Los Angeles Rams
The Los Angeles Rams are a professional American football team based in Los Angeles, California, which competes in the National Football League's NFC West division. The franchise has won three NFL championships, and is the only one to win championships representing three different cities (Cleveland in 1945, Los Angeles in 1951, and St. Louis in 1999). The Rams play their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
History of the National Football League in Los Angeles
In , the defending NFL champions, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles. The other league owners were not pleased with the move, but the league relented due in large part to concern that Los Angeles could potentially become the nucleus of a rival league. The Rams played home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, at the time shared with two NCAA teams – the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins – and an AAFC franchise, the Los Angeles Dons. It was the establishment of the Rams in Los Angeles that prompted the league to lift its moratorium on African-American players that had been in place since the early 1930s: terms of the Rams' lease on the Coliseum required the team to integrate, and to do so, the Rams signed former UCLA stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. When the AAFC folded in 1950, the Dons went out of business, but the AAFC's San Francisco 49ers were admitted to the NFL. This provided the NFL with a workable pair of West Coast cities for travel.