Rams Stadium Negotiations

[JesusNEVERexisted]

If you guys want some great insight into this watch Donnybrook tonight on Channel 9 at 7pm. Ray Hartman has been right about everything he has said the past 5 years.

I know the Blues game is on so you can DVR Donnybrook and watch it later.

[cprice12]

That stadium is definitely NOT happening here so it's likely just a matter of time before the Rams are gone. The St.Louis region has lost over a DOZEN Fortune 500 companies since the Rams came in 1995. Plus the entire Ferguson mess and high murder rate in the city has made this area even less appealing. A vote to fund this new stadium would never pass either.

I don't think anyone thinks that this stadium as it stands is going to be the only version of the proposal.
This thing will probably be tweaked left and right before it goes to any kind of a vote. That's kind of how it works.

[cprice12]

If you guys want some great insight into this watch Donnybrook tonight on Channel 9 at 7pm. Ray Hartman has been right about everything he has said the past 5 years.

I know the Blues game is on so you can DVR Donnybrook and watch it later.

Ummm...right.

[glen a richter]

Even if the Rams skip town, another team, Jaguars or otherwise, will move into town and they'll need a stadium anyway. So one way or the other, something will get built. Football, by the way, is the only sport that I can think of that can actual expand beyond the number of teams they already have and still be wildly successful and profitable. So the idea of a couple more teams in the league isn't entirely out of the question either. Throw in two more teams, two more regular season games and you've got a money maker.

In any event, at the end of the day, St. Louis will not be left without a team.

[JesusNEVERexisted]

Ray Hartman said there is 0% chance the stadium gets built and the Rams are leaving to LA & it's just a matter of when. The entire panel agreed a vote is necessary to build the new stadium and that will NEVER pass.

Don't forget about the history of dead stadium proposals in this town. There have been 3 stadium proposals proposed in thistown since 1987 that ALL never got built. The only one that got built was the Dome and they won't make that mistake again!

[dmiles2186]

Even if the Rams skip town, another team, Jaguars or otherwise, will move into town and they'll need a stadium anyway. So one way or the other, something will get built. Football, by the way, is the only sport that I can think of that can actual expand beyond the number of teams they already have and still be wildly successful and profitable. So the idea of a couple more teams in the league isn't entirely out of the question either. Throw in two more teams, two more regular season games and you've got a money maker.

In any event, at the end of the day, St. Louis will not be left without a team.

Isn't that what LA initially thought when they lost the Rams and the Raiders? Isn't that what Seattle thought when they lost the Sonics?

I don't know. I'm skeptical. If the Rams leave, I don't think it's as cut and dry as a team moving in right away. Nothing is guaranteed. I would hope someone else would move into the market, but I could also see STL become the negotiating chip, like LA is currently, that's used to get other cities stadiums. My sincere hope is that if the Rams are gone, STL has done enough to make an impression on the NFL that if we get this stadium built, they'll guarantee us a team in the form of an expansion franchise or something.

[dmiles2186]

This article has made the rounds the last few days. The Seahawks are on solid footing now, right? Well, about 2 decades ago, they weren't....just illustrates how these things are never over until the paper is signed.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/j ... e-seahawks

This is the story the loudest crowd in the NFL probably doesn’t want you to know. It is the story of how the Seattle Seahawks nearly disappeared, how the best home-field advantage in professional football almost never happened and how it took a passionate band of soccer fans to save football in Seattle.

On Sunday the Seahawks will host the NFC Championship Game in an attempt to reach their second straight Super Bowl. CenturyLink Field will again be sold out and the 68,000 fans crammed into its stands will try to rattle the Green Bay Packers as they do most opponents who find communications impossible in the face of a roar that has literally triggered seismic events. Flags with the number 12 will flap throughout the city anointing the crowd as an extra, essential 12th man in Seattle blue.

Yet there was a time not that long ago when the Seahawks were not adored in their home city, when the team played before huge swaths of empty metal bleachers and a fleet of moving vans hauled the team’s equipment to California in the first stage of a move to suburban Los Angeles. That was in 1996 and the Seahawks’ presumed departure did not generate much protest. Several losing seasons had been further blemished by a series of off-field troubles and the team’s owner, Ken Behring, was despised as an outsider determined to whisk the Seahawks away.

