NFL really pushing this whole “Rams should get to keep taxes and eat them too” thing

When last we left the St. Louis Rams stadium controversy, NFL VP Eric Grubman was trying to insist that using city revenue from sales and income taxes on Rams games was a terrible idea — not because that’s money that currently goes to the city treasury, as you might think, but because those taxes are “an NFL asset in the way we view the world,” so really they should just go to Rams owner Stan Kroenke to pay his share of stadium costs. Which is the kind of argument that’s so off-the-wall crazy that you have to figure he doesn’t mean for anyone to take him seriously, he’s just trying to—

After doing some poking around the past few days, serious concerns are growing in the NFL that any owner — let alone Kroenke — would sign off on what St. Louis is proposing…

When viewed through an NFL lens, the $75 million should count as team money, which brings the private contribution to $685 million.

As a result, what St. Louis currently sees as a $610 million private to $390 million public split, the NFL sees as a $685 million private to $315 million public split.

And that is a huge issue.

Okay, so the Los Angeles Daily News is taking Grubman seriously. Which means the NFL is actually preparing to defend turning down around $400 million in stadium subsidies from St. Louis on the grounds that not only should tax money be used to subsidize private construction projects, but that teams should get that tax money plus more tax money to make up for the fact that the first tax money is money that was paid by the team, so get your own damn tax money. It’s not quite the definition of chutzpah, but it’s getting close.