If you are a fan of the National Football League, then you know all about the current situation with Los Angeles. Three teams (the San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams) are trying to return to the city they at one point—however brief it was—called home, the city that has not had a football team for 20 years.
The way it appears now is that Stan Kroenke, the current owner of the Rams, has his own plan to build his own stadium in Inglewood, roughly 12 miles outside of downtown LA. On the other side, Alex Spanos and Mark Davis, owners of the Chargers and Raiders, respectively, have teamed up to build a joint stadium in Carson, about 18 miles south of downtown.
Now, I’m not going to speculate about who’s going to move because, at this point, it’s anybody’s guess until mid-January, when the NFL owners have their next meeting. At this meeting, they are scheduled to vote on the LA relocation issue. Before that takes place, however, each city will have a chance to submit their final proposal to the NFL to keep the teams and the team owners will have to formally submit their relocation before that date.
If any of those team ends up making the move—and it seems certain that at least one team will at some point in the near future, if not next year, but the jury’s still out on who—then whoever moves may have played their final game in San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis respectively. But looking at the bright side, at least all three teams finished their home stretch of the season off with wins.
Being from St. Louis, I’ve been a fan of the Rams ever since I started following football, which, unfortunately for me, was right after the Greatest Show on Turf era. My dad’s a season ticket holder, so I generally go to one game a year around Thanksgiving or Christmas when I’m back from school. It just so happened that this year, it fell on what could potentially be the Rams’ last home game.
Going into the game, I wasn’t expecting that big of a crowd. The Rams haven’t gone to the playoffs since 2004, and haven’t had a winning season since they went 12–4 back in 2003. Add on to that the fear of a second team abandoning the city—the Cardinals resided in St. Louis from 1960 to 1987 before they left for Phoenix—and it doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of fans have stopped coming to the games. My dad used to go with six people in our family, and now it’s just him and one brother left going to the games. People are just getting fed up.
While the crowd wasn’t that big, the mood was different from what I anticipated. I was expecting a lot of people to be cynical and bitter about this being the last game, but while there were a lot of people upset with the situation and Kroenke in particular, they weren’t going to just sit around, be sad and let the Rams leave without a fight.
There were chants of “Keep our Rams!” throughout the entire game and signs everywhere that read “All I want for Christmas is the Rams in St. Louis” and “Trade Kroenke and keep our Rams.” After the game, fans packed the section right behind the Thursday Night Football broadcast chanting and cheering, doing the best that fans can do to help keep the Rams in St. Louis. While a lot of the decisions that will be made about which teams will move to LA are outside of the local fans' hands, the fans showed just why they think the NFL should consider St. Louis a football town.