(Sports Network) - The checkered history of NFL football in St. Louis, Missouri, actually dates all the way back to 1923.

It was in that season that the league's first team to represent the Gateway City - the St. Louis All-Stars - went 1-4-2 under head coach/owner Ollie Kraehe before collapsing after one year due to financial difficulties.

Eleven years later, the city was back on the NFL map, albeit briefly, when the formerly-independent St. Louis Gunners replaced the defunct Cincinnati Reds for the final three games of the league schedule before fading back into obscurity.

The St. Louis Cardinals lasted a bit longer than that, 28 years to be exact, following their move from Chicago (instigated via some colluding between then- commissioner Bert Bell and Bears owner George Halas) in 1960.

But when team owner Bill Bidwill asked St. Louis' civic leaders for a new football-only facility, the city balked, and Bidwill was well on his way to holding dual pariah status in both St. Louis and Arizona.

As usually happens in these cases, the city eventually built that new stadium anyway, luring the Los Angeles Rams to town in 1995 with what is now called the Edward Jones Dome.

The Rams are about to celebrate their 15th season in St. Louis, and during that time have won a Super Bowl, appeared in another, and produced NFL stars like Kurt Warner, Torry Holt, and Marshall Faulk.

The franchise and city have been a credit to the league - the club's 5-27 record of the past two years not withstanding - but don't bet your stimulus check that the Rams will be around to celebrate a 20th year in the shadow of the Arch.

The team's majority owners, Chip Rosenbloom and his sister Lucia Rodriguez, are about to put the Rams up for sale, according to a report in Sunday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Rosenbloom and Rodriguez inherited a 60 percent share of the team when their mother, Georgia Frontiere, passed away last year.

And though the duo would reportedly like to keep the team in St. Louis to shield themselves from a P.R. hit, if there are no local takers for a franchise recently valued at $929 million by Forbes Magazine, Rosenbloom and Rodriguez aren't going to let anyone's sentimentality get in the way of that payday.

All of which leads to one place, easily described by two capital letters: L.A.

The league has been wringing its hands for years over the lack of a franchise in the country's second-largest market, even though a) no viable potential ownership group has stepped forward, b) no viable stadium plan has been presented and c) the citizens of Los Angeles and its surrounding area have long proven themselves to be fairly ambivalent toward NFL football.

There is indeed some irony in the fact that the Rams are on a collision course with the prospect of moving back to a region that they left back in 1994 because nobody there cared too much about them.

But the league and its owners will slip on their collective beer goggles and allow Los Angeles' historical NFL unattractiveness to go unconsidered because of the major financial incentives of moving a team from the nation's 21st- largest television market to its second-largest.

The league's corporate backers, and especially the TV network-types who only experience St. Louis when they fly over it at 30,000 feet, are salivating over the renewed possibility of NFL football in L.A.

Meanwhile, for the legion of Rams fans who are hopeful that the franchise will stay put, the white knight in this situation might just be minority owner Stan Kroenke.

Kroenke, who has owned a 40 percent share of the team since it relocated to St. Louis, is a native of Columbia, Missouri who might not take the Rams' potential move lying down.

By NFL rule, Kroenke can't buy the Rams outright unless he sells off his majority share of the NBA Denver Nuggets and NHL Colorado Avalanche, but it seems logical that if there is a chance to facilitate a sale to local ownership, Kroenke would have a good chance of greasing those wheels.

That said, any new owner is going to have an immediate battle to fight on the stadium front, as the Edward Jones Dome is already viewed as being a bottom- tier NFL facility. Without substantial upgrades to the stadium, the Rams can opt out of their lease in 2014, and in case you hadn't noticed, citizens and government leaders aren't currently enamored of the prospect of ponying up public dollars to subsidize improvements to the weekend homes of billionaires.

Frontiere's children haven't said much of anything on the topic of a potential sale, though Rosenbloom's most recent words should tell you all you need to know.

"The most important thing for me right now is putting a winning team on the field," Rosenbloom told the Post-Dispatch. "And we don't want that goal to be disrupted in any way."

Of course you don't, Chip. Any more losing might cut into your eventual, and inevitable, windfall.



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