Twenty years ago today, St. Louis won its first major professional sports championship of my lifetime, and to this date, it was the happiest a sporting event has ever made me. It was the culmination of a thrilling worst-to-first campaign for the St. Louis Rams which saw a backup quarterback become an MVP and a perennial doormat of a franchise become champions. In retrospect, the Rams’ run of futility was not nearly as long nor as lowly as what was to come, but it had encompassed my entire time as a sports fan.
A little over four years ago, the team to which I devoted two decades of my Sundays was gone. Removed from existence. Following a transparently fraudulent campaign in which Stan Kroenke purchased the Rams and immediately gutted the organization of basic needs in order to justify a relocation to Los Angeles, the owners almost unanimously voted to take my team away from me.
Both Clark Hunt and John York, the owners of the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers respectively, voted for the end of the St. Louis Rams. They did it for the same reason NFL owners do pretty much everything, and it’s the same reason Stan Kroenke wanted to relocate the Rams to LA in the first place: it made them money.
One could argue that, aside from Kroenke, this Super Bowl features the two owners which have most benefited from the relocation of the Rams. The Los Angeles Rams were a long-time rival of the San Francisco 49ers dating back to the 1970s and there is more zest to the rivalry when both teams are in California. And with the Rams out of the picture, the Chiefs were able to position themselves as Missouri’s professional football team.
To be clear, there are numerous arguments for rooting for or against either team in the Super Bowl. The Chiefs have a hyper-likable quarterback in Patrick Mahomes and an affable coach in Andy Reid who is near the top of any list of best coaches to never win the Super Bowl. They also employ and prominently feature a particularly egregious domestic abuser in Tyreek Hill, and as somebody who will be watching the Super Bowl with multiple people of Native American ancestry, it’s hard for me to justify rooting for a team that still actively encourages (very successfully) its fans to engage in the gleefully racist Tomahawk Chop. The 49ers have a fun cast of characters, and as somebody who like all good and true Americans hates the New England Patriots, seeing Jimmy Garoppolo hoisting the Lombardi Trophy would be deeply funny. They are also an organization that led the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick and now has a unit led by Kaepernick’s political opposite, MAGA-fied defensive end Nick Bosa.
But there is no looming sense that I, a St. Louisan, ought to root for the 49ers. I’m sure they’d love my support (well, they probably don’t care unless I start buying some merchandise) but there is no expectation that they would receive it. But the Kansas City Chiefs, four hours west along I-70 from me, have that expectation. The Chiefs shrewdly associated themselves with the St. Louis Blues’ 2019 championship run, with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce wearing Blues sweaters to playoff games. I’ve never found supposed regional synergy between teams that don’t have the same ownership to be more than a marketing gimmick, but that doesn’t make the marketing gimmick inherently bad.
But then I remember the cold, rainy, depressing day in January 2016 when I lost my team. And for all of my contempt for the obvious villains—Stan Kroenke and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones the most obvious among them—I felt a seething hatred for those who pretended to care about St. Louis and, when it came time to take action, followed along with the cartoonish evil of Kroenke. Shad Khan, the Jacksonville Jaguars owner with semi-local roots who had attempted to buy the Rams before Kroenke came in with an eleventh hour offer, voted for relocation. The Green Bay Packers, who will monetize the chance to tell you that they aren’t owned by greedy billionaires but rather by “The Fans” any day of the week, nevertheless did the bidding of billionaires in voting for the move (this wouldn’t be the last time in 2016 that Wisconsin would yield to the whims of the hyper-rich). And the Kansas City Chiefs, who would spend the ensuing four years pretending to be a safe refuge for spurned St. Louis Rams fans, voted to strip the Rams from St. Louis.
By almost all accounts, only two NFL owners voted against the Rams relocation, and each did it for such selfish reasons that I can’t even tip my cap to them—the Oakland Raiders did it because they wanted to be the ones to head to Los Angeles and deprive Oakland for a second time of its football team (they instead are packing up and heading to Las Vegas so that a team once beloved by a blue-collar, working-class fan base can become a tourist trap for wealthy vacationers), and the Cincinnati Bengals did it because they didn’t want a bump in the salary cap (inevitable with increased league revenues) and they don’t want to fairly compensate the men dying young for the sake of their product. It became very obvious that day that the NFL didn’t care about my fandom. None of them deserve it.
If the Kansas City Chiefs wanted my active fandom, they squandered that opportunity on January 12, 2016. I won’t be rooting against them on Sunday because they voted to relocate, because they won’t be the only organization represented that did so, but they forfeited my willingness to overlook the problematic nature of the organization. Like every NFL game, I’m simply rooting for the lesser of two evils. At least I don’t have to root for the Patriots this year.
There’s something to the “St. Louis is acting like spurned lovers: you have to get on with your life” attitude many, especially outside of St. Louis, have. But the solution isn’t embracing the Chiefs (or the Colts, or the Bears, or any of the other semi-regional teams that voted for and profited through relocation). The Chiefs aren’t the new romantic interest that helps you overcome your jadedness from your last bad experience: they’re the person that actively contributed to the destruction of your last relationship. If a romantic relationship ended because of a massive, collusive effort involving everybody in the world, I’d probably want to be alone for a while. And I think I’ll stick without an NFL team for as long as I see fit.
