[adarian_too]

OK. The Cardiac-Kids-of-the-Mississippi moved to 3 – 1. While the team moves heart defibrillator sales off the charts, let’s talk about whether the Front Office might be in a position to give St. Louisians heart palpitations. Just speculation mind you, but it’s Monday and some of us need to step back and revisit whether fact can indeed be stranger than fiction – just to settle the nerves.

Franchise free agency. The Rams have been at the vanguard of the movement. Daniel Reeves moved the Rams from Cleveland in '46. In '72 Irsay traded the Rams to Rosenbloom for the Colts. In ’78 the Rams moved from the LA Coliseum to the “Big A” in Anaheim despite league opposition and due to a successful restraint of trade lawsuit. In ’95 Georgia bartered the Rams to St. Louis. She’d did well for herself. She extracted concessions, like cleaning up the ownership of the dome lease, acquiring revenue from stadium luxury suites, club seats and concessions, plus a separate practice facility.

Since then revenue sharing has become even a greater issue. Not the broad-based revenues of TV broadcast rights, but locally-based revenue accruing from things like suite leases, naming rights, corporate sponsorships and a plethora of other income-producing opportunities. Apparently locally generated income has grown from 12 percent of total league revenue to 20 percent. With the extension of the Collective Bargaining Agreement earlier this year, NFL owners agreed to implement a three-tiered revenue sharing system whereby the top 15 teams would pay into a system to distribute among the less-wealthy teams.

Guess who’s now among the “less-wealthy”? Uh, huh. Since the move of the Rams to St. Louis the team has fallen among the league’s have-nots – if there is such a thing given the fact that the TV-broadcast revenues meet the salary cap portion of a team’s expenses by themselves. Part of that is because Georgia lost a little blood in the process of her franchise free agency. Revenue from personal seat licenses was a bone of contention between the NFL and the LA Rams. When the Rams made the move to St. Louis, she was forced to share $17 million worth of revenue generated by personal seat licenses with the NFL. St. Louis Convention & Visitor Comm'n v. NFL, 154 F.3d 851 (8th Cir. 1998).

Couple that with the fact that the Rams are 22nd in seating capacity. Add to that their number of luxury suites is a paltry 120 vs Washington’s 243. And pile on the fact that they have only 6500 club seats. Simultaneously other teams have gotten, or are about to get, stadium upgrades (AZ and NO just had upgrades. Dallas, SD, Indy, Minn, and the Giants/Jets are due in short order). Consequently, a team like the Rams, which ranked among the top six NFL franchises in revenue after its 1995 move from LA, is now in the bottom half of the league. [Per Marc Ganis of Sportscorp Ltd]. Its trend-setting stadium deal has now been eclipsed by those of bigger markets. Bigger markets can command higher priced suite leases.

Where does this leave Georgia? Under the terms of the Rams' 30-year lease, the Convention Center is required to maintain the Dome as a "first-tier" NFL venue. That means that every 10 years, the stadium must rank among the top 25% of all NFL facilities. If the Center and Rams cannot agree on "first-tier" improvements the Rams can be freed from their 30-year lease and convert it to a year-to-year lease. In an amendment to the lease in 2004 the Rams were allowed to request any stadium improvements team owners deemed necessary to keep the Dome among the top 25% of all NFL facilities. If improvements suggested by Ron Labinski, one of the founders of Kansas City-based HOK Sport, who served as a consultant in deciding necessary improvements to the Dome, aren’t completed, theoretically, the Center fails to meet the team's demands, and the Rams could be released from their obligations. Could this be in the cards?

Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones has said that the NFL isn’t going to be diluted any further and that there won’t be any more expansion. At the same time, the league definitely wants to return to California and exploit the LA market again – in Nov. ’05 the NFL agreed in principal to lease terms with the LA Coliseum. The opportunity to maximize non-shared and ancillary revenues is tantalizing.

Georgia, may be from St. Louis, but she also knows where the money is. And it isn’t as attractive in St. Louis as it once was. She isn’t in the top 25% anymore. She is among the so-called have-nots. It might be sooner than later for the Rams to be returning to Shaw’s stomping grounds. Franchise free agency is still alive and well in the NFL. Those who follow the Horns may yet be following them across the country again. A few improvements not to come to fruition – and Authority budgets aren’t always what they are cracked up to be – and the Rams could be on the move again – much sooner than one might expect. Keep those defibrillators within reach … time waits for no one.