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Sacks
- By Steve808
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 11 Replies
Sacks are great but it takes context, IMO. Let me give you some examples.
The Rams sacked cooper rush for a big loss against the cowgirls. But cooper makes a great pass and somehow, they convert 3rd and 15. That sucks. The Rams don't sack Kyler Murray that much because they are focusing on containing him. But it's effective. The Rams don't sack jimmy grabmyass because rat boy gameplans it that way.
Our problem is that the coaching staff (I love them) seems to have this blind spot against the whiners. They know that jimmy grabmyass only dinks and dunks and rarely throws a pass 10 yards down the field. Their offense is designed to run the ball or get rid of the ball in 2 seconds. Trying for sacks is almost futile, unless it's third and long. But the Rams continue to play soft and 10 yards off the ball and 3rd and 3. I feel sick when I can predict where the ball is going.
I'm hoping that Morris will have the DB's up in the face of the receivers to at least give the pre-snap look of tight coverage and they can drop back at the snap if that is the plan. But seeing the ball come out 2-3 yards down the field and the DB making contact after the first down is gained just feels like a kick in the nuts when it happens over and over.
ratboy gameplans to take AD out of the game so the defense needs to adjust to that. Force Jimmy to throw the ball down the field and more than likely, he will make mistakes.
Get the lead in the 4th and rat boy is likely done.
Last two weeks provide formula for Rams to take down 49ers
Kyle Shanahan is 1-31 when trailing by 3 points or more in the 4th quarter
www.turfshowtimes.com
The Trade of the Century....1972
- By LARams_1963
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 0 Replies
Great story about the trade of the Rams for the Colts...err, at least the owners!
www.nfl.com
In 1972, the owners of the Colts and Rams pulled off a transaction unlike anything seen in professional sports before or since: a complete franchise swap that shifted the fates of both organizations in far-reaching ways.
"A deep voice says, 'Hello, is your father there?' " Irsay said, recalling the conversation earlier this year. " 'No, he's not here right now.'
" 'Please tell him Carroll Rosenbloom called.' "
In the history of the NFL, there haven't been too many more consequential phone calls than the one Rosenbloom placed to Jim's father, Robert Irsay. It set off the weirdest, but most significant, trade in NFL -- and maybe pro sports -- history.
No players or coaches switched teams. Nobody had to move. No contracts were amended. Robert Irsay and Rosenbloom simply, monumentally, traded franchises -- the players and coaches, the uniforms and playing fields, the home cities, the histories, all of it -- giving Rosenbloom control of the Los Angeles Rams and Irsay control of the Baltimore Colts, the team his son Jim now runs in Indianapolis.
This year's trade deadline is Nov. 1, but nothing that happens between now and then, no matter who it involves -- nor any of the many transactions that have already taken place -- is likely to ever reshape the league like the swap of franchises that are now worth billions of dollars.
The 50th anniversary of this trade was this summer, but few football fans, even of the Rams and Colts, are likely to know of the intertwined history of the teams, and how an air conditioning executive joined with an owner who was angling for what he felt would be a more supportive market -- and who was motivated by a desire to avoid capital gains taxes -- to create a deal that had no precedent in major pro sports, and still has no equal for strangeness.
Rosenbloom died in 1979 and Irsay died in 1997. The full scope of the events was recaptured through interviews with several people who have intimate knowledge of the situation, including Jim Irsay, and a review of contemporaneous accounts of the trade and its aftermath, including those reported by Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.
The roots of the pact were actually planted a few years earlier, in 1968, when Dan Reeves, who was the owner of the Rams at the time, suggested to Rosenbloom, who was then the owner of the Colts, that Rosenbloom take over the Rams, as Sports Illustrated reported after the franchise swap in 1972. Reeves and Rosenbloom were old friends, and they spoke on the field before their teams played a game late in that 1968 season. Reeves was already ill with the cancer that would take his life three years later, and he told Rosenbloom that day that he did not think his family would keep the team after he died.
"I don't think you belong in Baltimore anymore," Rosenbloom quoted Reeves telling him in that Sports Illustrated article. "If I do go before you do, I hope you will give serious thought to acquiring this franchise."
The Colts beat the Rams in Los Angeles in December of 1968 -- shortly after then-Rams owner Dan Reeves suggested to Carroll Rosenbloom, then owner of the Colts, that Rosenbloom should take over his franchise, according to Rosenbloom's recollection. (Associated Press)
It was several more years before anything happened, but Reeves was right about his friend's waning relationship with Baltimore.
Rosenbloom had made his first fortune in clothing manufacturing -- he was so successful, he retired at 32 to become a gentleman farmer, and later, he would be a financial backer of Broadway shows and movies, as recounted by Sports Illustrated. He became the principal owner of the Colts in 1953 when the NFL awarded Baltimore a franchise. Another old friend, Bert Bell, who had been a coach on the University of Pennsylvania football team when Rosenbloom was a running back for the Quakers, was the NFL commissioner at the time, and Bell encouraged Rosenbloom to buy the team as part of a group of investors. Rosenbloom's share of the team cost $13,000. He asked Baltimoreans to give him five years to build a winner.
