THE NFL’S GREAT ESCAPE
How Stan Kroenke, Jerry Jones, Roger Goodell and the NFL's Power Structure Cleared the Way for the Rams to Leave St. Louis
By: Derek King
An investigative examination of a three-year campaign that transformed a stadium dispute into one of the most consequential and controversial franchise relocations in NFL history.
At one point, Stan Kroenke told St. Louis exactly what it wanted to hear.
In 2010, as Kroenke was preparing to become the controlling owner of the Rams, he was asked about the possibility of the franchise eventually leaving Missouri.
His answer was reassuring.
“I’m going to attempt to do everything that I can to keep the Rams in St. Louis,” Kroenke said.
He talked about his Missouri roots. He talked about his commitment to professional football in the city. He portrayed himself as the billionaire owner who would finally stabilize a franchise that had been through years of turmoil.
Five years later, Kroenke owned land in Inglewood, California.
A year after that, the Rams were gone.
The official explanation was straightforward: St. Louis could not provide a stadium solution that satisfied the NFL's requirements, while Kroenke had developed a privately financed stadium project in one of America's largest and most valuable sports markets, but the history of the relocation is considerably more complicated.
It involves a billionaire owner quietly assembling the pieces of a Los Angeles development empire; Rams executives making public statements about St. Louis while the Inglewood project was taking shape; an NFL executive who became the league's point man on Los Angeles; Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones campaigning aggressively for Kroenke's vision; a six-owner Los Angeles committee that recommended a competing stadium project—and then watched the full ownership reject its recommendation; and Commissioner Roger Goodell presiding over a process that ultimately delivered Kroenke a 30-2 victory.
Years later, St. Louis would accuse the NFL and the Rams of effectively stringing the city along while preparing the move. The lawsuit never reached a verdict. Instead, just weeks before trial, the NFL and Kroenke agreed to pay $790 million to settle the case.
That number alone makes the Rams' departure impossible to dismiss as an ordinary franchise relocation.
The question isn't simply why the Rams left. The question is how the NFL's most powerful people helped make leaving possible.
CHAPTER ONE: THE LEASE THAT CREATED THE ESCAPE HATCH
The seeds were planted in the original deal that brought the Rams to St. Louis in 1995.
The Edward Jones Dome was supposed to give the city an NFL-caliber facility for decades, but the lease contained an unusual requirement: by 2015, the stadium had to rank among the top facilities in the NFL.
If it didn't, the Rams could force the lease into a year-to-year arrangement and ultimately pursue relocation.
In 2013, an arbitration panel sided with the Rams in a dispute over the stadium's condition.
The result was devastating for St. Louis. The city was now facing a demand for hundreds of millions of dollars in stadium improvements. The Rams proposed improvements approaching $700 million. St. Louis officials rejected the proposal.
That created the legal and contractual opening Kroenke would eventually use. The team could now argue that it had exhausted efforts to secure a satisfactory stadium in St. Louis, but another development was happening at precisely the same time.
Kroenke was looking west.
CHAPTER TWO: THE LAND
In 2014, Kroenke acquired approximately 60 acres in Inglewood, California.
The property was not ordinary real estate. It was part of the former Hollywood Park site, adjacent to what would become one of the most valuable sports and entertainment developments in the United States.
Kroenke initially kept the property's purpose ambiguous.
That ambiguity became one of the most important issues in the later St. Louis lawsuit.
Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff publicly downplayed the idea that the land was connected to a football stadium.
According to the allegations later made by St. Louis, Demoff described the property as unsuitable for a football stadium because of its size and shape. But later accounts of the relocation saga portrayed Kroenke as having recognized the property's potential much earlier. ESPN reported that Kroenke had described the Inglewood site to Demoff as an "unbelievable site" for a football stadium.
That discrepancy became central to St. Louis' legal argument.
The city's lawyers weren't merely saying Kroenke eventually decided to move.
They were arguing that the decision had effectively been made while St. Louis was still being encouraged to believe the Rams could remain.
That distinction mattered enormously.
Because the NFL's relocation policy called upon clubs to work diligently and in good faith to maintain suitable facilities in their home markets. If the Rams had genuinely pursued St. Louis and then ultimately decided Los Angeles offered a better opportunity, that was one thing.
