Rams Have Cheap Image, but Shaw Doesn’t Buy It

With the No. 1-paying San Francisco 49ers to the north and the always-generous Raiders right next door, the Rams have not been able to escape their reputation as an organization not willing to spend the increasingly big bucks it apparently takes to win Super Bowls these days.

The Rams’ front office, led by Executive Vice President John Shaw, is sensitive to that public perception, and if there was one thing causing most of the tension between Shaw and Robinson before this year, it was how much the club pays its players.

Robinson hasn’t publicly complained about the team’s payroll, but the front office, including owner Georgia Frontiere, has never enjoyed bearing most of the blame for the team’s failure to reach the Super Bowl. And some front-office sources last season believed that Robinson let his dissatisfaction with the pay scale become too widely known.

Recently, both Shaw and Robinson addressed the issue, agreeing that those accusing the Rams of being cheap are ignoring the facts of the situation. The Rams have a payroll near $20 million and average a profit of about $1.5 million a year.

“I think it’s an unfair perception,” Shaw said. “Last year we paid somewhere between 10th or 12th in the league in salaries. And I definitely believe that there’s really no correlation between the amount of a club’s payroll (and) their success on the field.

“Often those that pay a lot of money haven’t been very successful. But I believe that Georgia has a commitment to continue to pay somewhere in the top 10 in salaries in the hope that the team will be successful.”

Last year, the Rams’ defense suffered with a rash of holdouts--Kevin Greene, Doug Reed and Michael Stewart all weren’t signed until right before the regular season--and much of the team’s decline in 1990 was attributed to short-sighted accounting.

“There’s been a lot of baggage over a period of time relative to our organization in terms of the money we pay,” Robinson said. “You know, there was a period of time when the total amount of money the Rams paid ranked in the lower third of the NFL. But that’s not true now. We’re in the upper third or upper half or whatever.

“I think we’re still fighting off some of that baggage. That is not something you could point to and say this is a cause for us to go bad. We’ve done a good job of signing draft choices. People would have the perception that the Rams don’t get their draft choices in, yet over the last two or three years we’ve done just about as good a job as any getting the draft choices in.

“Now we’re not going to be a team that pays people quote, whatever they want. I don’t think any of the negotiations that went on last year were unfair. There were disagreements, but the players certainly got a chance to compete for good money.”

Said Shaw: “I think the perception that we should have is that we pay our players fairly and competitively with the other teams in the league.

“If there was a definite correlation between winning and the amount of money players made, then we’d be an organization that overpaid our players last year and underpaid the year before.”