Rosenbloom hadn't exactly been looking to buy a sports team, but once he did, he built the Colts into champions -- though it actually took him six years. He engineered a blockbuster trade that, among others, brought a player named Don Shula to the team. He hired coach Weeb Ewbank. He signed a free-agent quarterback named Johnny Unitas. The Colts won the NFL title in 1958 (the victory over the New York Giants in the Championship Game is still called "The Greatest Game Ever Played") and '59, lost Super Bowl III to the Jets after the 1968 season and won Super Bowl V over the Cowboys after the 1970 season.
But there were sources of tension. After the 1969 season, Shula -- by then the Colts' head coach -- left Baltimore for Miami after Dolphins owner Joe Robbie dangled a reported $750,000 and other perks to lure him. Rosenbloom was furious.
Rosenbloom had also soured on the area, as The New York Times recounted in July of 1972, and he felt the Colts were underappreciated. He wasn't happy with Baltimore Memorial Stadium, and he was hurt by criticism from the local press, particularly from a columnist named John Steadman, who had also called Colts games on the radio. Steadman regularly criticized Rosenbloom, for whom he had once worked, in his column. Their relationship was so fractured that Rosenbloom's family has long wondered if Steadman helped to keep Rosenbloom from being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, despite his team's success -- Rosenbloom was the winningest owner in NFL history until he was passed by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft -- and despite his influence on the growth of the league, as an early supporter of revenue sharing and national television contracts, and as someone who played a crucial role in the NFL-AFL merger in 1970.
The tipping point for Rosenbloom seemed to come during the 1971 preseason, when three exhibition games there drew an average crowd of just 16,000 fans. He was ready to move the Colts to a new stadium he planned to build in the Maryland suburbs or even to Tampa, Florida -- the modern-day home of the Buccaneers did not yet, at that point, have an NFL team. Rosenbloom eventually went so far as to hold a one-day training camp in Tampa -- including Unitas -- early in 1972. Rosenbloom's dreams of a Florida relocation, though, were dashed by resistance from Pete Rozelle, who succeeded Bell as NFL commissioner in 1960, and other owners.
Meanwhile, Robert Irsay very much did want to own a sports franchise -- any franchise, really.
To this day, the deal struck between Carroll Rosenbloom (left, shown in 1978) and Robert Irsay (right, shown in 1984) remains unparalleled in pro sports history. (Associated Press)
Irsay was an irascible sort. During his eventual stewardship of the Colts, he became known for ear-splitting midgame tirades in which he ordered coaches to bench quarterbacks, and he once fired a coach after a preseason loss, which necessitated a trip to the team bus by a 16-year-old Jim to apologize. Baltimoreans never forgave him for moving the team.
But when Jim describes his father, there is a hint of romanticism, too. He loved Las Vegas, Jim said, particularly playing baccarat. He had very good luck, Jim said, calling him a riverboat gambler, someone who was never afraid to lay it all on the table. That was a good personality for the deal with which he was going to become involved.
"He was very interested in the Montreal Expos in 1968," Jim Irsay said. "Then he came to me and said -- and I was only 11 years old at the time -- he said, 'Do you want the Rams or the Colts?' I said the Rams. I always loved the Rams helmets, and I loved Roman Gabriel and those guys from the '60s."
Reeves, who paid $135,000 with a friend to purchase the then-Cleveland Rams in 1941 (the franchise moved to Los Angeles following the 1945 season), died in April 1971. As he predicted, his heirs looked to sell the team. It was clear almost immediately that Rosenbloom was interested. He was primarily living in New York and Miami by then, and he was looking for a new challenge. He was believed to have already looked into buying the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Kings. He may have considered buying the New Orleans Saints for his kids. He had even suggested his son could run the Colts, and Rosenbloom would buy the Rams. Rozelle nixed all those ideas -- the NFL rules then prohibited such cross-ownership arrangements.
"People around the league knew that Carroll Rosenbloom had a desire to be the NFL owner in Los Angeles, and he was used to getting what he wanted," said Joe Browne, who spent 50 years working in the league office, including 20 years working for Rozelle. "I would not put him on the list of quiet, self-effacing sports owners."
Rozelle suggested Rosenbloom sell the Colts and then buy the Rams, and there were plenty of suitors who were interested in relieving Rosenbloom of the Colts. But there was a problem Rosenbloom wanted to avoid: the estimated $4.4 million capital gains tax bill Rosenbloom would have faced had he sold the Colts.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly who came up with the unorthodox idea of a trade, although once Rosenbloom made clear he wanted to own the Rams, it seems likely it was an anonymous accountant or lawyer who devised a way to reverse engineer the desired result.
In the meantime, the Miami Dolphins had fired a personnel executive, Joe Thomas, who had been a key to Joe Robbie's purchase of the Dolphins. Rozelle suggested to Rosenbloom that Thomas might be able to find a buyer for the Colts. He had two: Willard Keland and Clem Ryan, who together agreed to buy the Rams for $19 million and then trade the team to Rosenbloom in exchange for the Colts.