If the organization had already decided Los Angeles was the destination while continuing to participate in St. Louis stadium discussions primarily to create the appearance of a relocation process, that was something very different.
St. Louis built its lawsuit around the second interpretation.
The Rams rejected it.
The legal record never produced a jury finding that resolved the dispute.
CHAPTER THREE: THE NFL'S LOS ANGELES MACHINE
Los Angeles had been without an NFL team since the Rams and Raiders left after the 1994 season. For two decades, the league watched one of America's largest markets sit empty.
The NFL couldn't ignore that.
The league eventually began treating Los Angeles not simply as a city without a team, but as an enormous untapped business opportunity. NFL executive vice president Eric Grubman became the league's lead executive for Los Angeles.
By 2015, the league had created the Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities.
The six-member committee consisted of:
Robert Kraft, New England Patriots
John Mara, New York Giants
Clark Hunt, Kansas City Chiefs
Bob McNair, Houston Texans
Jerry Richardson, Carolina Panthers
Art Rooney II, Pittsburgh Steelers
Their job was to evaluate the competing stadium proposals and advise the full ownership, but a problem emerged. The Rams' Inglewood proposal was increasingly difficult to ignore.
It wasn't merely a stadium. Kroenke envisioned a massive privately financed development surrounding the facility. It promised a new NFL landmark in the nation's second-largest media market, and it required no public money to construct the stadium.
The Carson proposal, backed by the Chargers and Raiders, was substantial, but Kroenke's project was bigger, much bigger.
The NFL wasn't just deciding where to put a football team.
It was deciding what its return to Los Angeles was going to look like.
CHAPTER FOUR: ENTER JERRY JONES
This is where Jerry Jones became indispensable. The Dallas Cowboys owner wasn't the owner of the Rams. He wasn't the owner of the Chargers. He wasn't the owner of the Raiders, but Jones understood the power of the Los Angeles opportunity.
He became one of Kroenke's strongest advocates.
In August 2015, Jones publicly praised Kroenke, describing himself as a fan of both the owner and the prospect of restoring the NFL to a major position in Los Angeles.
Behind closed doors, his influence was even more significant. ESPN's reconstruction of the negotiations described Jones as an aggressive advocate for Inglewood. He pushed the idea that the Rams and Chargers should share the Inglewood project. And he sold a much larger vision of what Los Angeles could mean for the NFL.
Not simply Sunday football. An entire NFL ecosystem.
Stadium.
Entertainment.
Corporate headquarters.
Major events.
The draft.
The league's growing entertainment machine.
Jones saw Los Angeles as something that could potentially make the entire league richer.
The distinction was important.
The argument was no longer simply: Should St. Louis keep the Rams?
It increasingly became: What could the NFL make in Los Angeles?
St. Louis was competing against a vision of the future, and Jerry Jones was helping sell it.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE EXECUTIVE WHO APPEARED TO BE IN THE MIDDLE
Eric Grubman occupied an especially sensitive position.
He was an NFL executive tasked with overseeing Los Angeles issues while also dealing with the home markets of teams considering relocation.
That put him in an inherently difficult position.
ESPN's detailed account of the process reported that Grubman was seen by some owners as particularly supportive of the Inglewood proposal.
During one presentation, Saints owner Tom Benson questioned why the NFL should help finance portions of Kroenke's broader development.
Before Kroenke or Demoff responded, Grubman reportedly answered the question.
To some of the Carson supporters, that was striking.
Why was a league executive defending the Rams proposal?
ESPN reported that some Carson supporters came to believe Grubman was effectively advocating for Kroenke.
That doesn't establish that Grubman violated NFL rules.
It does demonstrate the perception problem surrounding the process.
The NFL was supposed to evaluate the competing projects, but some participants increasingly believed the league's own machinery was favoring Inglewood.
CHAPTER SIX: ST. LOUIS IS STILL TRYING TO SAVE THE TEAM
While Los Angeles was building momentum, St. Louis was still fighting.
Missouri officials assembled a stadium proposal for a new riverfront facility.
