‘L.A. Rams!’ Fans fans flock to watch practice with team’s future in doubt
In the three-team monte for Los Angeles, the team that’s farthest away geographically — the St. Louis Rams — might have the strongest local support.
Will the Rams return to L.A., the city they left in 1994? We don’t yet know that, and last week’s owners meeting outside Chicago to discuss that very issue provided few tangible details.
But if Monday’s practice session betwee the Rams and Dallas Cowboys is any indication, there could be some real pull for the NFL to consider when it decides how it will proceed with a return to the nation’s second-biggest market almost a foregone conclusion at this point.
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Welcoming the Rams to their practice in Oxnard, Calif. (approximately 64 miles from the proposed Ingelwood NFL site that Rams owner Stan Kroenke is pitching) was a crowd of fans unlike anything the team has seen in its training-camp sessions back in St. Louis.
According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Jim Thomas, there were 7,739 fans — many wearing vintage and current Rams gear — for Monday’s practice, which was nearly 5,400 more fans than were at Sunday’s Cowboys-only practice session.
Another key person in attendance: Kroenke, aka “Silent Stan” for his quietude on the whole L.A. thing publicly, who has yet to make it out to a Rams camp day back home. The silence, in this case, may be deafening.
But the din in L.A. also speaks volumes. Per Thomas, the chants for the possible prodigal-son Rams were impossible to ignore. He wrote:
They chanted “LA Rams! LA Rams!” Then they shouted “Kroenke! Kroenke! Kroenke!”
Thomas also reports that Rams fans attending practice in Earth City, Mo. 10 days ago — the day NFL Network was visiting for a broadcast — were asked to discard their pro-St. Louis/anti-Kroenke signs. Several Rams fans also made the trip to suburban Chicago for the owners meeting to voice their support for their team, even though the momentum appears to point to manifest diestiny for the midwest-based team.
Having an owner such as Kroenke who appears so bent on moving the team, plus the buoy of a powerful owner such as Jerry Jones (per ESPN.com) offering support during the Rams’ “coincidental” visit out west for practice, has to be disheartening for Rams fans back in Missouri.
“What I do think is [the Rams] have such a traditional visibility and a traditional following here in Southern California,” Jones said. “And that’s the main positive that they have — and that they’ve got a great owner and they’ve got a great franchise. It’s a good thing for the NFL to have these teams that have the qualifications they have to think about this Los Angeles market.”
Although the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, conjoined on a bid to move to Carson, Calif., are not out of the mix to move, the Rams situation appears to be on the strongest footing right now for relocation. And fans out west are starting to catch on.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm
