NFL in Utah is just a pipe dream — or is it?

With the news that Real Salt Lake founder Dave Checketts is teaming up with talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh in a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League, the rumor mill soon kicked into high gear.

Pretty soon, people across the Wasatch Front were playing connect the dots, and it didn't take much hang time at all before the question emerged: Could this mean that the NFL, which long ago surpassed major league baseball as the most popular sport in America, might someday be coming to Utah? OK, so perhaps that proposition is about as far-fetched as, oh, say, the Beehive State hosting the Olympic Games. Yep, for years, most naysayers said that'd never, ever happen, either.

Sure enough, the 2002 Winter Olympics came along and proved 'em all wrong.

And now we've got Checketts, who has strong ties to Utah and also owns the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League, making a bid — along with the ultra-conservative people's champion Limbaugh — to buy up the majority interest of the struggling NFL franchise in St. Louis.

(By the way, don't forget that St. Louis already lost an NFL team in 1987 when the Cardinals moved to Arizona or that these Rams formerly called Los Angeles their home before moving to St. Louis in 1995.)

Following the Checketts/Limbaugh-wanna-buy-the-Rams announcement, local sports-talk radio shows had a field day.

One very intelligent-sounding man called 1280 AM The Zone and said he had seen the master plan in Draper and, low and behold, a large chunk of land was already set aside for an NFL stadium to be built there.

Of course, the biggest stumbling block to possibly bringing the NFL here is that almost all of its games are played on Sundays. And many folks feel that the influence of the LDS Church — which encourages its members to keep the sabbath day holy by attending church services and not engaging in any activities that would require others to work that day — would be highly detrimental to an NFL team's potential attendance and subsequent success.

However, another highly educated sports-talk caller who had apparently done plenty of research on the subject said that, of the approximately 2 million people living along the Wasatch Front, only around half of them were LDS nowadays and that only one-third of those church members were actually active — thus leaving a potential fan base of more than 1.5 million.