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Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Yup. A whole lot of egos ****ed that whole thing up.
I read a pretty comprehensive piece about it several years ago and it did a pretty nice job of being evenhanded. I just think the lack of publicly available information when this was all going on turned this whole thing into "Greedy Bidwell vs. St. Louis" when the reality was that his situation in St. Louis was really bad and the NFL was not the cash cow it is today.
People view his decision then through the lens of today's huge television revenues and that just isn't fair. The guy needed the team to be profitable; he had no other massive revenue streams to sustain it. He had no other business interests to speak of and television revenue was squat. He needed gate/stadium revenues to remain competitive. Players were getting more expensive and his revenues weren't keeping up. Fans were killing him for being cheap but his hands really were tied.
In hindsight, there's absolutely no question that St. Louis blew it when they ran the Cardinals out of town and the fact that they immediately got to work on a joint stadium proposal (I'm thinking within 3-5 years) shows that they knew it.
Had the egos that sabotaged the stadium deal in the late 80s never gotten in the way, the Rams aren't losing a football team right now.
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Another thing was the NFL wasn't that happy he chose Phoenix. They wanted that to be the expansion team for a big pay day.