"Commissioner Rozelle was as surprised as anyone when he first learned of the possible franchise trade, but neither he nor others around the league could think of a legit reason to prevent it," Browne said.
The deal hit a snag: Keland and Ryan were short of money. Thomas, then, came up with Irsay -- who, having first worked for his father's heating and air conditioning business, had begun his own company based in Skokie, Illinois -- to make up the difference. Irsay didn't know Rosenbloom, and he didn't know Thomas, Ryan or Keland well, either. They met in a coffee shop in a New York hotel. The others asked Irsay if he had $5 million to clinch the deal. When, ultimately, Keland and Ryan dropped out, Irsay was left with the entire $19 million tab. It was the largest amount ever paid for any professional sports team, topping the $16 million Leonard Tose had paid for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1969.
Now, as one might expect in a story such as this, with many strings being pulled by powerful figures behind closed doors, there are variations in the historical record. The Chicago Tribune reported Irsay was more aggressive in pursuing the deal, defeating Keland in a battle for majority ownership of the Colts. There is also the claim by another potential owner, Hugh Culverhouse, that a "handshake deal" to purchase the Rams from the Reeves estate for $17 million (as he later told The New York Times) was usurped by the Rosenbloom-Irsay arrangement. (Culverhouse eventually became the owner of the expansion Buccaneers.) But the events described above, which were also detailed in Sports Illustrated, align with Jim Irsay's recollections.
"He showed up to buy 30 percent of the team or so, and the other investors bailed, so he said, 'I'll take 100 percent,' and he put everything he had into it," Jim Irsay said. "He had sold the Robert Irsay Company for $5 million. My mom had to go to the bank to sign the check for everything he had. She always reminded him of that."
Pioli: Why Robert Irsay traded ownership rights of Rams over to Colts in '72
Irsay had been indifferent about which team he bought -- he just wanted a team, and now he had one, plus a few million dollars in cash that was part of the deal.
"He wasn't a big L.A. guy, really," Jim Irsay said. "He lived in Chicago. It was a lot easier to get to Baltimore."
The trade was a good fit for Rosenbloom, too. When he owned the Colts, Rosenbloom would leave his home in either New York or Miami to go to Baltimore on a Friday and watch practice. He would usually return to his New York home after the game on Sunday. In Los Angeles, Rosenbloom had the beach, the city and the team all in one place. His life was mostly easier, although leaving behind the players and staff, some of whom Rosenbloom had hoped to bring to Los Angeles with him, was difficult.
The deal closed in the summer of 1972, and Rosenbloom's family flew to meet him in Los Angeles. There had been a lot of churn in Robert Irsay's life then. He had sold his company and assumed control of the Colts. His daughter, Roberta, had been killed in a car accident the year before. But there was optimism for the Colts. He vowed that the Colts would remain in Baltimore, and that he and the city would work together to build a new stadium. For a then-12-year-old Jim Irsay, his first training camp, held in Golden, Colorado, was like a dream.
"I sat down as a 12-year-old at the training table, and Johnny Unitas tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Son, move your ass,' " Irsay recalled. "Thankfully, they accepted me as one of them, as a younger brother. I ended up in the inner circles of the league. They'd be saying, 'When you're an owner, just remember ...' The first time I learned to drive I was 14 at training camp. So many firsts. That was a special time."
The trade hardly solved the teams' challenges or ended the drama.
In Los Angeles, Rosenbloom had barely touched down before there was a problem. Gabriel had to be carried off the practice field during warm-ups with a collapsed lung.
The Rams finished the '72 campaign with just six wins but rebounded to become a postseason fixture, compiling a 66-19-1 regular-season record and making the playoffs in every year between 1973 and '78. Then, in April of 1979, Rosenbloom died, drowning in the ocean off Miami Beach. His widow, Georgia, an actress whom he'd met during a party hosted by Joseph Kennedy at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, took over the team -- firing her stepson in the process -- and became the very rare woman in the testosterone-fueled league.
Frontiere's devotion to the team was so great that she became known as Madame Ram. Like her late husband, she cared deeply for the players. Well before it became widely accepted that it is essential to take care of the whole person, Frontiere brought in a yoga instructor, a financial advisor, a nutritionist and a psychiatrist to help players.
Then, in 1995, with the team struggling, the fan base dwindling and no new taxpayer-funded stadium on the way, Frontiere moved the Rams to her hometown of St. Louis, with the assist of her new minority partner, Stan Kroenke. There, they finally won the first Super Bowl in franchise history. When Frontiere died in 2008, her children -- unable to manage the enormous tax burden -- sold the family's stake in the Rams to Kroenke. And in a full-circle moment, Kroenke enraged St. Louis in 2016 by moving the Rams back to Los Angeles, where they won another Super Bowl last season in their own stadium.
