is back’ and roll out the football and expect success. You’ve got to go earn it.

Q: Will you bring back the old L.A. Rams uniforms?

Demoff: I think the philosophy on the uniforms is a microcosm of the philosophy of the project. Yes, we have a rich tradition and history in Los Angeles. We have colors that people identify with. We have historic players. You want to carry some of that forward.

But, we’re also about to enter a world-class stadium that should be one of the best. … Yes, the Rams are coming back. It’s not the Rams from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. This is Stan’s vision and Stan’s stadium. We want to make sure we represent best in class in every aspect while we borrow from the Rams’ legacy. When I look at the Rams’ return to L.A., that’s what people are excited about — it’s modern NFL mixed with the team they grew up with.

Q: Have you noticed the large cardboard cutout of Stan’s head displayed by some L.A. Rams fans over the past year?

Kroenke: You want to talk about surreal? It’s kind of part of the territory, I guess. You never get comfortable with that. But they’re having fun.

Q: Does any of this feel real yet?

Demoff: My job was to make sure that we had a project that when you put it in front of the owners, all they had to do was raise their right hand and they have the project they’ve always wanted. I was looking at (Tuesday) and that’s what it was. They realized all they had to do was check a box and they got the project they wanted.

nittany ram wrote:

Yeah, I don’t see how Spanos and Davis were screwed by Kroenke. They just didn’t execute their plans to screw their fans as quickly as Kroenke did.

They weren’t screwed by Kroenke they were screwed by the league.

In terms of the details of the plans, no one knows those. Not even the owners. The owners never saw the Carson plan or the St. Louis plan. They just know they Goodell rejected them. That’s all they know.

So here you have 2 teams that have bad situations with local facilities and need to either upgrade those facilities or move.

And you have a town (St. Louis) that made an honest effort to actually put in place a viable plan.

So of the 3 teams, the one that the league favors is the one that doesn’t NEED to move. The 2 it shuts down are the 2 that DO need to move.

From that point of view, it hardly matters who was first, who was reactive, who was bigger and shinier. None of that’s relevant.

It IS possible to imagine a world in which the league says, okay LA is a good market and we want a team there, and here are 2 teams that actually need to address issues with their venue. Their plans could use work SO WE WILL HELP THEM WITH THAT because it’s the better thing to do all around. Plus we can help the St. Louis effort too.

So it is not automatically the case that the only choice here is to back the spiffier plan offered by the wealthier owner. In fact, it’s a conscious choice to employ those values and not other values in judging this.

One approach says, revenue money glitz splendor. The Jerry Jones way. The other says, we are committed to communities, and the values associated with them. The Rooney way.

It’s not inevitable that one way is “truer” than the other. They both involve conscious choices and commitment to certain values v. others.

Only one obvious conclusion for St. Louis: The fix was in

Howard Balzer

http://www.ksdk.com/story/sports/nfl/rams/2016/01/13/only-one-obvious-conclusion-st-louis-fix/78730048/

HOUSTON – At the end of the day, it’s fair to say the fix was in. We never really had a chance. Is there any other conclusion to reach?

After all, in a year in which the National Football League will celebrate the golden anniversary of its championship game, the Super Bowl, league owners voted Tuesday to support the man with the most gold, Rams owner Stan Kroenke, approving the relocation of the team from St. Louis to a Los Angeles-area stadium in Inglewood.

It was Kroenke who first helped the Rams move to St. Louis from Anaheim in 1995 when he joined then-owner Georgia Frontiere as a 40-percent partner. Now, 21 years later, he and the owners allowed the relocation despite a stadium plan that included $400 million of public money and cost $16 million to achieve what it did.

Yet, with straight faces, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stood at the podium and talked about how “we have not been successful in getting stadiums done in the home markets.”

Kroenke claimed he had engaged with the community and looked for an “alternative, but it didn’t succeed.”

Really? It all sounds like the theory of the big lie. Keep saying it enough and you actually begin believing it. Most eye-opening was the decision that was reached even after the LA Opportunities Committee recommended the Carson plan for the Chargers and Raiders. All along, Chargers owner Dean Spanos had said he had no interest in partnering with Kroenke or with the Inglewood project. However, when it became apparent early in the day that there weren’t enough votes to get that deal approved, everything shifted quickly.

The eventual deal was certainly one no one could have anticipated. The Chargers have an option that expires on Jan. 15, 2017, to be the second team in Inglewood, unless a referendum to approve public financing for a new stadium in San Diego is approved prior to Nov. 15, 2016. If that happens, the option could be extended until Jan. 15, 2018. The Raiders have a conditional option to be the second team, and that period would begin on the day that the Chargers’ option expires.

Said Raiders owner Mark Davis, “This is not a win for the Raiders. We have to work hard to find a home.”

Most remarkable is two teams that have been trying in vain to get a new stadium for more than a decade have now been given a reprieve and will be given an extra $100 million to boot. That’s right. An extra $100 million. The same figure that Goodell said was a non-starter for the riverfront stadium plan.

When I asked New York Giants owner Steve Tisch how that money could be viewed as a negative for the St. Louis plan but is being provided for the Chargers and Rams, he said, “I can’t answer that.”

The league’s relocation rules have been ignored and now should be shredded, just like the cross-ownership rules should be that allowed Kroenke to transfer ownership of his NBA Denver Nuggets and NHL Colorado Avalanche to his wife.

After the decision both the task force and Gov. Jay Nixon issued statements. From the task force: “Today’s decision by the NFL concludes a flawed process that ends with the unthinkable result of St. Louis losing the Rams. Over the past 15 months, our stadium task force has delivered in every respect to what the NFL demanded of St. Louis to keep our team. More important, over the past 21 seasons, most of them dire, St. Louis has been remarkably supportive of and faithful to the Rams. We will leave it to the NFL to explain how this could happen and hope the next city that may experience what St. Louis has endured will enjoy a happier and more appropriate outcome.

“Here in St. Louis and throughout our region, we are incredibly grateful for the energy and support we received during this journey. What St. Louis was able to accomplish in a very, very short time was, and is, amazing. That our collective efforts will not be rewarded, or recognized, is very unfortunate. We all deserve better, but never forget that we just showed everyone and ourselves what St. Louis is capable of achieving. The best days for St. Louis are not far away.”

Nixon had an interesting take on just what might be next:

“Tonight’s decision is disappointing, and a clear deviation from the NFL’s guidelines. It is troubling that the league would allow for the relocation of a team when a home market has worked in good faith and presented a strong and viable proposal. This sets a terrible precedent not only for St. Louis, but for all communities that have loyally supported their NFL franchises. Regardless of tonight’s action, the fact remains that St. Louis is a world-class city deserving of a world-class NFL team. We will review the NFL’s decision thoroughly before determining what next steps to take. In particular, we are interested in their justification for departing so significantly from the NFL’s guidelines after St. Louis had – in record time – presented a proposal for a first-class stadium.”

Jones claimed after the vote, “This was not a vote against St. Louis, which is a great city. There can be opportunity there.”

When asked what that might be, Jones said, “It can happen.” Right. Just more lip service from a league that sand-bagged St. Louis and left Spanos and Davis feeling like they’d been hit by a truck. And the league wouldn’t even care if they suffered concussions for their trouble.

]

Stark Contrast Between Losing Rams in 2016 and Losing Cardinals in 1988

Randy Karraker

http://www.101sports.com/2016/01/11/stark-contrast-losing-rams-2016-losing-cardinals-1988/

It is absolutely surreal to be sitting here in 2016, mentally preparing myself for a second NFL team to leave my hometown as the Rams hope to get the votes necessary to move to L.A this week. In March of 1988, the NFL’s 28 owners voted to allow the St. Louis Cardinals, the only team I had ever known, to leave for the Valley of the Sun.

