USA TODAY Sports
St. Nick had an extra special present for the folks in St. Louis.
Via Ben Frederickson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Rams relocation settlement check has cleared.
That’s a total payout of $790 million, with $276.5 million of that amount going to a pair of law firms that will be having a very Merry Christmas and an incredibly Happy New Year. Especially since the fee works out to an average of $10.6 million per equity member of each firm.
This leaves $513.5 million for the various St. Louis entities that sued the NFL over the decision of the Rams to return to L.A. after the 2015 season. It’s not chump change, but it shows that the plaintiffs had the league on the run. They could have gotten more at trial. They could have, in theory, gotten so much that the league would have offered an expansion team as part of an effort to make it all go away.
They’s not to say they did the wrong thing by settling. Litigation entails risk. They took a large bird in the hand. There quite possibly was a far bigger bird in the bush. We’ll never know what it may have been.
But we do know this. The NFL coughed up more than three quarters of a billion dollars to clean up the mess that was made when the Rams left St. Louis.