Two years and two days after the passing of former Rams owner Georgia Frontiere, her two children are closing in on a final decision regarding the future of the franchise.
According to Jim Thomas of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez are looking at three purchase offers.
But there’s also a fourth option -- keeping the team that went 1-15 in 2009.
Dave Checketts, owner of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues, leads the group that has submitted one of the offers. The persons behind the other two potential ownership groups aren’t yet publicly known.
Rosenbloom and Rodriguez own 60 percent of the team. Stan Kroenke, who married into the family of billionaires behind Wal-Mart, owns the other 40 percent.
And Kroenke can’t be ruled out of the mix for the 3/5ths of the team that he doesn’t already own. He holds an option to match any offer that Rosenbloom and Rodriguez accept. To finalize such a deal, however, Kroenke would have to sell the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and/or the NBA’s Denver Nuggets -- or persuade 24 other owners to scuttle the rules that limit ownership of other pro sports franchises to the same market in which the NFL team is located.
A sale would end 60 years of NFL ownership by the Rosenbloom/Frontiere families. At one point, Carroll Rosenbloom owned the Baltimore Colts; he swapped them straight up with Robert Irsay for the Rams. After Rosenbloom drowned while swimming in the ocean (a PBS investigation suggested that he was murdered by mobsters), Rosenbloom’s wife, Georgia, inherited the franchise.
