(02-25-2026 11:46 AM)GoldenWarrior11 Wrote:  

(02-25-2026 09:36 AM)Dr Dawgma III Wrote:  While everyone thinks of the Bears-Packers as the oldest NFL rivalry, it was in fact Bears-Cardinals.

The Chicago Cardinals were the White Sox (South Side) equivalent in Chicago. So all those blue-collar fans in the SNL skits would have been Cards fans in an alternate universe. Hard to imagine!

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I'll pose this question again: if the State of Illinois loses all that NFL tax revenue, could there be a movement to build a multi-purpose dome east of St. Louis across the Illinois border? The NFL looks to have some stability for the time being, but St. Louis is an interesting case. They only lost their team because the owner wanted to move to LA; it wasn't due to lack of support or success.

It appears high ranking political officials in Missouri support the idea. So could this hypothetically open the door for Illinois to pull the ol' okie-doke if the state loses the Bears?

I don't see the NFL ever revisiting the St. Louis market again. Outside of the Greatest Show on Turf years, the Rams were in the bottom third of attendance in the late 1990's, late 2000s and early 2010s, before bottoming out before moving to Los Angeles. The St. Louis Cardinals football also never hosted an NFL playoff game, and they were restricted attendance wise playing in old Busch.

It is a baseball/hockey city, with no professional basketball or football franchise (which is different reason I remain so high on SLU as a BE candidate, as there are limited competitive alternatives in the winter; and they are getting 9/10k at their home games this year).

I don't think the NFL will expand again anytime soon. I think 32 is the sweet spot for that league. If the NFL does ever expand again, I think 36 is the next number, so they'll need to add four teams.

Where St. Louis does potentially enter the picture, however, is as follows: there are more markets at least arguably capable of supporting a NFL franchise than there are available NFL franchises. So the owner of a NFL franchise looking for a sweetheart stadium deal can shop his team around to prospective NFL markets in the hope of getting the best deal available. We're going back a few years here, but that's how the original Cleveland Browns wound up in Baltimore, and how the old Houston Oilers wound up in Nashville. And this is only my opinion, but I think it's why the Buffalo Bills got a new stadium deal done as quickly and as quietly as they did.