ST. LOUIS — When watching an NFL game, I inevitably have one thought every single time. We should still get to experience this in St. Louis.
Without fail, I think that at some point in every game I watch.
Watching the franchise that was run into the ground and then stolen from us now flourish on the west coast only makes me think about it more often.
On Tuesday, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece on the impending NFC championship takeover of the LA Rams' SoFi Stadium by San Francisco 49ers fans. In it, he spoke of how there's a large group of "Los Angelenos" who view the Rams as a "refugee from a dump of a city in the Midwest."
Quite a picture, eh?
I can tell you this, though. At least our "dump" of a Midwest city supported our Rams.
Los Angeles has one of the best teams in football and stars on the field just about everywhere you look. The management makes exciting trades and hired an up-and-coming young coach who has become a star in himself. They invest in the team and have gone all-in on winning a championship.
Imagine how insane St. Louis would be if it had gotten a team like the 2021-2022 version in the last decade of the Rams' stay in St. Louis?
Sure you can point to attendance figures and the general malaise that came over the franchise for their last 10 years or so in our town to drag down that "support" argument, but something was always apparent. If the Rams put out a good product, people were going to absolutely eat it up in St. Louis.
Heck, that point was proven when they had to start opening up sections of The Dome to make room for all of the St. Louis BattleHawks fans when the XFL came to town.
These Rams are putting out an incredible product in Los Angeles and can't even get fans to go to their home games.
When your starting quarterback's wife publicly tells people not to sell their tickets to opposing fans, and that the opposing fans at the season finale made the environment incredibly difficult for her husband, you may have a problem.
And I haven't even gotten into the whole "dump" part of the comment. We could sling mud about that for days. If you're from St. Louis you know it's just not true, so I'm not even really going to get into it.
The west coast looking down on the Midwest is nothing new, but it's still annoying. Obviously, our town isn't perfect, but a Los Angeles columnist calling it a "dump" is pretty rich.
In St. Louis, all we're left with from 21 years of the Rams is memories and a check for $790 million.
These current Los Angeles Rams could be making memories for countless football fans. But, to borrow part of a line from Billy Joel, the team's "funky exile" to LA has been met with a yawn from the Los Angelenos.