Now, the league’s 32 owners are prepared to vote, perhaps to send my team since 1995, the Rams, back to another transient Sunbelt city, Los Angeles.
The differences are stark. The Cardinals were the team of my youth. The Rams are the team that brought me a Super Bowl as an adult. The Cardinals were the team that I was introduced to football with by my father, who first bought season tickets in 1971. The Rams are the team that I introduced my kids to football with, as a charter PSL holder in 1995. The Cardinals played in an era in which players had to work in the town they played in during the off-season, and fostered friendships with people and stayed in their town. I still run into Jim Otis, Steve Jones, Bob DeMarco, Dan Dierdorf, Jackie Smith, Roger Wehrli and more around St. Louis, and know them as friends. In this day and age in the NFL, the money has changed dramatically, for the better for the players. Their year-round job is to work out for their team, and when they aren’t, they return home or to a Sunbelt city.
When Bill Bidwill first announced that he wanted a new stadium for the Big Red after the 1984 season, he did so because he had to. Teams made about $16.8 million a year from TV in those days, and there was no salary cap. The Bidwill family was, and is, a football family. The NFL is their source of income. In the 1980’s, it was possible for a franchise to lose money. Without an improvement over Busch Stadium II, the Cardinals could lose money, and if they didn’t get a new stadium in St. Louis, they had to get one somewhere.
Now, each team gets $234 million a year from TV and NFL properties, and there’s a salary cap of $121 million. The Rams pay into player benefits, employees, insurance, travel expense, and $250,000 a year in rent. There is virtually no way the franchise can lose money.
In addition to the income, the year after the Cardinals moved to Phoenix, Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys for $140 million. Now that franchise is worth $4 billion. Kroenke purchased his original 40% of the Rams for roughly $60 million, and then bought the remaining 60% for about $450 million. So he has about $510 million invested in a property that was worth $775 million when he bought it, $1.45 billion now and probably at least $2.5 billion if he’s allowed to move it. Add to that the fact that Kroenke’s net worth is reported at $7.6 billion, and he doesn’t need to do this.
The Bidwill family had to move and didn’t want to. Kroenke doesn’t have to move, and is the only owner in sports that doesn’t want to keep his team in his home market.
In an ironic twist, St. Louis leadership did virtually nothing to keep the Cardinals in St. Louis, and have bent over backward to keep Kroenke’s Rams here. In 1989, when Missouri Governor John Ashcroft signed off on financing for a new domed stadium in St. Louis, Jim Holder called up Bidwill to ask about it. When Jim asked Bidwill what he thought, he said “if they would have done this three years ago, this would be a local call.” The Cardinals would have been happy with the Dome and we never would have had to meet Stan Kroenke.
RamsSigns-10
Fans hold up a sign encouraging the team to stay in St. Louis at the Rams’ final home game of the 2015 season.
Another difference between now and then is that the internet didn’t exist in the mid 1980’s. The emotional roller coaster fans have been on is by and large a product of information…accurate or not…gleaned from the internet.
In St. Louis, we knew Bidwill was shopping, but wondered if he had it in him to pull the trigger on a move. We didn’t know how far or close cities like Baltimore and Phoenix were to getting the team.
In 2015-2016, we knew immediately when Kroenke bought land in Inglewood, when he announced his stadium plans, when the team turned in its vitriolic relocation proposal, and how he feels about St. Louis.
I don’t ever remember seeing the Cardinals’ relocation proposal, but the Cardinals attorney Bob Wallace told Fox 2’s Martin Kilcoyne that it actually fawned over St. Louis fans and the market. It’s not that way now, obviously. Add instant information to the misinformation inherent in a story that lasts for years and there’s going to be a roller coaster.
When approval was given to the Big Red in 1988, they were the only team on the move, and it was just a matter of them getting the rubber stamp to relocate. Now, with three teams trying to fill one or two spots in an unknown Los Angeles stadium (Inglewood or Carson), there is anxiety that wasn’t a part of the Cardinals departure.
Both situations are emotionally devastating. I was younger then and didn’t know where life would take me. I didn’t even think about whether I’d get another chance to follow the NFL in my hometown. This time, I’ve lived an NFL life. I had a chance to watch the greatest offense the league has ever seen in person, and had a chance to watch my team in two Super Bowls. My Super Bowl Champion was one of the three or four best teams in the league’s history. Even if they’d ever get good again, NFL football for me could never match what I got from 1999-2004. If they go, I’ll be upset because I love my city and would hate to see the young people of St. Louis be deprived of a chance to have their own NFL team, but for me personally? It’s already been as good as it’s ever going to be.
But there’s one more aspect to this that I thought about all weekend. I think St. Louis got the Rams at the perfect time, and, if they lose them, it may be at the perfect time.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the NFL has reached its apex.
Look at any stadium during the regular season, and you’re going to see empty seats. Even Commissioner Roger Goodell admits getting people to stadiums is one of the biggest challenges the NFL faces. It’s expensive and time consuming to go to games, and the TV product is outstanding. I can’t tell you how many Rams games I’ve been to in the last seven years in which I’ve asked myself “why am I here?” When the product is bad, it’s easy to stay away.
Concussions are a huge problem, and are taking young athletes away from the sport. The rules have also taken the legal big hit out of football. The new CBA prevents players from being able to practice as much, and the product quality is not what it was even five years ago. Players aren’t coached as much, and aren’t as good. The league is greedy, with Goodell admitting that his primary focus is getting league revenues to $25 billion by 2027. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban predicted last March “just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule No. 1 of business.” The way things are going, with this relocation process included, Cuban may be right.
The NFL turned its head when the Patriots perpetrated Spygate, and couldn’t punish people when the Patriots allegedly deflated footballs to gain an advantage. Some people wonder whether there might be more cheating. There are so many rules that games have no flow.
Numerous players have been arrested for domestic violence, including defensive end Greg Hardy, who was welcomed back to the league by the Cowboys with a big contract.
The league spends an inordinate amount of time in court. That’s focused on as much or more than what happens on the field. It becomes a grind.
I’m not saying the league has reached its peak, but that it may have. Either way, the league we lost in 1988 and the league we may be losing now are dramatically different. It’s never good to lose a billion dollar industry or a pro sports team. But as much as it’ll hurt, trust me on this.
Once you get into the next season, you’ll be fine if you don’t have the NFL in your city. Bad football is better than no football, but no football isn’t the end of the world.

wv wrote:

Natural grass though.

I;ve seen it argued that the Rams as they are now built are not as good on grass.

The defense for one is slower.

However, maybe the long national nightmare of endless OL injuries will go away.