The elder Irsay, confronted with some of the same stadium issues that prompted Rosenbloom to want out of Baltimore, executed a middle-of-the-night move to Indianapolis in 1984.
The Colts, like the Rams, left heartbroken fans in their wake. And like the Rams, they won a Super Bowl for their new city and have a gleaming, modern stadium – parallel fates set in motion with a bizarre business deal 50 years ago.
"It is," Irsay said, "the greatest, biggest trade in the history of sports."
Follow Judy Battista on Twitter.
Digging into the Colts' and Rams' 1972 franchise swap: 'The greatest, biggest trade in the history of sports'
Fifty years ago, the owners of the Colts and Rams pulled off a transaction unlike any other: a complete franchise swap. Judy Battista digs into a bizarre chapter in NFL history that shifted the fates of both teams in far-reaching ways.
www.nfl.com
In 1972, the owners of the Colts and Rams pulled off a transaction unlike anything seen in professional sports before or since: a complete franchise swap that shifted the fates of both organizations in far-reaching ways.
By Judy Battista | October 26, 2022
Jim Irsay wasn't yet a teenager when the phone rang at his family's home in Chicago in 1972."A deep voice says, 'Hello, is your father there?' " Irsay said, recalling the conversation earlier this year. " 'No, he's not here right now.'
" 'Please tell him Carroll Rosenbloom called.' "
In the history of the NFL, there haven't been too many more consequential phone calls than the one Rosenbloom placed to Jim's father, Robert Irsay. It set off the weirdest, but most significant, trade in NFL -- and maybe pro sports -- history.
No players or coaches switched teams. Nobody had to move. No contracts were amended. Robert Irsay and Rosenbloom simply, monumentally, traded franchises -- the players and coaches, the uniforms and playing fields, the home cities, the histories, all of it -- giving Rosenbloom control of the Los Angeles Rams and Irsay control of the Baltimore Colts, the team his son Jim now runs in Indianapolis.
This year's trade deadline is Nov. 1, but nothing that happens between now and then, no matter who it involves -- nor any of the many transactions that have already taken place -- is likely to ever reshape the league like the swap of franchises that are now worth billions of dollars.
The 50th anniversary of this trade was this summer, but few football fans, even of the Rams and Colts, are likely to know of the intertwined history of the teams, and how an air conditioning executive joined with an owner who was angling for what he felt would be a more supportive market -- and who was motivated by a desire to avoid capital gains taxes -- to create a deal that had no precedent in major pro sports, and still has no equal for strangeness.
Rosenbloom died in 1979 and Irsay died in 1997. The full scope of the events was recaptured through interviews with several people who have intimate knowledge of the situation, including Jim Irsay, and a review of contemporaneous accounts of the trade and its aftermath, including those reported by Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.
The roots of the pact were actually planted a few years earlier, in 1968, when Dan Reeves, who was the owner of the Rams at the time, suggested to Rosenbloom, who was then the owner of the Colts, that Rosenbloom take over the Rams, as Sports Illustrated reported after the franchise swap in 1972. Reeves and Rosenbloom were old friends, and they spoke on the field before their teams played a game late in that 1968 season. Reeves was already ill with the cancer that would take his life three years later, and he told Rosenbloom that day that he did not think his family would keep the team after he died.
"I don't think you belong in Baltimore anymore," Rosenbloom quoted Reeves telling him in that Sports Illustrated article. "If I do go before you do, I hope you will give serious thought to acquiring this franchise."
The Colts beat the Rams in Los Angeles in December of 1968 -- shortly after then-Rams owner Dan Reeves suggested to Carroll Rosenbloom, then owner of the Colts, that Rosenbloom should take over his franchise, according to Rosenbloom's recollection. (Associated Press)
It was several more years before anything happened, but Reeves was right about his friend's waning relationship with Baltimore.
Rosenbloom had made his first fortune in clothing manufacturing -- he was so successful, he retired at 32 to become a gentleman farmer, and later, he would be a financial backer of Broadway shows and movies, as recounted by Sports Illustrated. He became the principal owner of the Colts in 1953 when the NFL awarded Baltimore a franchise. Another old friend, Bert Bell, who had been a coach on the University of Pennsylvania football team when Rosenbloom was a running back for the Quakers, was the NFL commissioner at the time, and Bell encouraged Rosenbloom to buy the team as part of a group of investors. Rosenbloom's share of the team cost $13,000. He asked Baltimoreans to give him five years to build a winner.
Rosenbloom hadn't exactly been looking to buy a sports team, but once he did, he built the Colts into champions -- though it actually took him six years. He engineered a blockbuster trade that, among others, brought a player named Don Shula to the team. He hired coach Weeb Ewbank. He signed a free-agent quarterback named Johnny Unitas. The Colts won the NFL title in 1958 (the victory over the New York Giants in the Championship Game is still called "The Greatest Game Ever Played") and '59, lost Super Bowl III to the Jets after the 1968 season and won Super Bowl V over the Cowboys after the 1970 season.
