The Cleveland Rams: The NFL Champs Who Left Too Soon, 1936-1945

NFL owners are notorious for breaking hearts by yanking beloved teams and decamping to more profitable climes. And this has been going on for longer than you think. Precisely 70 years before wounding St. Louisans by announcing a move to Los Angeles in 2016, the Rams left their original hometown, one that had cheered them to a championship performance just 27 days earlier--Cleveland. The transfer to LA in 1946 left many Clevelanders outraged, shocked the league, and shook up the NFL power structure. It also jolted the all-white NFL into reintegration, prepared the way for the incoming Browns, and left the Rams to become the only NFL champions ever to be based the following season fully intact in a different city. The story of how the Rams transformed from a homegrown Ohio team funded by local businessmen into the first major-league sports franchise on the West Coast is filled with long-forgotten drama, betrayal, and larger-than-life personalities. In The Cleveland Rams: The NFL Champs Who Left Too Soon, 1936-1945, author James C. Sulecki brings to life the vivid story of how the franchise began its long history of opportunistic moves, and how the Rams' departure jump-started a chain of events in sports-mad Cleveland that resonates to this day.