John Shaw

John Shaw Leaves Rams
by Tim Klutsarits, Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:25:00 GMT

In a move that I always classified as an œI will believe it when I see it moveactually happened without much fanfare on the St. Louis sports scene. John Shaw the long-time president of the St. Louis Rams and recent senior adviser for the Rams officially stepped away from the organization during the past couple of weeks. Shaw informed the NFL and other friends around the league that he is no longer a representative of the Rams franchise thus ending a 31-year run with the team.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shaw was offered, by new majority owner Stan Kroenke, an opportunity to remain with the team in his current capacity, but shaw thought it was a good time to leave the team. this ends the career of a man who was always an enigma to the st. louis rams fans. he was someone that most people could not figure out. was he a highly skilled mercenary who helped benefit the football fans in st. louis or was he a dark ominous character who had nothing more than the bottom line on his mind and had no interest in building a consistently good football team.

To me Shaw was, and please excuse the geekdom reference, like Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars saga. He was the ultimate man behind the curtain who was always a couple of steps ahead of everyone else and was a very cold figure. You never got the feeling that Shaw was a warm person inside and that he was always very cold and calculating. Shaw never moved to St. Louis with the team and is a reason, and a good one at that, why people are still on edge about the team moving back to Los Angeles. Shaw managed the team from 2,000 miles away and it always rubbed people the wrong way.

Shaw controlled everything at Rams Park and you could make the case that Shaw had the most power of any individual working for any NFL franchise. While working for the Rams, Shaw pretty much had a rubber stamp from ownership on anything he wanted to do. Georgia Frontiere listened to Shaw explicitly and did what Shaw wanted for the most part. That continued with the Rosenbloom’s over their short tenure as owners following Georgia’s death. They trusted Shaw and always believed in him. For that matter current owner Stan Kroenke still considers Shaw a close advisor that he can trust.

I think that most people will always view John Shaw’s time at the Rams with mixed emotions. He should be remembered by St. Louis Rams fans as the driving force to move the team here. Shaw was the decision maker and he was the one that was sold on moving the team here to St. Louis. Granted, it was not for some altruistic reason, but it did bring football back to St. Louis. It wasn’t Frontiere who was driving this move it was Shaw. Shaw made it happen, whether it was for the right reasons or not, and he should be thanked and remembered for that if you are a St. Louis Rams fan.

Shaw should also be remembered for being the person who sat Dick Vermeil down after a 4-12 season and demanded that Vermeil change the way things be done. He wasn’t dictating x’s and o’s, but he did want a different philosophy. That changed everything. It brought about Mike Martz, Marshall Faulk, Torry Holt and then the franchise hit the lottery in Kurt Warner. Shaw was what set everything in motion for the Rams to win the Super Bowl.

What Shaw should not be looked upon with favor was his management style, which led to the collapse of the Rams from 2002 on. Shaw’s management style was one that he wanted to have friction in the building, because he believed keeping people on edge created a conducive environment for success. Whether or not you believe that is up for debate, but it absolutely was a failure as Mike Martz and Jay Zygmunt both destroyed the franchise by trying to win the political games going on in the building instead of winning games on the field. Shaw from 2000 miles away should have and could have put an end to the shenanigans but didn’t and it frankly ruined the Rams franchise for a number of seasons.

The other big sin from Shaw, from a football perspective, is the way the Jerome Bettis-Rich Brooks issue went down. Bettis should have never been run out of town by a first year coach who had proven nothing in the NFL but Shaw allowed it to happen. That in turn led to Brooks being gone by the following season and another few years of mediocrity from the Rams because Shaw didn’t step in on the football side of things until it was too late.

Shaw was clearly a better businessman than a football man, but that is not to understate his importance to football in St. Louis. He brokered a deal to get out of the 2nd largest TV market in the U.S. to move to the 21st ranked and then got the biggest sweetheart lease in the history of the league. It was such a good deal that now the Rams own the hammer again to move if they were so desired to do so. Shaw made his bosses a ton of money and always kept an eye on the future. For that Shaw was a huge success in the NFL.

What struck me this morning is that Shaw is now a free agent to work in the NFL again and at age 61 he could certainly retire if he wanted, but you don’t get the feeling he is ready for that. With two stadium groups working to build a stadium or stadiums in Los Angeles it certainly seems like one of those two groups would want to bring on a person who has ties to the NFL and knows how to get deals done. Wouldn’t that be the biggest irony of all that the man who engineered football to leave Los Angeles would be the guy who brings football back to Southern California? God willing it is not his former employer’s team. That would be too much of a movie script wouldn’t it?

[insidestl.com]

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