But there were sources of tension. After the 1969 season, Shula -- by then the Colts' head coach -- left Baltimore for Miami after Dolphins owner Joe Robbie dangled a reported $750,000 and other perks to lure him. Rosenbloom was furious.
Rosenbloom had also soured on the area, as The New York Times recounted in July of 1972, and he felt the Colts were underappreciated. He wasn't happy with Baltimore Memorial Stadium, and he was hurt by criticism from the local press, particularly from a columnist named John Steadman, who had also called Colts games on the radio. Steadman regularly criticized Rosenbloom, for whom he had once worked, in his column. Their relationship was so fractured that Rosenbloom's family has long wondered if Steadman helped to keep Rosenbloom from being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, despite his team's success -- Rosenbloom was the winningest owner in NFL history until he was passed by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft -- and despite his influence on the growth of the league, as an early supporter of revenue sharing and national television contracts, and as someone who played a crucial role in the NFL-AFL merger in 1970.
The tipping point for Rosenbloom seemed to come during the 1971 preseason, when three exhibition games there drew an average crowd of just 16,000 fans. He was ready to move the Colts to a new stadium he planned to build in the Maryland suburbs or even to Tampa, Florida -- the modern-day home of the Buccaneers did not yet, at that point, have an NFL team. Rosenbloom eventually went so far as to hold a one-day training camp in Tampa -- including Unitas -- early in 1972. Rosenbloom's dreams of a Florida relocation, though, were dashed by resistance from Pete Rozelle, who succeeded Bell as NFL commissioner in 1960, and other owners.
Meanwhile, Robert Irsay very much did want to own a sports franchise -- any franchise, really.
To this day, the deal struck between Carroll Rosenbloom (left, shown in 1978) and Robert Irsay (right, shown in 1984) remains unparalleled in pro sports history. (Associated Press)
Irsay was an irascible sort. During his eventual stewardship of the Colts, he became known for ear-splitting midgame tirades in which he ordered coaches to bench quarterbacks, and he once fired a coach after a preseason loss, which necessitated a trip to the team bus by a 16-year-old Jim to apologize. Baltimoreans never forgave him for moving the team.
But when Jim describes his father, there is a hint of romanticism, too. He loved Las Vegas, Jim said, particularly playing baccarat. He had very good luck, Jim said, calling him a riverboat gambler, someone who was never afraid to lay it all on the table. That was a good personality for the deal with which he was going to become involved.
"He was very interested in the Montreal Expos in 1968," Jim Irsay said. "Then he came to me and said -- and I was only 11 years old at the time -- he said, 'Do you want the Rams or the Colts?' I said the Rams. I always loved the Rams helmets, and I loved Roman Gabriel and those guys from the '60s."
Reeves, who paid $135,000 with a friend to purchase the then-Cleveland Rams in 1941 (the franchise moved to Los Angeles following the 1945 season), died in April 1971. As he predicted, his heirs looked to sell the team. It was clear almost immediately that Rosenbloom was interested. He was primarily living in New York and Miami by then, and he was looking for a new challenge. He was believed to have already looked into buying the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Kings. He may have considered buying the New Orleans Saints for his kids. He had even suggested his son could run the Colts, and Rosenbloom would buy the Rams. Rozelle nixed all those ideas -- the NFL rules then prohibited such cross-ownership arrangements.
"People around the league knew that Carroll Rosenbloom had a desire to be the NFL owner in Los Angeles, and he was used to getting what he wanted," said Joe Browne, who spent 50 years working in the league office, including 20 years working for Rozelle. "I would not put him on the list of quiet, self-effacing sports owners."
Rozelle suggested Rosenbloom sell the Colts and then buy the Rams, and there were plenty of suitors who were interested in relieving Rosenbloom of the Colts. But there was a problem Rosenbloom wanted to avoid: the estimated $4.4 million capital gains tax bill Rosenbloom would have faced had he sold the Colts.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly who came up with the unorthodox idea of a trade, although once Rosenbloom made clear he wanted to own the Rams, it seems likely it was an anonymous accountant or lawyer who devised a way to reverse engineer the desired result.
In the meantime, the Miami Dolphins had fired a personnel executive, Joe Thomas, who had been a key to Joe Robbie's purchase of the Dolphins. Rozelle suggested to Rosenbloom that Thomas might be able to find a buyer for the Colts. He had two: Willard Keland and Clem Ryan, who together agreed to buy the Rams for $19 million and then trade the team to Rosenbloom in exchange for the Colts.
"Commissioner Rozelle was as surprised as anyone when he first learned of the possible franchise trade, but neither he nor others around the league could think of a legit reason to prevent it," Browne said.
The deal hit a snag: Keland and Ryan were short of money. Thomas, then, came up with Irsay -- who, having first worked for his father's heating and air conditioning business, had begun his own company based in Skokie, Illinois -- to make up the difference. Irsay didn't know Rosenbloom, and he didn't know Thomas, Ryan or Keland well, either. They met in a coffee shop in a New York hotel. The others asked Irsay if he had $5 million to clinch the deal. When, ultimately, Keland and Ryan dropped out, Irsay was left with the entire $19 million tab. It was the largest amount ever paid for any professional sports team, topping the $16 million Leonard Tose had paid for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1969.
