I’m sorry my friend but you were correct when you stated you don’t know the law.
I can guarantee you that the NFL did NOT give any written agreement to St. Louis concerning the Rams as you stated above. That’s not even legally plausible! The NFL does not own the Rams; they cannot enter into a contract for the Rams without express authority. However, even with the remote chance the NFL had authority to contract on the Rams behalf, IF they gave St. Louis any type of written guarantee, that would be a binding contract.
If St. Louis met their conditions of this alleged contract, the Rams would be obligated to perform. The minute the Rams breached on performance, St. Louis would have been in court getting an injunction to enforce the contract.
It’s a 100% certainty that this contract you speak of does not exist. If one did, the Rams wouldn’t have had a chance to load up the moving vans.
St. Louis has other major issues with their lawsuit. The biggest being standing. IMO, a city that loses a team has no standing to sue the NFL or the departed team under a bylaw/relocation guidelines theory because the city was neither a party to the bylaws nor were they a 3rd party beneficiary to them.
The bylaws and the subordinate relocation guidelinesare are essentially a contract between the 32 NFL teams. None parties can’t sue when they are breached. The only exception is if NFL cities can be considered 3rd party beneficiaries. That would require the bylaws and relocation guidelines to have been created with their benefit in mind. Problem is, the bylaws were created to prevent an owner who is blocked from relocating from suing. The purpose for their creation had nothing to do with NFL cities at all. Thus, no standing for St. Louis. Too bad, so sad!
Even if St. Louis had standing, they couldn’t win on fraud. The relocation
guidelines were cleverly written. Notice that word “Guidelines.” The title of the document implies that they are not obligated to go by it. Inside the document, they use terms like “factors” to be considered. Basically, the guidelines give the NFL great flexibility and essentially are legal CYA.
It would be near impossible for a city to argue that they reasonably relied on them. The contractor/bid examples are great analogies. You know when you are making the bid, you may not win the contract. As long as the NFL/Rams made it appear that they jumped through the hoops that they created, they will be safe. In the end, the Relocation Committee ruled that St. Louis’ proposal was nice but failed to meet the standard (which by design was fuzzy).
My assessment is that this lawsuit has no merit. I bet the city knows that. It’s a money grab as others have pointed out.