Hoping to keep the team in Seattle, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen offered to buy the Seahawks but with one caveat: he wanted a new stadium to replace the dreary Kingdome, he wanted $300m of public money to help finance it and he wanted the financing to be approved in a statewide referendum that Allen would pay to hold. If the vote failed, Allen vowed to walk away, returning the Seahawks to Behring who appeared ready to complete the team’s California move.

Winning the election seemed an almost impossible task. Allen’s request came as the city’s baseball team, the Mariners, was prevailing in an ugly fight for a new stadium. The Mariners were far better liked at the time than the Seahawks and few in the state of Washington wished to give Allen — then the world’s seventh-richest man — tax money for a stadium. As the June 1997 vote drew near the Seahawks supporters were desperate for a miracle.
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Then Fred Mendoza called Allen’s offices.

Mendoza is a Seattle attorney and soccer fan who by the mid-1990s was playing on a handful of adult teams, coaching his children’s teams and providing legal advice to a local soccer organization. The MLS had just started, giving America its first true major soccer league since the folding of the NASL in the 1980s and the people in Mendoza’s circle longed for a Seattle team. But the MLS did not want a franchise in the Kingdome and efforts to build a soccer-only stadium went nowhere.

One day Mendoza read a newspaper story about Allen’s struggles to get funding for a football stadium and he was hit with a thought. “I immediately went ‘Whoa, football has a rectangular stadium and that would be perfect for a soccer field,’” Mendoza recalls.

He phoned Allen’s offices and left a message. The next day he found himself sitting in the office of Bert Kolde, one of Allen’s top advisors who was helping to run the stadium effort. He told Kolde there were some 300,000 people involved in soccer around Seattle, many of them dearly wanted an MLS team and if the proposed football stadium could be marketed as a football and soccer stadium … well there might be more than a few votes in it.

“This is exciting,” Mendoza remembers Kolde saying.

Allen’s people scrambled to turn their football project into a combined football and soccer stadium. They hired an architect with soccer expertise to redraw the stadium’s blueprints, widening the corners to accommodate a soccer field, moving lights so they would illuminate the sidelines and slightly raising the lowest rows of the grandstand to give better soccer sightlines. Mendoza drove around the state with Kolde and Seahawks president Bob Whitsitt, attempting to woo skeptical newspaper editorial boards. Several times he went to the state capitol to beg legislators for their support.

But his biggest work was done on the weekends, when he set up a tent at youth soccer games. He had a microphone and a sound system and he told the people who gathered around him that Allen was committed to helping Seattle get a soccer team.

“Fifty, 60, 70 people would come over and listen and they would say: ‘Hey let’s get the stadium,’” Mendoza says.
Clint Dempsey of Seattle Sounders The Sounders have become known for their passionate fanbase. Photograph: Ted S Warren/AP

A key moment came in the spring of 1997 when MLS commissioner Doug Logan and NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue attended a city luncheon in support of the stadium. After the lunch, Logan said: “You have our assurances that Major League Soccer will be here if the stadium is built.”

Suddenly Seattle’s soccer community had something tangible: a guarantee. People who hated the idea of helping to fund a stadium for Allen were campaigning to have it built.

“Knowing what I know about soccer today [the fans] brought a totally different demographic to the vote,” says Gary Wright, a Seahawks vice president at the time who was later instrumental in starting the Sounders MLS franchise. “The hardcore soccer person isn’t the same as the hardcore football person. It widened the margins of the electorate by bringing in extra people.”

As the referendum drew near, support for the stadium grew. On election day, more than 1.6 million people cast ballots in a vote so close the result wasn’t known until the next morning. Eventually word came: the stadium had passed by a mere 36,780 votes, a margin of 51% to 49%.

“There is no question the soccer vote was the difference,” Mendoza says. “And Paul will tell you that. Without soccer there would be no Seahawks today.”

Five years later, the stadium opened with a gigantic half-roof designed to capture crowd noise and direct it toward the field. Soon the stadium became known as the loudest building in the NFL, an obvious home advantage for the Seahawks who then won a string of NFC West championships. The team so scorned in the mid-1990s that locals often called it “the Seachickens” became the most-beloved sports team in the city. The near-move to California was forgotten.

But there is also this. The MLS team Seattle finally got in 2009 has turned into the league’s most valuable franchise. For all five years of the Seattle Sounders existence the team has led the MLS in attendance, averaging more than 43,000 the last three seasons, a figure that would put it in the top half of all the European leagues.