Now, as one might expect in a story such as this, with many strings being pulled by powerful figures behind closed doors, there are variations in the historical record. The Chicago Tribune reported Irsay was more aggressive in pursuing the deal, defeating Keland in a battle for majority ownership of the Colts. There is also the claim by another potential owner, Hugh Culverhouse, that a "handshake deal" to purchase the Rams from the Reeves estate for $17 million (as he later told The New York Times) was usurped by the Rosenbloom-Irsay arrangement. (Culverhouse eventually became the owner of the expansion Buccaneers.) But the events described above, which were also detailed in Sports Illustrated, align with Jim Irsay's recollections.
"He showed up to buy 30 percent of the team or so, and the other investors bailed, so he said, 'I'll take 100 percent,' and he put everything he had into it," Jim Irsay said. "He had sold the Robert Irsay Company for $5 million. My mom had to go to the bank to sign the check for everything he had. She always reminded him of that."
Pioli: Why Robert Irsay traded ownership rights of Rams over to Colts in '72
Irsay had been indifferent about which team he bought -- he just wanted a team, and now he had one, plus a few million dollars in cash that was part of the deal.
"He wasn't a big L.A. guy, really," Jim Irsay said. "He lived in Chicago. It was a lot easier to get to Baltimore."
The trade was a good fit for Rosenbloom, too. When he owned the Colts, Rosenbloom would leave his home in either New York or Miami to go to Baltimore on a Friday and watch practice. He would usually return to his New York home after the game on Sunday. In Los Angeles, Rosenbloom had the beach, the city and the team all in one place. His life was mostly easier, although leaving behind the players and staff, some of whom Rosenbloom had hoped to bring to Los Angeles with him, was difficult.
The deal closed in the summer of 1972, and Rosenbloom's family flew to meet him in Los Angeles. There had been a lot of churn in Robert Irsay's life then. He had sold his company and assumed control of the Colts. His daughter, Roberta, had been killed in a car accident the year before. But there was optimism for the Colts. He vowed that the Colts would remain in Baltimore, and that he and the city would work together to build a new stadium. For a then-12-year-old Jim Irsay, his first training camp, held in Golden, Colorado, was like a dream.
"I sat down as a 12-year-old at the training table, and Johnny Unitas tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Son, move your ass,' " Irsay recalled. "Thankfully, they accepted me as one of them, as a younger brother. I ended up in the inner circles of the league. They'd be saying, 'When you're an owner, just remember ...' The first time I learned to drive I was 14 at training camp. So many firsts. That was a special time."
The trade hardly solved the teams' challenges or ended the drama.
In Los Angeles, Rosenbloom had barely touched down before there was a problem. Gabriel had to be carried off the practice field during warm-ups with a collapsed lung.
The Rams finished the '72 campaign with just six wins but rebounded to become a postseason fixture, compiling a 66-19-1 regular-season record and making the playoffs in every year between 1973 and '78. Then, in April of 1979, Rosenbloom died, drowning in the ocean off Miami Beach. His widow, Georgia, an actress whom he'd met during a party hosted by Joseph Kennedy at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, took over the team -- firing her stepson in the process -- and became the very rare woman in the testosterone-fueled league.
Before his death, Rosenbloom had planned to move the team from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium in neighboring Orange County, because it was nearly impossible to sell out enough of the enormous Coliseum to prevent Rams games from being blacked out locally, and because Orange County was experiencing a population boom. The Rams played one more season at the Coliseum, reaching Super Bowl XIV, then Georgia -- who eventually remarried and took on Frontiere as her last name -- went ahead with the move in 1980, making her supremely unpopular with Angelenos who wanted the team to stay. Two years later, the Oakland Raiders moved into the Los Angeles Coliseum, dividing the Rams' traditional fan base. Al Davis, then the Raiders' owner, and Rosenbloom had been friends. Had Rosenbloom been alive for the Rams' move to Anaheim, would Davis have been so quick to challenge the Rams in Los Angeles?
Frontiere's devotion to the team was so great that she became known as Madame Ram. Like her late husband, she cared deeply for the players. Well before it became widely accepted that it is essential to take care of the whole person, Frontiere brought in a yoga instructor, a financial advisor, a nutritionist and a psychiatrist to help players.
Then, in 1995, with the team struggling, the fan base dwindling and no new taxpayer-funded stadium on the way, Frontiere moved the Rams to her hometown of St. Louis, with the assist of her new minority partner, Stan Kroenke. There, they finally won the first Super Bowl in franchise history. When Frontiere died in 2008, her children -- unable to manage the enormous tax burden -- sold the family's stake in the Rams to Kroenke. And in a full-circle moment, Kroenke enraged St. Louis in 2016 by moving the Rams back to Los Angeles, where they won another Super Bowl last season in their own stadium.
