Pro Football : Expansion and Realignment Are Getting Closer

Three items that weren’t on the agenda--expansion, realignment and revenue sharing--dominated much of the informal discussion this week at the National Football League’s winter meetings in Palm Desert.

The league needs 30 teams instead of the present 28, some club owners reasoned, and the teams should be regrouped into six geographically logical divisions.

It won’t happen this year, but both should be done in the early 1990s, Art Modell, president of the Cleveland Browns, said.

“I think we’ve held off on expansion about as long as we can,” Modell added, noting that numerous American cities--including Baltimore, Oakland, Memphis, and Jacksonville--have been waiting for many years.

“At the same time, we should realign into divisions along purely geographical lines. Heading into the ‘90s, nothing else makes sense economically, or from any other standpoint.”

Jim Irsay, vice president and general manager of the Indianapolis Colts, sees it about the same way.

“We ought to combine revenue sharing with (expansion and) realignment,” said Irsay, who is one of many owners favoring an equal distribution of total gate receipts as well as television income.

“The discrepancy (in gate revenue) between cities like Phoenix and Detroit isn’t healthy for pro football. The NFL was built on a foundation of strong markets everywhere.”

None of this is possible without labor peace, retiring Commissioner Pete Rozelle said. But some of the owners are getting restless. They want to begin moving as soon as next year toward realignment and, if possible, expansion and revenue sharing.

The Raiders may be having their troubles on the field these days, but they’re still serving the NFL as a training ground.

All five of the league’s West Coast teams were represented at Palm Desert this week by executives who came up under Raider owner Al Davis.

The lineup: San Francisco--Bill Walsh; Rams--John Robinson; Seattle--Tom Flores; San Diego--Steve Ortmayer; Raiders--Al LoCasale.

Flores is a former Raider head coach. The others are former assistants.

Although Seattle pushed the Raiders out of the playoffs in the final regular-season game of 1988, Davis thinks his team is on the way back.

“We’re close to being real good again,” he said.

Davis surprised a lot of people when, in a surprising display of emotion, he hugged Rozelle and spoke of his respect for the commissioner after Rozelle had announced his retirement. It had been widely assumed, since they have been feuding for about 20 years, that they shared only a cordial dislike of one another.

The NFL decision that provoked the most animosity this week was one reducing the training-camp player limit to 80.

This ended a long era of unrestricted off-season recruiting in which some NFL coaches had found unsuspected quality by bringing in 150 or more candidates.

On many issues at the winter meetings each year, the league splits into one group of clubs seeking the cheap way out and another that pitches for excellence. This was one such issue.

And although teams that operate on the cheap are often outvoted, they usually gain winter-meeting leverage whenever one of their number makes the Super Bowl, as the Cincinnati Bengals did this year.

The Bengal economy cartel won this time, continuing a big week in which it had also prevailed in two other other areas:

--The coaches will be limited to a six-man taxi squad this year, and if they have to fill it with injured-reserve players, there will be no room for developmental players.

--Instant replay officiating will have to continue this season without a new technological improvement that would have advised the upstairs officials precisely when a whistle sounded on the field.

Sometimes the NFL is a major league in name only.