If the Rams evaporate, I would be done. I would probably still watch the Super Bowl. But I wouldn’t have a team to follow. I wouldn’t start over with another team.

There is something about my team loyalty – an essence of my innocent childhood years – that remains an important part of sports for me. I think that is why the blue and whites are important to me.

Baseball kind of “jumped the shark” for me. I was a baseball fanatic growing up. It’s just that tradition in baseball is so rich, and the tradition eroded severely in a lot of ways, and I no longer felt like my favorite team had the same…je ne sais quois. I still root for the Dodgers, but I’m a fair weather fan now.

There are a few scenarios here that could push me beyond my…loyalty, for lack of a better word. If I get sickened by what happens in the next 2-3 years, I could lose it.

zn wrote:

I once got into a discussion about similar stuff with a St. Louis fan who wanted to change the team name and logo so they would be more St. Louis. I disagreed, and said their longterm identity meant more to me than any St. Louis identification. He said that was superficial, since it meant I was just loyal to laundry. I said that the name, logo, and uniform are more than just merely external things–they’re the signs and symbols of a history and tradition, and that history and tradition is part of what the team means to people. I knew he was a baseball Cards fan, so I said, what if the Cards changed their colors and their name and became (say) The Aces. Would that be an absolutely meaningless change in merely superficial, external things? I think he saw the point when it struck home–no, the Aces wearing black and red would not be the same as the Cards wearing red.

Well, we are headed into something that matters a great deal to a lot of us, and to our posting friends that we have bonded with over the past two decades. Some of us are fans of the _________ Rams. Some of us are fans of the St. Louis _________. I think some of us may be fans of the Los Angeles ________, a currently vacant spot that people have filled with the Rams. I think, though, that if the Chargers had moved to LA five years ago, we would have seen some Los Angeles fans vanish.

We are headed for changes, and we are all going to lose some friends one way or another. It’s too bad.

But at least we have the consolation that Kroenke will be worth more on paper no matter what.

Interesting assessment of the 6 football stadium proposals in Los Angeles.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/01/the_six_possible_plans_for_a_los_angeles_nfl_stadium.php#more

rfl wrote:

wv wrote:
So I assume their thinking will be — Build a Brick WALL of an OLine.
Throw every resource at that one Unit. Do whatever you have to do
but make SURE that one Unit is topnotch.

Your conviction that they MUST be prioritizing the OL is interesting. It sounds plausible, but I am not convinced.

Anyway, I’d just question your metaphor. I don’t think the key is an OL WALL. I think what they really want is a pile driving OL to get the running game going.

The frequent assumption about Fisher’s Rams is that they are a power running team. The truth is that their running game was extremely erratic last year. Their offense was driven by passing, not running.

That’s not what Fisher wants. He wants to supercharge the running game and build passing on it.

Just a quibble …

I think what they want is battering rams.

And I think I should trademark that and market it as the nickname of the line.

This is what a team of quitters looks like:

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:
I sincerely hope the man never goes far without a tiny little cigar.

What happened to his hand.

He extinguished his previous cigar on it. Duh.

Cignetti – Tougher Than You.

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:
But…if the Davis family ends up owning the Rams, it will take me a long time to climb out of my depression.

Hole-Lee-Shit. Dont even say that.
Dont think it, and dont type it.

Geezus-h-christ.

Let a thousand flowers bloom,
except for that one.

w
v

Yeah. It would be the ultimate kick-to-the-groin for a Rams fan. Like we haven’t been kicked around enough.

PA Ram wrote:

I will always believe it was a dumb call at that moment.

They were down in the first half–momentum was an issue. I would have criticized him for kicking the field goal.

This play was THE game. They had to have the T.D.

For some reason they decided to call a play with a lot of moving parts. There was an off snap in the first half that Wilson gathered in–could have happened. Could have been called for a penalty on a pick play. Could have and was intercepted. Wilson may have pulled the ball down for a split second of hesitation and been sacked.

If they run it in Lynch either gets it and it’s game over or he doesn’t and a time out is taken. You live to play again.

I love the chances with Lynch–stacked box or not.

Was execution perfect? Nope.

But the coaches should not have put the team in that position. They did not have to do it.

I’ve read all the excuses, all the explanations and all the rationalizing.

In the end–that call is going to haunt that team and its fans forever.

I agree with that.

I also think everybody around here would be pretty happy with that if it had been ANY other team than the Patriots. It would have been something to gloat over a division rival about, and ridicule them. Instead, it appears a lot of Rams fans are unhappy.

Weird, huh?

21Dog wrote:

It’s a great game. Even better now that fighting is mostly gone from it.

Of course it’s best when your team has won two of the last three Cups.

It certainly boosts my enjoyment level.

I would think the Inglewood vote is the next event. I don’t know, though, if there is another wave of bureaucracy to get through after that. Maybe there are environmental hurdles, and so forth, that have to get cleared prior to the commencement of construction. Could take months. I would think that the project needs a legal green light in LA before the league votes on it. Once that happens, I would think things would move quickly, and dominoes will fall all around.

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

How the hell did that ever happen, btw?

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:

Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that Hackett has pulled his name from consideration in St. Louis and will be joining Gus Bradley’s staff in Jacksonville. Per Rapoport, Hackett is expected be the team’s quarterbacks coach.

Mmm Hmm.

“I respectfully decline the opportunity to be Offensive Coordinator for the Rams because I just cannot pass up the opportunity to be QB coach for Blake Bortles and Chad Henne in Jacksonville,” said no-one ever.

nittany ram wrote:

Zooey wrote:
Fine by me.

Nathaniel Hackett is not a football name. Just don’t like the sound of it.

Agreed. Nathaniel Hackett sounds more like a colonial era rabble rouser than a football coach.

The Rams need someone who understands x’s and o’s. They don’t need a gadfly to King George.

Exactly.

That’s why I liked Chudzinski. You can score points behind a man like that. You need a guy with a name like Biertzhopfer or something. Something that sounds like it’s made of steel.

I think a person should be careful before debating Matt Damon, Jon Stewart, or Richard Sherman. They are smarter than you are.