St. Louis Unveils Stadium Plan on North Riverfront

Just more than two months ago, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon tapped Anheuser-Busch President Dave Peacock and local attorney Bob Blitz to spearhead the effort to come up with a stadium plan to keep NFL football in St. Louis.

First, some specifics:

- The plan called for an open-air stadium along the riverfront as expected. Worth noting is that open-air stadiums are significantly less expensive than retractable roofs.

- The announced capacity would be 64,000 for professional football and about 30,000 less for soccer. That's a reasonable capacity for the region that wouldn't overextend the support of the Rams beyond the current 66,000 capacity of the Edward Jones Dome.

- The announced cost was $860-900 million, coming in under the billion mark.

- The funding issue was a bit convoluted calling for no new tax revenue being required though Peacock did mention that $200 million would likely need to come from the NFL and Rams owner Stan Kroenke each...which leads to the major note here...

This wasn't aimed at Stan Kroenke to convince him that he'd have a better deal with this stadium plan in St. Louis versus the suggested Los Angeles stadium site. It was aimed at the NFL to convince them that a new stadium in St. Louis is feasible, fund-able, and functional.

The sell isn't to keep the Rams necessarily. It's to keep NFL football in St. Louis with the underlying suggestion that it would be easiest to keep the Rams as the purveyor of such.

This was never going to be a simple one on, one off process. It was never going to be linear.

But at least for today, we got a sense that in some corner of the collective mind of the city of St. Louis, there's a serious dedication to NFL football in the Gateway to the West...even if at least one of the players came off non-plussed.

It's nice but to stay n STL our stadium need to closed.. #LikeTheOld1Better pic.twitter.com/Zgfy1JVGZB

— Mr.Pix6Sh*t (@JjenkzLockdown) January 9, 2015

Stl rams plan to play football next year come late December early January.. #L.AorCloseTheNewRoof

— Mr.Pix6Sh*t (@JjenkzLockdown) January 9, 2015

Stay tuned.