St. Louis Rams

The St. Louis Rams are a professional American football team based in St. Louis, Missouri. They are currently members of the Western Division of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL). The team has won two NFL Championships and one Super Bowl.
The Rams began playing in 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio. The NFL considers the franchise as as a second incarnation of the previous Cleveland Rams team that was a charter member of the second American Football League. Although the NFL granted membership to the same owner, the NFL considers it a separate entity since only four of the players (William "Bud" Cooper, Harry "The Horse" Mattos, Stan Pincura, and Mike Sebastian) and none of the team's management joined the new NFL team.
The team then became known as the Los Angeles Rams after the club moved to Los Angeles, California in 1946. Following the 1979 season, the Rams moved south to the suburbs in nearby Orange County, playing their home games at Anaheim Stadium in Anaheim for fifteen seasons (1980-94), keeping the Los Angeles name. The club moved east to St. Louis prior to the 1995 season.

Cleveland Rams (1936-1945)
The Cleveland Rams were founded by attorney Homer Marshman in 1936. Their name, the Rams, comes from the nickname of Fordham University. Rams was selected to honor the hard work of the players that came out of that university. They were part of the newly formed American Football League and finished the 1936 in second place with a 5-2-2 record, trailing only the 8-3 record of league champion Boston Shamrocks.
The following year the Rams joined the National Football League and were assigned the Western division to replace the St. Louis Gunners, who left the league after a three game stint in the 1934 season. From the beginning, they were a team marked by frequent moves playing in three stadiums over several losing seasons. The franchise suspended operations and sat out the 1943 season because of a shortage of players during World War II and resumed playing in 1944. The team finally achieved success in 1945, which proved to be their last season in Ohio, achieving a 9-1 record and winning their first NFL Championship, a 15-14 home field victory over the Washington Redskins on December 16.

Los Angeles Rams (1946-1994)
In 1946, Rams' owner Dan Reeves, fed up with poor attendance at Cleveland Stadium and competing against the Cleveland Browns (then members of the All-America Football Conference), moved the Rams to Los Angeles, becoming the first NFL team based on the West Coast (there had been a team called the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926, but they played their schedule on the road only). Reeves brought in new partners in the form of Fred Levy, Ed Pauley, Harold Pauley, and Hal Seley and signed a deal with the city to lease the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and the team played there from 1946 to 1979.
The beginning of the Rams' residence in Los Angeles coincided with the arrival of another professional football team into the City of Angels, the Los Angeles Dons of the newly-formed All-America Football Conference. The two teams shared the Coliseum from 1946 through 1949, then merged before the NFL absorbed the AAFC in 1950.
Reeves died in 1971, and through a complicated arrangement with the Baltimore Colts that brought Bob Irsay in as Colts' owner, Carroll Rosenbloom, who had been the Colts' owner, took over the Rams.
Rosenbloom had long been bothered by the Coliseum Commission's apparent foot dragging on building luxury boxes at the Coliseum, which he saw as essential to future success. He broke off negotiations with the Commission and started to negotiate to play at Dodger Stadium, but Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley did not want a football team playing at Chavez Ravine. Rosenbloom was petitioned by Orange County Supervisor Ralph Clark, the founder of the Los Angeles Rams Booster Club, to move the team to Anaheim Stadium, the home of the California Angels. Clark convinced Angels owner Gene Autry to okay the remodeling of Anaheim Stadium to accommodate the Rams, expanding capacity to 68,000 and putting in seating appropriate to football. In 1980, the Rams moved to Anaheim from Los Angeles.

St. Louis Rams (1995-present)
Under the terms of the Rams' deal with Anaheim, they were to receive the rights to develop plots of land near the Stadium. When nothing came of these plans, and with attendance falling, Rams' owner Georgia Frontiere (Rosenbloom's widow, as he died before the move to Anaheim was completed) got permission to relocate the team. After an aborted move to Baltimore, the Rams moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995, initially playing at Busch Memorial Stadium until the TransWorld Dome (now the Edward Jones Dome) was completed. The NFL owners originally rejected the move -- until Frontiere agreed to share some of the permanent seat license revenue she was to receive from St. Louis. This same year the then-Los Angeles Raiders were threatening to relocate as well -- and did, back to Oakland.
The 1995 and 1996 seasons the Rams were under the direction of head coach Rich Brooks. Then in 1997 Dick Vermeil was hired as the head coach. He remained head coach until retiring after the Rams won Super Bowl XXXIV against the Tennessee Titans in early 2000. After that Mike Martz took over until his firing in 2005. Scott Linehan is the current head coach after replacing Martz in January of 2006. During this time some of the most important players have been Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce. They were part of an offense dubbed "one of the fastest ever" and "The Greatest Show on Turf". This offense has been under the direction of Kurt Warner (1999-2001) and Marc Bulger (2002-present).
Georgia Frontiere died January 18th, 2008. Ownership of the team passed to her son Dale "Chip" Rosenbloom and daughter Lucia Rodriguez. Chip Rosenbloom was named the new Rams majority owner.

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