Los Angeles Rams

The Los Angeles Rams are a professional American football team based in the Greater Los Angeles area. The Rams compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the National Football Conference (NFC) West division. The team plays its home games at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, which it shares with the Los Angeles Chargers. They are headquartered at the Rams Village at Warner Center in Los Angeles.

The franchise was founded in 1936 as the Cleveland Rams in Cleveland, Ohio. The franchise won the 1945 NFL Championship Game, then moved to Los Angeles in 1946, making way for Paul Brown's Cleveland Browns of the All-America Football Conference and becoming the only NFL championship team to play the following season in another city. The club played its home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum until 1980, when it moved into a reconstructed Anaheim Stadium in Orange County, California. The Rams made their first Super Bowl appearance at the end of the 1979 NFL season, losing Super Bowl XIV to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31–19.

After the 1994 NFL season, the Rams left Southern California and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, becoming the St. Louis Rams. Five seasons later, the team defeated the Tennessee Titans to win Super Bowl XXXIV, 23–16 in the first season of the "Greatest Show on Turf" era, in which they also made Super Bowl XXXVI but lost 20–17 to the New England Patriots. After the 2015 NFL season, the team sought and received approval from the other owners to move back to Los Angeles in time for the 2016 NFL season. The Rams appeared in Super Bowl LIII but lost to the Patriots, 13–3. Three years later, the Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 23–20 to win Super Bowl LVI, becoming the second NFL team to win the Super Bowl in its home stadium.

The club is the only NFL franchise to win championships representing three different cities: Cleveland in 1945, St. Louis in 1999, and Los Angeles in 1951 and 2021.

History

Cleveland Rams (1936–1945)

The Cleveland Rams were founded on April 11, 1936, by Ohio attorney Homer Marshman and player-coach Damon Wetzel, a former Ohio State star who played briefly for the Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Pirates. Wetzel, who served as general manager, selected the "Rams", because his favorite college football team was the Fordham Rams from Fordham University; Marshman, the principal owner, also liked the name choice. The team was part of the newly formed American Football League and finished the 1936 regular season in second place with a 5–2–2 record, trailing only the 8–3 record of league champion Boston Shamrocks. The team featured players such as William "Bud" Cooper, Harry "The Horse" Mattos, Stan Pincura, and Mike Sebastian.

The Rams joined the National Football League on February 12, 1937, and were assigned to the Western Division. The Rams would be the fourth in a string of short-lived teams based in Cleveland, following the Cleveland Tigers, Cleveland Bulldogs, and Cleveland Indians. From the beginning, they were a team marked by frequent moves, playing in three stadiums over several losing seasons. However, the team featured the Most Valuable Player of the 1939 season, rookie halfback Parker Hall.

In June 1941, the Rams were bought by Dan Reeves and Fred Levy Jr. Reeves, an heir to his family's grocery-chain business that had been purchased by Safeway, used some of his inheritance to buy his share of the team. Levy's family owned the Levy Brothers department store chain in Kentucky and he came to own the Riverside International Raceway. Levy owned part of the Rams with Bob Hope, another of the owners, until Reeves bought out his partners in 1962.

The franchise suspended operations and sat out the 1943 season because of a shortage of players during World War II and resumed playing in 1944.

NFL champions (1945)

The team finally achieved success in 1945, which was their last season in Ohio. Adam Walsh took over as head coach that season. Quarterback Bob Waterfield, a rookie from UCLA, passed, ran, and place-kicked his way to the league's Most Valuable Player award, which was known as the Joe F. Carr Trophy back then, and helped the Rams achieve a 9–1 record and win their first NFL Championship, a 15–14 home field victory over the Washington Redskins on December 16. The margin of victory was provided by a safety: Redskins great Sammy Baugh's pass bounced off the goal post, then backward, through his team's own end zone. The next season, NFL rules were changed to prevent this from ever again resulting in a score; instead, it would merely result in an incomplete pass.

Original tenure in Los Angeles (1946–1994)

On January 12, 1946, Reeves was denied a request by the other NFL owners to move the Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles and the then-103,000-seat Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He threatened to end his relationship with the NFL and get out of the professional football business altogether unless the transfer to Los Angeles was permitted. A settlement was reached and, as a result, Reeves was allowed to move his team to Los Angeles. Consequently, the NFL became the first professional coast-to-coast sports entertainment industry.

From 1933, when Joe Lillard left the Chicago Cardinals, through 1946, there were no black players in professional American football. After the Rams had received approval to move to Los Angeles, they entered into negotiations to lease the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Rams were advised that a precondition to them getting a lease was that they would have to integrate the team with at least one African-American; the Rams agreed. Subsequently, the Rams signed Kenny Washington on March 21, 1946. The signing of Washington caused "all hell to break loose" among the owners of the NFL franchises. The Rams added a second black player, Woody Strode, on May 7, 1946, giving them two black players going into the 1946 season.

The Rams were the first team in the NFL to play in Los Angeles (the 1926 Los Angeles Buccaneers represented L.A. but were strictly a traveling team), but they were not the only professional football team to play its home games in the Coliseum between 1946 and 1949. The upstart All-America Football Conference had the Los Angeles Dons compete there as well. Reeves was taking a gamble that Los Angeles was ready for its own professional football team—and suddenly there were two in the City of Angels. Reeves was proven to be correct when the Rams played their first pre-season game against the Washington Redskins in front of a crowd of 95,000 fans. The team finished their first season in L.A. with a 6–4–1 record, second place behind the Chicago Bears. At the end of the season Walsh resigned as head coach. The Coliseum was home for the Rams for more than 30 years, but the facility was already over 20 years old on the day of the first kickoff. Bob Snyder coached the team for one season. In 1947, he led the team to a 6–6 record and a fourth place finish in the NFC West.

In 1948, halfback Fred Gehrke painted horns on the Rams' helmets, making the first helmet emblem in pro football. In 1948, Clark Shaughnessy took over as head coach and led the team to a 6–5–1 record. Late in 1949, the Dons were folded into the Rams when the All-America Football Conference ceased operations.

NFL champions (1951)

The Rams' heyday in Southern California was from 1949 to 1955, when they played in the pre-Super Bowl era NFL Championship Game four times, winning once in 1951. During this period, they had the best offense in the NFL, even though there was a quarterback change from Bob Waterfield to Norm Van Brocklin in 1951. The defining offensive players of this period were wide receiver Elroy Hirsch, Van Brocklin and Waterfield. Teamed with fellow Hall of Famer Tom Fears, Hirsch helped create the style of Rams football as one of the first big play receivers. During the 1951 championship season, Hirsch posted 1,495 receiving yards with 17 touchdowns. The popularity of this wide-open offense enabled the 1950 Los Angeles Rams to become the first professional football team to have all their games televised.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Rams went from being the only major professional sports franchise in Southern California and Los Angeles to being one of five. The Los Angeles Dodgers moved from Brooklyn in 1958, the Los Angeles Chargers of the upstart AFL was established in 1960, the Los Angeles Lakers moved from Minneapolis in 1960, and the Los Angeles Angels were awarded to Gene Autry in 1961. In spite of this, the Rams continued to thrive in Southern California. In the first two years after the Dodgers moved to California, the Rams drew an average of 83,681 in 1958 and 74,069 in 1959. The Rams were so popular in Los Angeles that the upstart Chargers chose to move to San Diego rather than attempt to compete with the Rams. The Los Angeles Times put the Chargers plight as such: "Hilton [the Chargers owner at the time] quickly realized that taking on the Rams in L.A. was like beating his head against the wall."