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.
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.
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