Let’s all Choose the Best Los Angeles Rams Logo Ever

Our best logo ever tournament jumps over to the National Football League and the home of everyone’s favourite new logo of 2020, the Los Angeles Rams. The Rams have moved across the country from Cleveland to Los Angeles with a championship pit stop in St Louis along the way.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in our past polls, our Washington Bullets/Wizards vote is now over and you can see which logo came out on top here. The Baltimore Orioles poll finished up earlier this week and you can check out the results of that one right here. We’ve had nearly ten-thousand votes cast thus far since starting this up just a few days ago, incredible!

You know the drill, we’ll start things off with a little history lesson on the Los Angeles Rams before getting to the poll, which is located down near the bottom of this post.

How did the Los Angeles Rams Get Their Team?

Today’s Los Angeles Rams started out as the Cleveland Rams playing out of the original American Football League back in 1936. The Rams qualified for the AFL Championship in their inaugural season but the title game was scrapped when their opponents refused to play. Cleveland immediately sought and was granted a transfer to the NFL, announced by the team on December 23, 1936, for the 1937 season.

The Cleveland Rams sat out the 1943 NFL season due to several of their players entering World War II. Low attendance and lousy weather welcomed the team back to the field with a disappointing turnout at Cleveland Stadium for their 1945 NFL championship win over the Washington Redskins appearing to have been the final straw. The day after the game the two clubs announced they’d play a pre-season charity match in Los Angeles on September 6, 1946, which would turn out to be a bit of foreshadowing because…

On January 12, 1946, less than one month later, the Rams surprised everyone and announced they were moving to Los Angeles. “The reason I’m moving to Los Angeles is that I believe it will become the greatest professional football town in the country”, Rams president Dan Reeves explained at the time.

The Rams would eventually call the west coast home for nearly 50 years before they moved to St. Louis in 1995, after 20 years in Missouri (including a Super Bowl victory in 1999) the Rams moved back to Los Angeles in 2016 where they still remain today.

Why are the Los Angels Rams called the Rams?

According to the book National Football League Strategies: Business Expansions, Relocations, and Mergers by Frank Josza, Jr., the Rams were named after Fordham University’s football Rams. Josza claims the name was chosen “to honour the hard work of coaches and football players at that school”.

The first mention of the name “Cleveland Rams” in any newspaper of the era is a simple AP announcement that the “Cleveland Rams American Professional Football league club” had signed two college players on October 5, 1936. Before their inaugural home game later that month, the Rams introduced their mascot “Swifty”, described as a “stampeding ram from the western plains”.

The 1930s Fordham Rams, inspiration for the team name (Photo: Fordham Archives)

The Rams’ name has followed the franchise from the AFL to the NFL in 1937, from the Cleveland Rams to the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, from the Los Angeles Rams to the St. Louis Rams in 1995, and finally back to the Los Angeles Rams again in 2016.

Los Angeles Rams Logo History

The Los Angeles Rams logo history is a bit of a confusing one, one that we had to re-research before doing this poll (so our L.A. Rams logo history section may appear to conflict with this a bit). The team seemed to use several different colour variations of the same logo all within a short period of time. Due to the fact that there were no official style guidelines for many of these years we’ve had to go out and make a few calls here based on our extensive research using a combination of historical league and team records. Follow along in the post below or if watching video is your thing, you can also watch their logo history above (with the original L.A. Rams 1960s “fight song” as the soundtrack!)

Starting with their first season in the NFL, the Cleveland Rams used this detailed depiction of a rams’ head facing the right with blue and white features from 1937 until about 1942.

When the team came back from their one-year hiatus due to the war, they had simplified their ram-head logo, flipped it to face the opposite direction, and added yellow to the colour scheme. The Rams would bring this logo along with them to Los Angeles in 1946.

In 1948 the Los Angeles Rams updated the ram head again, this time it seemed a combination of their original Cleveland logo and the one that followed it. This logo style would be used with several different colours in one way or another (as a primary or as an alternate logo) until 1988, fourty years after it was first introduced.

With the team having worn white horns on their helmet now for some time, the team re-coloured the horns on their logo to match circa 1972 (though they’d switch back to yellow on the helmet in ’73). The ram head was also flipped to face the right.

Around 1975, the Rams changed their black and white logo to blue to at least match the primary colour of their uniform. The ram head was also tilted slightly.

Again, to better match the team’s actual on-field colours, the Rams finally re-added yellow to their logo around 1981. It appears this version of the logo was used as the primary until 1983 before it was demoted to an alternate logo until the late ’80s (you can still see it on Fleer trading cards as recent as 1988).

There is some debate about whether the Rams simply used their helmet graphic as their primary logo in 1984 or the “LA RAMS” wordmark, the team now claims the wordmark was the primary during this period so we’re going with that. This logo also lived on following its replacement as the primary, sticking with the team as an alternate/wordmark logo until they left for St. Louis in 1995.

After several decades struggling with a logo that was representative of the team, the Los Angeles Rams finally settled on what they were most visually famous for — the ram-horned helmet. The Rams used this as their primary logo until the move to St. Louis, but even after the move in 1995 this helmet continued to be worn by the team until the end of the 1999 season.

A new city came with a new logo, the freshly-coined St. Louis Rams incorporated their famous Gateway Arch into a new Rams wordmark to help them identify more with their new market. This logo was used by the club for their only Super Bowl championship in 1999.

Seeking a modern new look for a new millennium, the St Louis Rams darkened their colours to navy blue and gold and went back to a (much more polished) ram’s head as their primary look. The new navy and gold colour scheme were carried over to the team’s helmet and uniforms. The Rams brought this logo with them back to Los Angeles for their first season in 2016.

Looking to embrace their past Los Angeles uniform history, the Rams dropped the gold for white, mimicking a look used by the team in the 1960s. An NFL rule regarding uniform re-designs forced the Rams into an unusual situation in which they wore their new LA blue and white helmets with their old St Louis blue and gold uniforms giving a mix of eras. To avoid this as much as possible, the Rams were given approval to wear their old 1980-90s style colours on a more frequent basis than is usually allowed.

Finally, just a few months ago, the Los Angeles Rams introduced their new logo and lightened-up colour scheme for the upcoming 2020 season. The new logo features an “LA” angled to the right with the “A” designed to resemble a ram’s horn.

Now that you’ve seen the logos, it’s time to pick your favourite! Again, like the Orioles and the Wizards polls, we’re allowing you to choose your top two Rams logos. If you genuinely think only one of these logos deserves the title of the greatest Los Angeles/St. Louis/Cleveland Rams logo ever, please just choose one! I have combined two of the rams head variations from the 1970s into one for the purposes of the poll as the only real change between those two was to the colour of the outline of the logo from black to blue.

UPDATE (Jul 14/20: 5pm ET)

The results are in! After 5000 votes we have our winner. Watch the video below to find out which is the best Los Angeles Rams logo of all-time…