“The Sounders themselves were shocked by it,” says local radio broadcaster Mike Gastineau whose book — Sounders FC Authentic Masterpiece — describes the unprecedented rise of Seattle’s soccer franchise. “All their projections said they would draw 16,000 to 20,000 a night and do a little better than break even. It turns out they were in the right place at the right time.”

And yet none of the Sounders success would have happened without the Seahawks. For it turns out Logan’s promise in 1997 meant little in the MLS offices. It took 10 years for Seattle to get its soccer team and another two before the team played a game — an eternity for many soccer fans started to wonder if they had been duped, especially when a promised grass field (necessary in international soccer matches) was replaced by FieldTurf at the Seahawks request.

Eventually Allen had to invest in a portion of the expansion franchise and enlist the help of Seahawks employees to operate it before the MLS granted Seattle a team.

Few of those Sounders fans will be in the stands on Sunday. Wright says there is little crossover between the soccer and football crowds. The Sounders have been marketed to young people in their 20s working for tech companies and living downtown. The Seahawks have a more established, more suburban base.

No one at CenturyLink Field will be thinking about soccer as the Seahawks play for another Super Bowl. But if someone was to look close Sunday afternoon, they would see the faint, mostly-erased lines the Sounders soccer pitch peeking from beneath the hash marks ...

A subtle reminder of the sport that saved the Seattle Seahawks when they were all but gone.

[JesusNEVERexisted]

KMOX just said Jeff City will NOT approve any more state money for a new stadium and Peacock ' s plan calls for $400 million. They also said Kansas City built a great NFL stadium with NO public money.

[ComradeT]

KMOX just said Jeff City will NOT approve any more state money for a new stadium and Peacock ' s plan calls for $400 million. They also said Kansas City built a great NFL stadium with NO public money.

Which one would that be? Arrowhead? Are you out of your mind? Or maybe in your bizzaro world 0 = 100%?

http://www.stadiumsofprofootball.com/af ... tadium.htm

FACTS & FIGURES
-Tenant: Kansas City Chiefs
-Capacity: 76,416
-Surface: Grass
-Opened: August 12, 1972
-Naming Rights: None
-Architect: Kivett & Myers -Cost: $43 Million
-Public Financing: 100%
-Private Financing: None

In June 1967, a $102 million bond was issued for construction of two sports stadiums.

The county also paid for renovation by issuing bonds.

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/n ... -refi.html

Jackson County will sell about $340 million in bonds Wednesday in order to refinance some of the debt from the 2006 renovation of Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums.

When you post shit that you heard someone else say, at least bother to double-check the readily and easily available sources. My 12-year old does better fact checking than you. Even he thinks that!!!

[JesusNEVERexisted]

IT DOES NOT MATTER. That was just an off the fly comment they made on KMOX. Upon checking, the Hunt family put in $125 million for the recent renovation and made it clear they want to stay in KC!

The bottom line is not a SINGLE prominent person in St.Louis is saying this stadium will be built. Yet several prominent people have already said there is NO WAY it gets built.

[cardsfan04]

IT DOES NOT MATTER. That was just an off the fly comment they made on KMOX. Upon checking, the Hunt family put in $125 million for the recent renovation and made it clear they want to stay in KC!

The bottom line is not a SINGLE prominent person in St.Louis is saying this stadium will be built. Yet several prominent people have already said there is NO WAY it gets built.

Case closed I guess. We should all stop caring.

[cprice12]

IT DOES NOT MATTER. That was just an off the fly comment they made on KMOX. Upon checking, the Hunt family put in $125 million for the recent renovation and made it clear they want to stay in KC!

The bottom line is not a SINGLE prominent person in St.Louis is saying this stadium will be built. Yet several prominent people have already said there is NO WAY it gets built.

I bet you a stadium gets built. Actually, I guarantee it.
At some point a stadium will get built, whether it be this proposal or a variation of this one or a completely different one.
A stadium will get built.

There. I said that...and I am a prominent member of the St. Louis area. I have owned and operated a sports website for 13 years which was featured once on FSMW between periods. I have hung out with Chris Kerber on more than one occassion. I have sat and shot the breeze with Kevin Wheeler and Bob Plager, who liked me so much he put a smilie face next to his autograph just for me. I have had conversations with Jeremy Rutherford, Dave Butz & Party of 5 star Scott Wolf. I co-hosted a very reputable and highly regarded and sponsored podcast with the one and only Jeff Ponder. My commentary was published in The Hockey News. I have shaken T.J. Oshie's hand. I had a lengthy conversation with Brett Hull during training camp back in 1994. I have sat in the KMOX press box during a game...twice. I watched Mike Ramsey walk by me once. I have a brick outside of Busch Stadium. Guy Hebert handed me his trapper to try on...which I did...and it stunk. Randy Karaker has read a tweet of mine on the Fast Lane. I have met and talked to Tom Pagnozzi and Joe Magrane. I chatted with Dick Schofield while buying hockey equipment...and didn't like him. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious.

