ST. LOUIS — Soon after a $790 million wire transfer from the NFL arrived in St. Louis just in time for the holidays, Bob Blitz did a little online shopping.
He sent his Team STL teammates, from secretaries who plowed through piles of paperwork, to attorneys who clashed with the league’s best suits, a small pouch tied up with ribbon.
Inside they found a Christmas ornament in the shape of a medallion. It showed a man spinning a sling over his head. Standing in his path was a giant.
“Everybody thought we were taking on Goliath,” Blitz said.
I have been waiting to write one final column about the Rams relocation lawsuit saga. Waiting until the originator of the lawsuit, Blitz, and his top ally in the effort, Jim Bennett, could sit down to talk things over after a protective order expired. We started at the start, when the lawsuit largely was panned as sour grapes, and went through a finish that included one of the biggest known monetary settlements in NFL history.
Everyone has been given a chance to share their views on the resolution. Except Blitz and Bennett. Until now.
Blitz brought to the lawsuit a wealth of knowledge on the subject matter. He knew the blow-by-blow of the relocation saga because of his connection to the stadium task force that made an impressive yet sabotaged attempt to keep the Rams. It was the NFL’s counter-attack on the task force that made this case.
Blitz, a former wrestler, found leverage and flexed it. He planned a straightforward state-law case rooted in the league’s lack of interest in following its own relocation guidelines, a smart choice considering how unsuccessful complicated antitrust cases have been against the league. Blitz planned the twists and turns he figured the lawsuit would take, and he predicted most of them correctly, including the defense naming him as a witness late in an attempt to limit his work in the courtroom.
Bennett, first drawn toward the fight because he was a ticked-off Rams fan, excelled at keeping the lawsuit out of the closed-door arbitration process the league fought for during its effort to link the lawsuit to the Rams’ win in that years-ago lease dispute about the Dome. That victory was a big one, and it would come up again later.
Bennett sharpened the argument St. Louis should be viewed as a third-party beneficiary to the NFL’s relocation guidelines, something any relocation-threatened city should cheer. He kept pressure on league owners through a dogged discovery process that drilled down on sensitive financial details.
Blitz and Bennett sealed a partnership with a handshake. Their teams became one. They got to work and soon started winning, exposing the NFL’s greed and hypocrisy through wins at pretrial hearings that populated the calendar leading up to a trial date that was pushed back just once, because of the coronavirus pandemic, despite NFL stall tactics.
“We don’t take shotgun approaches,” Blitz said. “Every bit of our discovery was directed at proving the five claims we pleaded. We had it all in the can. We called most of this case right, before it ever happened. It turned out, with the evidence that we saw, it became a lot easier than we ever thought.”
Why settle then?
City and county leaders have explained why they took the money. But why didn’t the lawyers push their clients to push for more?
First, let’s get something squared away. Saying Team STL should have pushed for a bigger settlement can be argued, I suppose. Saying it should have pushed for an expansion team? It’s not a claim based in reality.
“As lawyers, you have to keep in mind, what can you get out of a lawsuit, and what can’t you?” Bennett said. “The lawsuit made no mention of an expansion team.”
While the specifics of the back-and-forth mediation that produced the settlement’s dollar figure — along with any unrevealed smoking guns unearthed in discovery — will perhaps forever remain buried beneath the terms of the settlement agreement, the lawyers did explain why they agreed with their clients about accepting the deal. Go ahead and crack your jokes about the lawyers’ healthy cut of the winnings here. For those interested in considering their points, there are some notable ones.
When you compare the cash landed for the region to a) the success of other relocation-based lawsuits against the NFL and/or b) the amount of money the region spent in first luring the Rams and later fighting to not lose them, the return on investment is rather impressive.
“The NFL has never paid anything like this before,” Blitz said.
Then there were the less positive but very real reasons to think long and hard about chasing an even bigger win at the trial and the years-long appeals process that would follow.
The pandemic again is creating havoc on the scheduling of trials, and likely would have caused at least one more postponement, driving up the cost of doing business.
The success of the NFL against Oakland in the relocation lawsuit playing out there created less-than-ideal optics despite the fact the cases were structured differently.
Some of the financial damages Team STL cited were riper than others for a trimming back during appeals. Most cases revolve around money taken from plaintiffs. A lot of money pursued in this case revolved around money that would have gone to St. Louis had the Rams not moved. It’s harder to prove.
But it was the new-look U.S. Supreme Court that was perhaps the biggest reason for pause. It has changed since the lawsuit was filed, and could be changing its stance on certain topics.
If the inevitable appeals process reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Blitz and Bennett could not know for sure that the NFL would not make another and this time more successful run at connecting this lawsuit to the arbitration case the Rams won over those Dome upgrades that never came. The U.S. Supreme Court passed on an intervention on the NFL’s behalf the first time around. There was no guarantee it would once more.
“That was the one that bothered me the most,” Blitz said. “Hitting .333 on that doesn’t do you any good. You had to be perfect.”
Perfect lawsuits are almost impossible to find. Passing on a settlement of this size and winding up with something smaller, or nothing at all, after years of appeals would have been truly devastating. Instead St. Louis got a mountain of money to hopefully do some real good, the league was taught an expensive lesson, and other relocation-threatened cities received a playbook.
“It may force them to look at issues they have that they did not know they have,” Blitz said about the league.
Hopefully Blitz sent NFL commissioner Roger Goodell an ornament, to remind him of the time Goliath paid big to holster David’s sling.