Architects were hired. Consultants were brought in. Environmental work was undertaken.
Millions of dollars were spent. The city and state were trying to demonstrate that St. Louis could remain an NFL market. But the Rams were increasingly looking elsewhere.
The St. Louis lawsuit later alleged that the city spent approximately $16 million developing its stadium proposal based on assurances from the Rams and NFL that keeping the team remained a legitimate possibility. The NFL and Rams disputed the city's characterization.
Their argument was essentially that St. Louis had been given years to solve its stadium problems and ultimately failed to produce an acceptable solution. That argument had a legitimate foundation. The Dome had failed the lease's top-tier requirement. The Rams had a contractual path to leave. St. Louis had struggled to finance the necessary improvements, but there was a second question that wouldn't go away: When did the Rams actually decide to leave? Because if the answer was years before the official relocation application, St. Louis' argument became much more powerful.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE "AMF" LETTER
Then came one of the strangest pieces of evidence in the entire saga.
Inside the Rams organization, a farewell letter was reportedly prepared for St. Louis fans.
It was known internally as the "AMF letter." The initials stood for "Adios, Mother F---."
The existence of the document was revealed during reporting on the St. Louis lawsuit.
Its significance wasn't the profanity.
It was the timing.
The letter suggested that the organization was preparing emotionally and operationally for departure before the public relocation process had concluded.
To St. Louis, it was another piece of circumstantial evidence that the relocation wasn't an uncertain possibility. It was a destination already being prepared. The Rams had another interpretation. Preparing contingency plans does not necessarily mean a final decision has been made, but politically, the symbolism was brutal.
St. Louis officials were trying to convince the NFL they deserved to keep the franchise. Meanwhile, inside the Rams' organization, employees were apparently preparing goodbye material.
CHAPTER EIGHT: GOODell'S IMPOSSIBLE JOB
Roger Goodell was now trapped in the middle of an ownership civil war. He had six owners on a committee evaluating Los Angeles. He had three teams competing for the market. He had Kroenke pushing Inglewood. He had the Chargers and Raiders pushing Carson, and he had Jerry Jones lobbying owners for a different solution. Goodell had to produce something that could get 24 votes. That number was crucial.
NFL relocation required approval from three-quarters of the league's owners. Twenty-four votes.
No simple majority, no commissioner fiat, no unilateral decision.
Twenty-four owners had to agree. And they weren't agreeing.
The Los Angeles committee eventually recommended Carson by a 5-1 vote.
Robert Kraft was on that committee. So were Mara, Hunt, McNair, Richardson, and Rooney.
That should have been decisive.
It wasn't.
CHAPTER NINE: THE COMMITTEE LOSES
January 2016, Houston.
The NFL's ownership descended upon a hotel for one of the most consequential meetings in league history.
The Carson proposal had the official recommendation.
The Inglewood proposal had Kroenke.
Kroenke had Jerry Jones.
The league faced an extraordinary problem.
The committee had recommended one plan.
The owners appeared increasingly interested in another.
Then came a pivotal procedural decision.
Owners voted 19-13 to use a secret ballot.
That mattered.
A secret ballot freed owners from having to publicly confront fellow owners.
They could vote against the committee recommendation without announcing it.
They could vote for Kroenke without publicly embarrassing Dean Spanos.
They could vote their financial interests, their market interests, and their personal relationships without leaving a public record of who had opposed whom.
The first Inglewood ballot produced 21 votes. Twenty-one. Only three short. The second produced 20. Still short. But the direction was unmistakable. The committee's Carson recommendation was collapsing.
The owners were gravitating toward Kroenke.
CHAPTER TEN: GOODell CLOSES THE DEAL
This is where Goodell's role became critical.
After the votes stalled, Goodell pulled Kroenke, Spanos, and Raiders owner Mark Davis into a private negotiation.
The discussion lasted approximately an hour.
Meanwhile, other owners worked on the compromise.
According to ESPN's reconstruction, Robert Kraft, Clark Hunt, Bob McNair, and John Mara led the negotiations, while Goodell largely listened. The solution was politically brilliant. Kroenke would get Inglewood. The Chargers would receive a one-year option to join him.
If the Chargers declined, the Raiders would receive the option.
