St. Louis Post Rams Move: NFL Kick-Off Week­end

Fall on cam­pus brings stu­dents back to school, and NFL foot­ball back to many fans. This is al­ways an ex­cit­ing time of year for NFL fa­nat­ics who love draft­ing their fan­tasy foot­ball line­ups and cheer­ing on their fa­vorite teams.

This year for St. Louis fans, how­ever, a sad re­al­ity is about to set in. With the ap­proval of the Rams move to L.A, which was com­pleted last Feb­ru­ary, this will be the first fall since 1995 that fans in St. Louis do not have a home team to cheer for. This has left many fans an­gry with the league for al­low­ing the move, and even more an­gry with, Stan Kroenke, the Rams owner who con­sis­tently pushed the idea of mov­ing the team to the west coast. In ad­di­tion to the anger, many fans have turned away from the sport en­tirely, be­liev­ing that the busi­ness as­pect of the game com­pletely ig­nores fan loy­alty,which has ul­ti­mately caused fans to lose faith in the way the league op­er­ates.

As a sopho­more with an in­ter­est in E-Sports, Collin Huguelet said he plans on cheer­ing for the cow­boys, be­cause he spent time liv­ing in Texas. Colin also men­tioned that he used to be a fan of the very pop­u­lar fan­tasy foot­ball, but has not been in a league for a few years.

 

 

On the other hand, Marko Sos­nicki, ju­nior, con­sid­ers foot­ball as the least of his con­cerns. When asked what he liked most about the NFL, Sos­nicki replied, “Noth­ing.” Ac­cord­ing to Sos­nicki, he sim­ply has no in­ter­est, and the move of the Rams did not af­fect him much.

 

While foot­ball fans in St. Louis may be very heated about the Rams move to L.A., fans on cam­pus seem less than both­ered by the move. This col­lec­tive lack of in­ter­est ap­pears to be a di­rect re­flec­tion on the way Rams owner, Stan Kroenke, ad­dressed fans while own­ing the team in St. Louis. Kroenke re­fused to up­date the Rams home sta­dium, The Ed­ward Jones Dome, then pur­chased land in L.A. for fu­ture Rams sta­dium fa­cil­i­ties.

In ad­di­tion to this ap­par­ent lack of ded­i­ca­tion to a state in which he at­tended col­lege, Kroenke also had no in­ter­est in tak­ing part in ac­tiv­i­ties within the St. Louis area. In St. Louis, foot­ball is a highly-ad­ver­tised sport, how­ever, with this con­tin­ued turned-eye to­wards smaller mar­ket teams, the league could quickly lose its pop­u­lar­ity.