Since then, Rosenbloom and Rodriguez have dropped Moag and hired investment firm Goldman Sachs to serve as a financial adviser and help evaluate ownership bids.

Acquiring the Rams will take deep pockets. Forbes magazine estimates the team’s value is more than $900 million. That would put the combined Rosenbloom-Rodriguez stake at about $540 million, though sources now expect the entire team is worth significantly less—perhaps in the range of $700 million to $750 million—given the poor state of the economy and the Rams’ miserable on-field performance.

Even at a discount, however, Limbaugh realized last summer that buying into the NFL without a significant investment partner would be a stretch. He signed a new eight-year syndication deal with Premiere Radio Networks estimated to be worth about $300 million. But NFL ownership requires even more.

“I have no debt whatsoever. This would require changing that,” Limbaugh said. “There is a whole lot of interest in the Rams with the NFL being a business entity that a lot of people want to be involved in. But it’s becoming a billionaires’ club.”

Limbaugh, 58, played football in high school and has been a fan of the game since childhood. He was considered, but passed over, as a Monday Night Football color analyst in 2000. He had a brief stint on ESPN’s pregame studio show Sunday NFL Countdown in 2003, but resigned a few weeks into the season after he made remarks about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb that critics charged as racist.

Limbaugh grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a two-hour drive south of St. Louis. He left town in the early 1970s after flunking out of Southeast Missouri State University and landed his first radio job in Pittsburgh. But his brother, David Limbaugh, still lives in Cape, and cousin Stephen Limbaugh Jr. was confirmed in June 2008 as a federal judge for the Eastern District of Missouri in St. Louis after serving on the Missouri Supreme Court since 1992.

Yet Limbaugh, who called himself a “huge Steelers fan,” said connections to the Show-Me State do not play into his thinking about the Rams.

“The fact that I’m from Missouri has nothing to do with it,” Limbaugh said. “This is a business decision. The worst thing that can happen to an NFL team is for a fan to buy it, because it is a business. You have to be able to let a player go, even a year or two early. You have to be able to tell a 32-year-old that he’s washed up.”

Limbaugh first learned to separate the personal and business sides of sports while holding a marketing job with the Kansas City Royals from 1979 to 1983.

“After the novelty wore off, I lost the ingredients of being a fan. It became a job,” Limbaugh said. “I’ve made it a point not to get so close to the performance side of football, the players side. If you are an owner and put (the players) on a pedestal, you are at risk.”

A sale of the Rams to Limbaugh or anyone else could be complicated by several factors. Billionaire THF Realty chairman Stan Kroenke owns 40 percent of the team. He held the right of first refusal to buy out Frontiere’s stake if she decided to sell, and that right might still be enforceable despite the transfer of her ownership to her heirs, said Bob Lattinville, head of the sports-law practice at Stinson Morrison Hecker in St. Louis.