Senior advisor and owner's representative John Shaw has officially hung it up after 31 years with the St. Louis Rams. Shaw was team president until two years ago when Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez fired GM Jay Zygmunt and launched the Billy Devaney front office. Those two years have been the two of the most productive for the Rams in a long time.
Shaw and Zygmunt became the symbols for everything wrong with the Rams. Zygmunt's feud with Mike Martz brought the franchise to its knees, resulting in such productive affairs as the 2006 draft. Shaw's biggest crime in all of that was a refusal to step in and resolve things for the betterment of the team. Or maybe he did step in. Either way. The knock on Shaw and the old Rams front office was that bean counters not football men ran the operation.
With the death of Georgia Frontiere, handing the franchise over to her children then sale to Stan Kroenke, Shaw played a role in making the transitions, a process where having a bean counter who knows the business helps.
It seems like Shaw should be older than just 60-years-old. Being with a team for more than three decades just makes him seem older, I guess. In the PD article Shaw says that he doesn't know what his next stop will be. At 60, I wonder if he won't find his way back into football somehow.