The league would also offer the Chargers $100 million, and the Raiders $100 million toward stadium efforts in their existing markets, and Kroenke would agree to terms designed to make sharing the Inglewood project financially attractive to another club.
Suddenly, the opposition had a way out.
The Chargers weren't being excluded; the Raiders weren't being excluded; Kroenke wasn't being stopped. Everyone could claim a victory.
Then Jerry Jones did something almost cinematic. As the negotiations dragged on, Jones had beer and wine delivered to the ballroom. The battle was nearing its end.
When the owners finally voted on the compromise, it passed: 30-2.
The Rams were going to Los Angeles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ROBERT KRAFT'S CURIOUS PLACE IN THE STORY
Kraft's role illustrates just how complicated the relocation fight was. He wasn't originally a Kroenke partisan. He was a member of the committee that supported Carson.
Yet when the committee's recommendation was effectively overturned, Kraft became one of the owners helping negotiate the final Inglewood compromise. Years later, Kraft would again find himself at the center of the Rams relocation controversy.
By 2021, the St. Louis lawsuit had reached discovery. A Missouri court ordered several NFL owners to provide personal financial information potentially relevant to damages.
Among them were:
Kroenke, Jones, Kraft, Mara, Hunt.
The NFL fought disclosure. The owners fought disclosure.
But the Missouri Supreme Court ultimately rejected their attempt to avoid turning over the information.
The litigation had reached a point where the private financial interests of NFL billionaires could be placed before a Missouri jury. That was exactly the nightmare the league had hoped to avoid.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE INDEMNIFICATION FIGHT
There was another problem.
Before the relocation vote, the NFL required the Rams, Chargers and Raiders to sign indemnification agreements. The relocating clubs agreed to cover costs associated with legal challenges to their moves. The league believed it had protected itself, but years later, the Rams and Kroenke challenged aspects of the arrangement. By 2021, the dispute had become explosive.
ESPN reported that Kroenke had argued that he had done everything the NFL asked and should not bear the entire financial burden of the St. Louis litigation.
Jerry Jones defended him. Other owners weren't nearly as sympathetic.
John Mara reportedly reminded the room that the owners would not have approved Kroenke's move without the indemnification agreement. The internal argument was extraordinary.
The same ownership group that had approved the move 30-2 was now arguing among itself over who should pay for the legal consequences.
Then came another twist.
Goodell reportedly asked Kroenke to leave an owners-only meeting while NFL general counsel Jeff Pash discussed the indemnification dispute with the remaining owners.
The relocation that once appeared to demonstrate unprecedented owner solidarity had become an internal NFL legal war.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE LAWSUIT
In 2017, St. Louis sued.
The defendants were not simply the Rams.
The lawsuit targeted the NFL and its 32 clubs.
The allegations were sweeping.
St. Louis claimed the Rams and NFL had violated the league's relocation policy.
It alleged fraudulent misrepresentations. It accused the defendants of interfering with St. Louis' business interests, and it alleged that Kroenke, the Rams, and NFL executives had effectively deceived the city into spending millions pursuing a stadium solution while the relocation to Los Angeles was being prepared.
The allegations specifically accused Jerry Jones of conspiring with Kroenke to push the move through.
Again, these were allegations, not judicial findings.
The NFL strongly disputed them. The league argued that the relocation process complied with its rules and that St. Louis had failed for years to solve its stadium problem.
The case therefore presented two fundamentally different versions of history.
The NFL's version:
St. Louis failed to provide a satisfactory stadium. Los Angeles presented a superior opportunity. The owners exercised their business judgment and voted to move the Rams.
St. Louis' version:
The decision had effectively been made before the formal process began; the league's relocation rules were used as a facade, and the city was encouraged to spend millions trying to save a team whose owners were already preparing to leave.
Neither side got a jury verdict.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE $790 MILLION ANSWER
The trial was scheduled for January 2022.
The stakes were enormous.
St. Louis was seeking more than $1 billion. The NFL faced the possibility that a Missouri jury would hear internal communications, owner testimony, and financial records.
Kroenke faced personal exposure. Jones and other owners had been pulled into the discovery process.
