Seems to me you have four options. Which way would you go?
I didn’t get into football until after they left L.A., but I lived in L.A. at the time. They’re not ‘my team’, but my thought is that they belong in L.A.
When the Colts moved in Indy, I certainly stopped being a fan. I think I speak for all of Baltimore. I wonder if it’s different in St Louis this time.
Same here. It is different for me because I remember the Rams in LA. But if I was from St. Louis and only became a fan when they moved to town then I probably feel differently. When the Washington Senators packed up and left town, changing their name also, I unluckily moved to Philadelphia and became a Phillies fan, but I’m still stuck with the District of Columbia Redskins, my original team, still in the town where I was born.
Remaining a fan of the Rams means that I am in some way supporting that lying POS Kroenke. Nope. Not gonna happen. That SOB is not seeing a dime of my money. In fact I’m questioning remaining a fan of the NFL period.
I think I would be teamless, but it’s hard to say. I’m from Buffalo, and if called upon to support a basketball team, I still go for the Clippers (and you have to be really old these days to know that history).
It’s probably the same situation as when the Cardinals moved to Arizona. I doubt many St. Louisans remained fans, and now they’ve been burned a second time.
As a Chargers fan, I’m looking at that scenario right now.
If the Chargers move to Inglewood, I will consider myself “teamless.”
The Nets moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn, and I’m still a fan. Of course it’s not quite the same thing as they still play nearby.
People root for the “home town” team, no matter what it’s called. As someone mentioned above, people in Baltimore immediately discarded the Colts and became instant Ravens fans. Nobody in Milwaukee (nor Boston) kept on rooting for the Braves.
People in Baltimore felt discarded by the Colts because of the way they left. But they couldn’t become instant Ravens fans until a dozen years later.
Conversely, I knew a guy in New England who remained a Braves fan fifty years after they left Boston.
When the football Cardinals moved from STL to Arizona, I followed them for a while. After some time all the players from the STL team retired or moved to different teams so I stopped following them closely. That is until Kurt Warner started playing for the Cardinals.
I’ll probably drop the Rams even faster and root for KC or even, gulp, the Bengals. I spent the first 18 of my 61 years in Cincinnati.
:rolleyes: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It was either sneak out in the middle of the night, or have the team seized by eminent domain. The Colts did the only thing they could.
You have a link to the explanation? (How can a league franchise, personnel contracts, or portable assets by “seized by eminent domain,” anyway?)
In any case, I was just speaking to how football fans in Baltimore felt.
I stopped following this thread when it was moved. 
Speaking as a resident of Baltimore (at the time), I continued to root for the Colts after they left. As the players I knew, and rooted for, got older and moved on - my rooting interest softened (plus I had always been a Cowboys fan so I started following them more). After they drafted Peyton I became a stronger fan again.
I remember watching an Indy - Pitt playoff game in a Baltimore sports bar, and was shocked by the number of people rooting for the Steelers. People generally hated the Steelers during the Baltimore Colts years - I guess their hate for Irsay was greater.
That doesn’t explain it at all, and the links within aren’t completely clear either. Apparently (two links deep) the state legislature did authorize the seizure of intangible assets. Has this ever been done elsewhere, and been sustained?
Yup, and yup.
St. Louis followed the Cardinals pretty closely for the team’s first couple of seasons in Arizona, but as the old St. Louis players moved on, so did the fans. The mourning period will be even shorter this time because a) the team drove away casual fans by being abysmal for a decade and b) that lying POS Kroenke pissed off the committed fans so badly that Cell Guy’s response is one of the milder ones.
Hell no. Greedy owner doesn’t deserve fans.