So there.

[dmiles2186]

IT DOES NOT MATTER. That was just an off the fly comment they made on KMOX. Upon checking, the Hunt family put in $125 million for the recent renovation and made it clear they want to stay in KC!

The bottom line is not a SINGLE prominent person in St.Louis is saying this stadium will be built. Yet several prominent people have already said there is NO WAY it gets built.

A prominent crackhead on my bus to work said that there are purple elephants in the sky, the stadium will get built, Taco Bell is the healthiest food one can eat. He had a KMOX shirt on. Upon checking, he had a ton of ear wax and made it clear that he was Jimi Hendrix's brother!

The bottom line is that it wasn't just an off the fly comment made by Beatrix Hendrix. He said a stairway would be built to heaven and we'd all ride on hover boards to the heavenly gates and there is NO WAY that's a lie.

[JesusNEVERexisted]

Even Grubman with the NFL said the Rams can move EVEN IF the stadium is built! With no assurances there is NO WAY the stadium gets built.

[cprice12]

Even Grubman with the NFL said the Rams can move EVEN IF the stadium is built! With no assurances there is NO WAY the stadium gets built.

The stadium isn't going to be built unless the Rams are staying. That has been stated publicly.
So that scenario wouldn't even present itself...so Grubman obviously doesn't know what he is talking about on that point.

Jim Thomas of the PD said Kroenke has said he isn't going to go rogue and will only move with league approval.
If you had read what I said earlier, if Kroenke goes rogue, it is possible it could cost him $3 billion of his own money (over half of his $5.5 billion net worth) to move and it would also negatively effect his net worth. So assuming that is true, there is no way in hell Kroenke just up and moves the team without league approval. And it will be interesting to see if he can get league approval if the city gets a stadium plan together than can be approved to be built. If that happens, if they get approval to actually build a stadium, Kroenke and the Rams aren't going anywhere.

[ComradeT]

Even Grubman with the NFL said the Rams can move EVEN IF the stadium is built! With no assurances there is NO WAY the stadium gets built.

He also said many other things. Like that the league is not set on moving the Rams, or that the league is looking to keep the Rams St. Louis Rams. How does all of this escape your megamind?

[JesusNEVERexisted]

Grubman also said the bylaws are not etched in stone. If they're not etched in stone then they don't necessarily have to abide by the 9 vote rule. That means even if they get 15 no votes the Rams could still move.

I still trust Ray Hartman on this because he has been 100% right on this issue since 2010. Not to mention several other prominent St.Louisans who say the stadium will never happen. Hartman also brought up a great point saying Kroenke wouldn't have gone to all this trouble if he couldn't move the team. And now even the NFL admits they don't have to follow their own by laws which paves the way for the Rams to leave!

[Oaklandblue]

The Rams are not moving out of St. Louis. I don't care what any city official, state govenor or former player or general manager says, the NFL has to approve the move and it has yet to even be approached at the NFL level. It's all idle threats and bullshit being done as a scare tactic to get a stadium built. They ain't going anywhere.

[dmiles2186]

I still trust Ray Hartman on this because he has been 100% right on this issue since 2010. Not to mention several other prominent St.Louisans who say the stadium will never happen. Hartman also brought up a great point saying Kroenke wouldn't have gone to all this trouble if he couldn't move the team. And now even the NFL admits they don't have to follow their own by laws which paves the way for the Rams to leave!

I don't know who Ray Hartman is or what he's said, so please cite specific examples with links and quotes please. Thanks.

[glen a richter]

Did I see right that "it does not matter" what the facts are the first time you spew crap, and then when you get called on it it's okay because there's still some point to be made out of the lies that you spewed the first time?

I'm just trying to make sense out of the nonsense pouring out of your keyboard, JNE. The proper thing to do when someone calls BS and backs it up is to say "I was mistaken. I should have done a little more research beforehand." Not try to cover yourself by saying "It does not matter!" Even all your teachers and, presumably, your parents taught you that when you were younger!