The league had already failed in multiple attempts to kill the case or move it elsewhere.
Then, in November 2021, the NFL blinked.
The league and Kroenke agreed to pay $790 million to settle the case.
There was no admission of wrongdoing.
There was no jury verdict.
There was no judicial finding that the NFL had conspired to remove the Rams from St. Louis, and St. Louis did not receive an expansion franchise. But the amount was extraordinary.
Seven hundred ninety million dollars. For a franchise relocation that the NFL had publicly defended as a legitimate exercise of ownership rights. The settlement ended the case. It also ensured that many of the most explosive allegations would never receive a final answer from a jury.
THE BIGGER STORY
The Rams did not leave St. Louis because Jerry Jones ordered it.
Roger Goodell did not have the authority to simply relocate the franchise.
Robert Kraft did not single-handedly turn against St. Louis, and there is no court finding establishing that the NFL secretly conspired to deceive St. Louis.
The historical record is more complicated—and arguably more revealing—than that.
Kroenke acquired the critical Inglewood property. The Rams developed an increasingly sophisticated Los Angeles strategy. Kevin Demoff publicly defended the organization's commitment to St. Louis while the future of Inglewood remained a looming question.
Eric Grubman became the NFL's principal Los Angeles executive. Jerry Jones emerged as a powerful advocate for Kroenke's vision. The NFL created a Los Angeles committee that recommended Carson. The full ownership then rejected that recommendation.
Goodell helped negotiate a compromise. Kroenke got Inglewood. And the owners voted 30-2. The process worked, but it worked in a way that left St. Louis feeling less like a city that had lost a competitive bidding process and more like a city that had been outmaneuvered by an organization whose ultimate destination was already becoming clear.
That distinction explains why the anger lasted. The Rams weren't merely another team that changed cities. They were the franchise that had been deliberately brought to St. Louis in 1995, celebrated as the city's return to major-league football, and then taken away 21 years later by an owner whose wealth, real-estate holdings, and relationships within the NFL gave him an extraordinary amount of leverage. The NFL saw Los Angeles as an opportunity.
Kroenke saw Inglewood.
Jerry Jones saw an NFL empire.
Goodell saw a way to get the ownership behind a solution.
And St. Louis saw its football team disappearing over the horizon.
THE MOST DAMNING PART MAY BE WHAT NEVER GOT ANSWERED
The hardest question in the entire Rams saga remains surprisingly simple:
When did Stan Kroenke actually decide that the Rams were leaving St. Louis?
If the answer is 2015, the story is relatively straightforward.
The stadium fight had failed.
The Dome wasn't competitive.
Kroenke found an extraordinary Los Angeles opportunity.
He pursued it.
The owners approved it.
End of story.
But if the decisive answer lies years earlier—before St. Louis officials spent millions developing a stadium proposal, before the NFL formally opened its relocation process and while Rams officials were still reassuring the community—the history looks very different.
The St. Louis lawsuit was built around precisely that question, and the discovery process produced enough damaging material that the NFL and Kroenke ultimately decided that $790 million was preferable to putting the entire story before a jury.
That settlement cannot legally be interpreted as an admission of guilt, but it also means the public never received the final courtroom answer to the central question.
Was the Rams' relocation simply the inevitable result of St. Louis failing to deliver a new stadium?
Or had the NFL's most powerful owners and executives already decided that Los Angeles was where the Rams belonged—and then spent the next several years building the political, financial, and procedural machinery necessary to make that decision inevitable?
There is no jury verdict answering that question.
There is, however, a remarkable trail of events.
A Missouri billionaire bought California land.
A Rams executive publicly minimized its significance.
An NFL executive became the point man for Los Angeles.
Jerry Jones championed Kroenke.
An NFL committee recommended Carson.
The ownership rejected its own committee.
Goodell negotiated behind closed doors.
The vote became 30-2.
The Rams left, and five years later, the NFL agreed to pay St. Louis $790 million to make the lawsuit disappear.
For St. Louis, that isn't simply the history of a sports franchise changing cities.
It is the history of a city discovering that, in the NFL, the team may play on the field—but the real game is often played in the rooms where billionaires vote.
Thanks for reading.
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