On February 13, if the often-though-not-always correct bookmakers in Las Vegas are correct, the Los Angeles Rams are going to win the Super Bowl and cause me to be in a terrible mood for days. I want to try to mitigate this as much as I possibly can.
Being a former St. Louis Rams fan is just an absolutely
insane bummer, and it does not help that every team I want to be bad is now
good. Hell, we were one first-half touchdown by Tyreek Hill, the guy who
strangled his pregnant girlfriend and then broke the arm of his now-born child when
he was three (I usually add “accused of” type caveats, but he straight up says
it on audiotape), from the super racist team that has spent the last
half-decade scavenging the wreckage of St. Louis football fandom (and largely
succeeding) for new adherents that they
themselves had a role in creating in making the Super Bowl. A Chiefs/Rams
Super Bowl—Jesus absolute Christ.
The Rams have, instead, an extremely likable opponent in the
Cincinnati Bengals. There are undeniably faults—Joe Mixon is indefensible, and
while I give owner Mike Brown credit for voting against the Rams’ relocation, this
doesn’t exactly make the notorious cheapskate who himself extorted Cincinnati
into building him a stadium he named after his daddy a sympathetic figure more
broadly. But there’s Joe Burrow, the quarterback who looks like a bully in an
80s teen comedy but instead is the protagonist of a beautiful story—the Ohio
native who was squeezed out of fulfilling his childhood dream of playing at The
Ohio State University and instead became a folk hero at LSU alongside Ja’Marr
Chase, who is now his top receiver with the Bengals. With all of the attention
in the world on Burrow, his social media presence has been aggressively combed
and all anyone seems to have come up with is a bunch of innocuous tweets about
the mid-2010s Cleveland Cavaliers and some shockingly progressive tweets about social and
economic justice.
In a perverse way, that Joe Burrow has become maybe the most
broadly beloved player in the NFL mostly over the course of a few weeks makes
me less confident that the Bengals can pull this off. When the Rams played the
still-Tom Brady-led New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in 2019, the fact
that it was Brady and Bill Belichick, arguably the two greatest to ever do what
they do, did give me a sense of relief, even if rooting for the Patriots was
never exactly my favorite thing to do. But now I’m rooting for a second-year
quarterback who is certainly good but I am absolutely not convinced is great
to maintain St. Louis’s 1-0 lead in Super Bowls won vs. Super Bowls won by
teams that abandoned it.
What to do if the Cincinnati Bengals win the Super Bowl is
very simple—pound a few celebratory shots and/or beers, run around screaming
along to “Song 2”, and sending derogatory taunting text messages to every
single Green Bay Packers fan I know. That’s the fun part. But what if the Los
Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl? How do I cope with that? Here are the things I
will tell myself:
1. This wasn’t going to happen in St. Louis: I’m
old enough that I remember when the Arizona Cardinals won the first playoff
game in franchise history—a 20-7 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC
Wild Card Round in the 1998-99 season. I remember a local sense of melancholy,
that this was something that should have happened in St. Louis but didn’t (this
sense evaporated eight months later when the 1999 Rams took charge). That is
probably true—there wasn’t really a material change in the operations of the
St. Louis, Phoenix, or Arizona Cardinals. But had the hundreds of thousands of
NFL franchise owners banded together and stopped the relocation of the St.
Louis Rams, what is currently unfolding in Los Angeles never would have happened.
Stan Kroenke bought the Rams with the express intent of relocating them—the Rams
spent the first six years of his majority ownership treading water, openly
cavorting with Los Angeles while employing Jeff Fisher to oversee the most
aesthetically unpleasing football team possible. If Kroenke were unable to move
the Rams, he probably would have sold them, and as awful of an owner as Stan
Kroenke is from the perspective of St. Louis, every move he is making is built
around bringing Los Angeles a championship right now. It’s not exactly a
mystery as to why—he’s 74 years old and despite giving his son, former awful
Mizzou basketball player Josh Kroenke, control of the Denver Nuggets in order
to subvert the NFL’s ownership rules, he only cares about himself and doesn’t
care what happens to the Rams franchise once he’s dead.
2. Good for Aaron Donald: Aaron Donald was
more of a regional curiosity when he played in St. Louis for two seasons—it was
against league broadcast rules (citation needed) for ESPN to discuss the St.
Louis Rams (even the relocations of literal NFL franchises are covered with all
the fervor of a pretty bad Russell Westbrook shooting night). And now everybody
accepts that Donald is awesome, which he was in 2014 and 2015 as well. I have no
grudge against Aaron Donald. What am I supposed to do, ask a guy not to get
paid to play in LA and instead stay loyal to a city he isn’t from which doesn’t
have a team? Aaron Donald should get to body-slam Stan Kroenke off the stage if
the Rams are handed the Lombardi Trophy. Maybe take a shot at Goodell while you’re
up there too. Note: There are two other former St. Louis Rams still on the team—Rob
Havenstein, who was only with the St. Louis team for one year and for whom I
have no emotional attachment either way, and Johnny Hekker, the punter who
seems like a cool guy but is a living reminder that for the last four years
they were in St. Louis, the most marketed players on the Rams were the
kicker and the punter.
3. Matthew Stafford is cool, too: How is Joe
Burrow in a Super Bowl and he’s arguably not even the guy whose bro/bully
appearance is most incongruous with everything we actually know about him as a
person? The Los Angeles Rams have a ton of irritating offensive players—Cam Akers
was openly
wishing concussions on opponents less than a month ago, Tyler Higbee
straight up did
hate crimes, and Cooper Kupp forced every NFL announcer at gunpoint to say
both his first and last name any time he catches a ball. But Matthew Stafford
spent a long time being jerked around by an incompetent Detroit Lions franchise
(I mean, I don’t want to deny his complicity—nobody was forcing him to take the
money) and now he gets to play for a team that cares. If this were a different
team, I’d love it. Also, his wife called out fan apathy and that is insanely
funny to me.
4. The twelve Los Angeles Rams fans deserve
happiness: When it comes down to it, if I am going to critique the
relocation of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, I have to acknowledge those
who were hurt by the original sin of the St. Louis Rams—their relocation from
Los Angeles. The face of the relocation to St. Louis, Georgia Frontiere,
inherited the team from her husband, who himself only acquired the team after a
1972 franchise trade with the then-Baltimore Colts, a thing that I still can’t
wrap my head around. I can note that Rams attendance was rarely very good in
Los Angeles and that Frontiere gave Los Angeles a more sincere chance to keep
its team than Stan Kroenke gave St. Louis, and that’s all true, but I wouldn’t
expect that to be much solace for Angelenos who lost their favorite team. There
may not have been as many die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans as there were
die-hards of some other teams, but that doesn’t mean there were zero. And while
most of my experience with die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans came from those who
spent decades trolling St. Louis Post-Dispatch comments sections and
therefore my perception of them is a bunch of antisocial lunatics who
celebrated the relocation of my favorite childhood sports team with fervor they
would not experience again until November 8 of that same year, I know that this
is a self-selecting group. In a perfect world, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San
Diego would all have NFL teams. And just as I compartmentalized Los Angeles’s
absence from the NFL team list when the Rams were in St. Louis, I can’t really
get mad at LA fans who do the same with St. Louis, so long as they aren’t
aggressive jerks about it.
All right, there we go. And now I can take a deep breath and
root for the Los Angeles Rams! Just kidding, I still hope they lose by triple
digits and that Kroenke falls out of his luxury box.
