Biography | Stan Kroenke — The Trophy He Lifted in the Stadium He Built

The first NFL game in this bowl was played to empty seats. Eighteen months later the same building hosted Super Bowl LVI, and the home club won it. On 13 February 2022 the Los Angeles Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20. Kickoff was 3:35 p.m. Pacific. Official attendance was 70,048. It was the first Super Bowl played under this canopy. It was only the second time a team had played and won a Super Bowl in its own stadium, after Tampa Bay a year earlier at Raymond James. Stan Kroenke accepted the Vince Lombardi Trophy on the field he had financed. The Rams had come back to Los Angeles for the 2016 season and waited on this bowl. Matthew Stafford was in his first year with the club after twelve seasons in Detroit without a playoff win. The franchise’s previous Super Bowl title had come in January 2000, when the club still played in St. Louis. Its last championship as a Los Angeles team had been the 1951 NFL title. Cooper Kupp caught the go-ahead one-yard pass from Matthew Stafford with 1:25 left and was named the game’s most valuable player. Aaron Donald’s pressure on fourth down ended Cincinnati’s last drive. Joe Burrow was sacked seven times. The bowl sits on the former Hollywood Park racetrack, on land Kroenke’s holding company had assembled before the January 2016 owners’ vote in Houston. Later reporting put the privately financed Hollywood Park project near five billion dollars. A visitor on Stadium Drive is standing where the owner of the club lifted the trophy in the house he built. Photo: Redspork02, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Photo: Fox Sports, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons