On Wednesday, the Rams reluctantly released a copy of the proposal in which the team released the contents of its bowels onto the head of St. Louis. On Thursday, the guy who runs St. Louis responded, with a letter to Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“In reviewing the St. Louis Ram’s submission for relocation, I was struck by multiple inaccuracies and misrepresentations of St. Louis and our community’s relationship with the Rams,” Francis Slay wrote to Goodell, via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Slay took issue specifically with owner Stan Kroenke’s assertion that the team has been working with St. Louis since 2002 to resolve the stadium situation.
“I have been Mayor of St. Louis since then and I -- to this day-- cannot ever remember meeting Stan Kroenke, much less engaging with him in any conversations about the future of NFL football in St. Louis,” Slay wrote.
It’s no surprise that the Rams tried to couch the stadium situation as something that has been percolating since 2002, since that’s when the Chargers actually started trying to work out a new stadium in San Diego. And the duration of the Chargers’ effort to land a new venue in San Diego has become one of the biggest arguments in favor of allowing the Chargers to move.
For the Rams, the situation became problematic only in recent years, when the lease required that St. Louis upgrade the stadium to the top 25 percent of league, the team and the city went to arbitration regarding their competing proposals, the team won, and the city thereafter did nothing to upgrade the stadium.
Now, Kroenke wants out, St. Louis wants the Rams to stay, and it all will get resolved in six days.