The elder Irsay, confronted with some of the same stadium issues that prompted Rosenbloom to want out of Baltimore, executed a middle-of-the-night move to Indianapolis in 1984.
The Colts, like the Rams, left heartbroken fans in their wake. And like the Rams, they won a Super Bowl for their new city and have a gleaming, modern stadium – parallel fates set in motion with a bizarre business deal 50 years ago.
"It is," Irsay said, "the greatest, biggest trade in the history of sports."
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12/4 Game vs sea chickens extra ticket for FREE
- By bubbaramfan
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 11 Replies
Thank you cvramfan for inviting me to see a Ram game with you and your cousin. I promise to be on my best behavior. (not saying much).
Amazon wins 10 year bid for Thursday Night Football
- By Psycho_X
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 39 Replies
Me too.I'm a European on Game day.....
Just cause the games have been awful. Like really bad competition. In preseason they looked like they mostly might be great matchups but this has been a weird season. NFL will still blast away ratings of any other thing on tv so it's not like Bezos isn't getting his money worth.
Amazon's Thursday Night Football Ratings Are Plummeting
Amazon Prime's ratings for Thursday Night Football are falling rapidly.www.thebiglead.com
Amazon's Thursday Night Football Ratings Are Plummeting
Amazon has invested a lot in its foray into NFL programming with Thursday Night Football. The company hired an all-star broadcasting team and had a marquee game in Week 2 to launch things. Apparently, it's been all downhill since from a ratings perspective.
According to Nielsen, Amazon Prime scored 13 million viewers for Week 2's contest between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers. It has mostly been a steady decline since. Ratings bottomed out in Week 7 as 7.8 million viewers turned in for the matchup between the Arizona Cardinals and New Orleans Saints.
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That's not great. It doesn't help that the games have largely been awful.
Amazon hired Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit to broadcast games and brought in Kaylee Hartung as a sideline reporter. If that wasn't enough, they've also stocked their pregame coverage with big names. Charissa Thompson hosts, while Tony Gonzalez, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Richard Sherman and Andrew Whitworth are in as analysts.
This has been a big undertaking, so the ratings drop has to be concerning for the company.
Five biggest surprises of 2022 NFL season thus far: Struggles for Buccaneers, Packers stand out
- By ROD-BOT
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 0 Replies
Five biggest surprises of 2022 NFL season thus far: Struggles for Buccaneers, Packers stand out
With seven weeks of the 2022 NFL season in the books, Judy Battista looks at five preseason expectations that don't match reality.
www.nfl.com
Five biggest surprises of 2022 NFL season thus far: Struggles for Buccaneers, Packers stand out
Entering this week, the NFL's average margin of victory was just 8.9 points. That's the lowest in NFL history, a boon for the competitiveness of a league whose draft and salary cap are designed to engineer evenness and thwart dynasties.It is not so great for making predictions.
This season has turned preseason prognostication on its head. One reason: So much of the league is clumped right around the midline. When Sunday began, 10 teams were at 3-3, an even .500. And another 13 teams were one different result away from being .500, for better or worse. Teams that were supposed to be dominant have struggled. Some that were supposed to struggle have soared.
That means a whole lot of wrong. With the season still not even half gone, there is plenty of time for course corrections, but we're not too proud to admit that we are surprised by some of what we've seen. Here are the top five preseason takes that don't match reality.
1) PRESEASON EXPECTATION: The Buccaneers and Packers are leading Super Bowl contenders from the NFC.
REALITY: Their offenses look broken.
Scoring is down in the NFL this season and these two offenses are a good reason why. The most stunning result of the season came on Sunday, when the Buccaneers were lifeless in a 21-3 loss to the Panthers. Carolina, led by interim coach Steve Wilks, had only one win entering the game. Coach Todd Bowles called it a "dark day" for the Bucs and it's hard to argue after losses to the Mitch Trubisky-led Steelers and the Panthers, who had third-string quarterback P.J. Walker and didn't have recently traded running back Christian McCaffrey. That's four losses in their last five games. Slow starts are a consistent problem -- the Bucs have not scored a first quarter touchdown this season -- but the Bucs' issues go well beyond that. Their running game is non-existent (they had just 46 yards rushing against the Panthers) and they are among the worst teams in the league on third down (they converted just 2 of 12 third-down opportunities against the Panthers). This is the first time Tom Brady has had a losing record through his first seven games since 2002, his first full season as a starter, which is not how it's supposed to go with a team that is still largely intact from its Super Bowl season. Bowles hinted at tough questions ahead, saying the Bucs have to find out if the older players can still play and if the younger players are good enough to play. Either way, this is certainly not what Brady could have imagined when he came out of retirement.
The Packers are in at least as bad a spot, having dropped their third in a row, 23-21 to the Washington Commodes. The offense is wildly out of whack -- the Packers ran the ball just 12 times, while Aaron Rodgers attempted 35 passes, despite having a sore thumb and being out of sync with his receivers. Incredibly, they had no third down conversions. It's worth questioning the play-calling, but the other looming issue is whether the Packers will acquire another receiver before the Nov. 1 trade deadline.
