Maybe Stan Kroenke and his cronies won’t get off scot-free after all.
Perhaps some sort of justice can still be served.
That’s what I hope comes from Wednesday’s news that the city, county and Regional Convention and ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Complex Authority are suing the National Football League and its teams for damages and restitution from the Rams’ relocation rip-job.
How did the news hit you?
I know some smart and fine folks who wish we would just drop this and move on. I’m just not one of them.
Sometimes an uphill battle is worth fighting. Sometimes the little guy wins.
I encourage you to read the lawsuit before you decide, with the knowledge that the lawyers behind it won’t profit unless they win. The 52-page whopper filed in St. Louis Circuit Court has been in the works for more than two years, and it has evidence ranging back as far as 2010. Unlike this column, it includes no cheap shots, no bitter overtones.
People are also reading…
But it’s compelling.
What you will find is a clinical description of how the Rams repeatedly made a mockery of the NFL’s relocation guidelines while the league, which once trumpeted the importance of said guidelines, pretended they did not exist.
You remember the relocation guidelines. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were the boxes the NFL swore had to be checked back when St. Louis thought it had a chance to present a stadium plan that could keep the Rams from moving.
In the beginning, NFL suit Eric Grubman spoke of these rules as if they were chiseled into stone. But as time went on, and St. Louis emerged as the most likely city to present a stadium plan that would keep its team, Grubman backpedaled. The rules softened into suggestions. It became country club politics at its worst.
Kroenke and ringleader Jerry Jones sneered at the relocation guidelines. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell ignored them as he dismissed St. Louis along with inadequate stadium efforts from Oakland and San Diego. And when the owners sheepishly cast their secret ballots in January 2016, they made a mockery of them.
There’s just one problem.
The relocation guidelines are supposed to matter.
They have been in place since 1984. They can be traced back to the Rams, ironically. After the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum sued the NFL for blocking the Raiders’ attempt to move into the Rams’ vacated venue, the Ninth Circuit Court told the NFL to create objective standards to assess proposed relocations. This lawsuit mentions multiple breaches of the guidelines but hammers down on one that was ignored most often — the one that requires a team to negotiate in good faith with its current community before relocating.
This isn’t about the bad lease that gave Kroenke the loophole he needed to leave for Los Angeles. This is about the lies told by Kroenke and those he pays that convinced those in St. Louis a solution was possible. This is about the league doing nothing to stop exactly the kind of swindle its relocation guidelines are in place to prevent.
What happened to the relocation guidelines?
The question was never addressed.
This lawsuit picks at that scab.
It demands an answer.
Remember when Kroenke said he was “going to attempt to do everything that I can to keep the Rams in St. Louis� He never met with the officials who led St. Louis’ effort to keep the team.
Remember when Kevin Demoff, Kroenke’s talking head, doubled down and told fans there was a “one-in-a-million chance†the team would move? According to Demoff’s own quotes, that came after Kroenke called him and told him he had found “an unbelievable site†for a football stadium in Inglewood.
Remember when former Rams coach Jeff Fisher let it slip recently that he first learned of Kroenke’s plans to relocate during his interview in January 2012?
The lawsuit is littered with bullet-point examples like these. I’m calling them Demoff’s Greatest Hits for short.
The lies that leaked out over the years always made the Rams look reptilian. Look at them all at once, and you feel the need to take a shower. But if being sleazy was against the law, Kroenke would be in jail for evicting poor families from their Texas ranch homes. It’s too early to know if this lawsuit would stand a chance in court. It’s too early to know if it will even get there.
The NFL is flush with cash and qualified counsel, and it hates to lose. Kroenke wins more legal cases than his teams win games. Yes, the big guys rarely lose.
But I’m glad St. Louis is taking its shot.
If this lawsuit gets any bit of money back from the league, like the more than $16 million spent on the effort to keep the Rams, it wins.
If it forces the NFL to stop making up rules as it goes along, it wins.
If it stops other cities from working in vain to keep a team, it wins.
Even if it fails, it should become a thorn in the side of the professional liar, his puppet master and their accomplices.
Hopefully it becomes that, and more.