Cleveland Rams, Miami Seahawks, and LA Dons Oh No!

Check your ego at the door, and your facts on the internet. While they were the most recent, the Seattle Sonics weren’t the first team to be relocated.

There is a tendency to be preoccupied only with what has happened recently. The most recent must be the most important. But it is unclear how it will fit in the often re-written tale of history. This applies to current events, and perhaps even more so to personal traumas and events, but this is certainly true in sports culture. If only there was a map that would outline what is to come in the future.

So thanks to The 110 Report’s crack research department, there is some context to follow up on the earlier discussed trends of team relocation.

Seattle Sonics fans weren’t the first city to have their team relocated, and neither were Los Angeles Rams fans . . . kind of.

Fact: The Rams won their first NFL Championship way back in 1945. Their quarterback was Bob Waterfield out of UCLA.

Twist: They were NOT the Los Angeles Rams at the time however, but the Cleveland Rams. Founded in 1937, the Cleveland Rams franchise won the NFL championship in 1945, and one year later moved to Los Angeles in 1946.

Welcome to Los Angeles 1949

Fact: Los Angeles was the home of two professional football franchises: The Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Dons.

Twist: The Los Angeles Dons were not part of the NFL, but were members of the All-America Football Conference. The AAFC was in existence from 1946-49, and was a serious competitor of the NFL. But in 1950 three of the 8 teams left for the NFL, and the All America Football Conference folded. The three teams who joined the NFL were: The San Francisco 49ers, the Baltimore Colts, and the Cleveland Browns.

Fact: The Rams won their second NFL championship, their first and only in LA, in 1951 over the previous year’s champion.

Twist: They beat the Cleveland Browns who won the NFL Championship in their first year in the league, after taking all four of the All America Conference titles from 1946-49.

The Rams left Cleveland for LA, and then the Cleveland Browns rolled through the AAFC before their inclusion in the NFL in 1950.

Alternatively, the Baltimore Colts of the AAFC originally began as the Miami Seahawks in 1946, before relocating to Baltimore to become the Colts the next year. They moved to the NFL, and after their first season in the league in 1950 they were disbanded. But this turned out to be only temporary as a new Baltimore Colts team formed in 1953 from the former Boston Yanks, New York Yankees of the AAFC, New York Bulldogs, and Dallas Texans franchises.

Fast forward to 1984

Fact: The Baltimore Colts literally snuck away in the night to play as the Indianapolis Colts that year. When Jim Irsay completed negotiations with the mayor of Indy, Mayflower trucks arrived at 2am, and by 10am completely moved the franchise out of Maryland.

Twist: The Cleveland Browns abandoned Cleveland to become the Baltimore Ravens in 1996. Because of the public outrage, Cleveland managed to work out a deal to retain all records, championships, names, and colors after the relocation however.

Fifty years after the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles, the Cleveland Browns controversially ditched the Midwest city for Baltimore, which had been without a team for 12 years since the Colts left in 1984.

The Los Angeles Rams spent 48 years in the City of Angels from 1946-1994, and it has now been 18 years since the Rams left.

Inevitably, Nicholas Cage is destined to unearth a National Treasure map documenting franchise relocation and re-relocation city by city.

According to our working rubric, Cleveland was without a franchise (whether it be the Rams or Browns) for all of 3 seasons, all of which were spent after Art Modell moved to Baltimore in 1996 because the Browns of the AAFC began immediately after the Rams left. Since 1947, Baltimore has been without a franchise for 14 years, two of which were when the team literally disbanded before reforming in 1953.

Clocking in at 18 years and counting since the Rams relocated to St. Louis, they are due. This is the time in the movie National Treasure: Silence of the Rams, where Nicholas Cage stars in a long montage dedicated to hammering out the last details of the teams overdue return to LA, set to the remix of the Bloodhound Gang song Bad Touch with the chorus “You and me baby ain’t nothing but ram-mals.”

Or the big reveal in the climax of the 71 minute thriller, as Cage labors over the map, he realizes he broke the code. Already being the beneficiary of a franchise relocation in 1946, Los Angeles is not due for their franchise to come back post 1994.

“It’s happened before them, and it’ll happen after them,” Cage delicately growls, ” But not for them.” [Dramatic Pause] “Los Angeles is a victim of Reverse Relocation.” [Gasp]

Considering the St. Louis Rams current stadium lease is up at the end of the year, it is time they get plucked out from under that arch by a city of angels.

For daily updates on the effort, Follow Bring Back the Rams on Twitter, or visit their Facebook page.

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