For the Bucs, there can be some solace in the fact that in the NFC South, they are still tied for first place. No such comfort for the Packers. They are already behind the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC North and they have to go to Buffalo next Sunday. Luckily for both, there is only one 6-0 team in the conference (Philadelphia) and two one-loss teams (New York Giants and Minnesota). Everybody else is clumped together, so they will likely remain in the race throughout the season.
2) PRESEASON EXPECTATION: The NFC East is the worst division in football.
REALITY: The NFC South is the worst division in football.
It's not that we thought the NFC South was going to be deep, not with the Atlanta Falcons bidding farewell to Matt Ryan and the New Orleans Saints without Asshole Face. But there was hope for Baker Mayfield in Carolina, and the Bucs were supposed to be battling for home-field advantages, not wins. Instead, after Week 7 losses by the Bucs, Falcons and Saints, everybody is under .500. That means the Panthers, who have already fired Matt Rhule, are only one game behind the Bucs. And the Falcons are tied for first. One of these teams will win the division and any thinking person would say the Bucs have the edge with Brady. But none of these teams, including the Bucs as detailed above, looks capable right now of making a sustained playoff run.
3) PRESEASON EXPECTATION: Every team in the AFC West is playoff-caliber.
REALITY: Nope.
The Chiefs ran up 44 points against the league's top-ranked defense on Sunday, so they are still the class of the division and it doesn't look any closer now than it did before everybody went on a free-agency frenzy in an attempt to catch them. The Chargers' propensity for falling behind by double digits in the first quarter, as they've done the last three games, is troubling and it came back to bite them Sunday, in a 37-23 loss to the Seattle Seahawks. Still, the presence of Justin Herbert means the Chargers are never entirely out of a game, as the two earlier comebacks proved. This is mostly a Las Vegas and Denver issue. The Raiders' defense is a problem yet again -- they entered the week 28th in scoring defense, and all four of their losses have been by six points or fewer. Mostly, the team lacks consistency -- that 17-0 lead over the Chiefs looked great, allowing the Chiefs to roar back for a 30-29 victory less so -- which is not surprising considering Las Vegas has an entirely new coaching staff. Before the bye, the offense appeared to start clicking, averaging 30.5 points per game in their previous two games, and that continued in a big way Sunday in a 38-20 victory over the Texans. Best of all for the Raiders is that they play the Saints, Jaguars, Colts and Broncos coming up, perhaps giving them a chance to sneak into the fringes of a wild-card race.
The Broncos, though, are the most mystifying team in the NFL this season. Nobody, absolutely nobody, expected Russell Wilson to struggle as he has adapting to Nathaniel Hackett's offense, even before injuries started to affect him and ultimately keep him off the field Sunday against the Jets. Entering the game, the Broncos were 32nd in the league in scoring, and, including the 16-9 loss to the Jets, they have managed just eight offensive touchdowns. There is no quick fix here, other than greater comprehension of the offense and better execution. But the results have been so poor, the clock management so confounding, that Hackett's future is already a hot topic.
4) PRESEASON EXPECTATION: The New York teams are rebuilding.
REALITY: The New York teams are a combined 11-3.
This was only half wrong. The Jets and Giants are still rebuilding, although the Jets, with more young pieces in place, are further along than the Giants. But in the meantime, they are the two biggest surprises of the season, the Jets leaning heavily on their defense, the Giants relying on defense and the running game. Both teams won nail-biters on Sunday, requiring down-to-the-wire defensive stands to preserve their wins. It's hard to say how long their winning streaks are sustainable. The Giants go to Seattle next week and the injuries are piling up -- right tackle Evan Neal left Sunday's game with a knee injury and tight end Daniel Bellinger with an eye injury. The Jets host the Patriots, but running back Breece Hall has what is likely a serious knee injury, which will place more of the onus on Zach Wilson, who had just 121 passing yards and was under nearly constant duress by the Broncos. But after the two teams tied for the worst record in the NFL over the five seasons from 2017 to 2021, and neither has made the playoffs since 2016 (a wild-card round loss by the Giants), New York is suddenly, unexpectedly, a football town again.
5) PRESEASON EXPECTATION: Pete Carroll can't be serious about going with Geno Smith to replace Russell Wilson.
REALITY: The Seahawks lead the NFC West with Geno Smith running the show.
Smith was last a full-time starter in 2014, but even then, at the start of his career with the Jets, he was never as in command as he looks now for the Seahawks. Entering Sunday's game against the Chargers, he was leading the league with a 73.4 completion percentage, and he has been performing especially well with deep passes and under pressure. In Seattle's Sunday victory, he was 20-of-27 passing for 210 yards, two touchdowns and an interception. He got a lot of help from running back Kenneth Walker III (two rushing touchdowns) and a defense that is finally coming together (two takeaways, three sacks). The result is that what appeared to be an awkwardly timed tear-down for Carroll is instead a mid-career renaissance for Smith and a return to the playoff chase for the Seahawks.
