Thanks for listening to Reasonable Doubt on Podcast One.

This is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with your hosts, Mark Garagas and Gary Smith.

Welcome to this special Thanksgiving Saturday edition with my good buddy GPS.

And we're bringing back Jimmy Neutron again because Gary and I were talking today and we were thinking, you know, we really wanted to talk about both

Groot and St. Louis and NFL and I'm going to give Jimmy some pushback on St. Louis. So we were thinking who better than to find the illustrious Dan

and Los Angeles for life to talk about St. Louis. And why don't we start with that Dan give your kind of summary and your analysis that St. Louis settled too quickly and too cheap.

Sure. And at a really high level, this was a lawsuit that started back in 2017. The St. Louis Rams, as we once knew them, have since obviously moved on to the Los Angeles Rams.

But before that happened, there was about a three, four year fight between St. Louis, between the politicians, between the Cronkey family to try to keep them there.

A lawsuit was ultimately filed alleging that the NFL didn't follow their proper relocation guidelines and essentially left it with some alleged fraud alleged lying to city officials.

And this was a, you know, as it was as it matriculated to the courthouse about a billion plus lawsuit. Some reports had it up to 10 billion if it's holding all the water.

But this was a case barreling towards a trial on January 10th and there was a mediation on the calendar. We can get into the specifics.

But I think a lot of people thought this was at least heading to at least the courthouse steps maybe for a settlement, but it settles about 40 days out.

And all 32 NFL owners were named in the case, obviously, Stan Cronkey owner of the Rams was the main culprit here with allegations of fraud, puter damages.

One little interesting side light when you say all of the owners also fill those in who aren't in the weeds as to what happened at the last meeting of the NFL owners and that little contraport.

Yeah, so I guess here's where the fun part comes with Stan Cronkey. There was a vote to allow Stan Cronkey to move the team from St. Louis to Los Angeles in exchange for the ability to move the team plus Angeles.

The owner said the 31 other owners said to Cronkey, hey Stan, sign this a demnification agreement. Just agree if there's some type of lawsuit, you'll pick up all the costs, right?

You'll pick up all the expenses and whatever else. And Cronkey says sure he signs on the dotted line. So that was at this owner's meeting and this was signed three, four years ago, fast forward to, you know, now a couple of weeks ago from that.

And Cronkey's understanding that agreement only picked up legal costs, which was maybe tens of millions of dollars and the 31 NFL owners thought and still think that Cronkey has agreed to pay all everything.

So that's still in dispute. Even post-seminis to don't survive that offer.

Tax to have been service charge. Well, and I think you've been taking the position that the exposure on this for the NFL was astronomical that fair.

Relatively, right? Billions or is it 10 billion? Is astronomical for us? I used to have a federal judge in Sacramento, you used to say Mr. Gargis, a couple of million here, a couple of million there after a while comes real money.

So here we're, right, billion here, billion there. Now this is where I'm going to push back a little.

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