UFL is giving NFL major momentum to come back to St. Louis

It has been about a decade since the NFL last had a team in St. Louis. In what used to be home to the Rams and Cardinals before that, St. Louis is all about the Battlehawks now. While St. Louis does have three professional teams, one in MLB, MLS and the NHL, you have to wonder if the NFL made a huge mistake in leaving this midwestern metropolis behind for good, or for merely the second time already.

The Rams moved back to Los Angeles after owner Stan Kroenke decided to build Kroenkeland over in Inglewood, California. He relocated the Rams, and somehow convinced the Chargers to ditch their fanbase, too. While the Rams were borderline pitiful for their last decade in the city, we have seen the great people of St. Louis support the Cardinals and Blues for years. Now they enjoy the Battlehawks.

And it is much more than St. Louis being one of the largest metro areas in the country without an NFL team. Great cities like Birmingham, Memphis, Portland and Salt Lake City all don't have NFL teams. What this really comes down to is how well St. Louis supports this UFL franchise. Even with the USFL and XFL merging into this, the Battlehawks continue to draw far better than their UFL counterparts.

Look at their Week 10 attendance numbers when the Battlehawks hosted San Antonio at the Dome.

Listen to how loud it got inside of the Dome at America's Center. If only St. Louis had a better venue...

And that right there is precisely why the NFL is not thinking about going back to St. Louis yet.

UFL's St. Louis Battlehawks are proof that the NFL can still work there

The combination of a terrible on-field product, an opportunistic billionaire and an out-of-date stadium all contributed to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Los Angeles. After all, the Rams spent the bulk of their existence in Los Angeles prior to Kroenke's predecessor Georgia Frontiere moving the team to St. Louis in 1995. Four years later, they were Super Bowl champions as the Greatest Show on Turf!

Sadly, the NFL is never going to come back to St. Louis until the league can get assurances of a new state of the art stadium to be built inside its metropolis. I have to be honest. I flew above St. Louis less than a week ago. For as awesome as Busch Stadium and the Arch look from above, I cannot say the same for the Battlehawks' home and where the Rams used to play. Kroenke just left before it was bad.

I think what the overwhelming success of the Battlehawks signifies is that we really do need a second tier of American professional football domestically. Cities like St. Louis, San Antonio and Orlando certainly have the people and the resources to be pillars of this so-called underleague. For the time being, let's enjoy the successes the XFL and now the UFL have brought to St. Louis on the gridiron.

In time, there may be a golden opportunity for St. Louis, but timing and preparation are key in all this.