Cal Lutheran Fails to Woo NFL Tenant : Training camp: After three teams reject school, officials decide not to solicit another.

Cal Lutheran, which lost the Dallas Cowboys this year after 25 years of hosting the NFL team’s training camp, has been rejected as a training site by the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Raiders and is not seeking any other NFL tenants, a school official said Wednesday.

Both Carl Peterson, the president and general manager of the Chiefs, and Al Davis, managing general partner of the Raiders, visited the Thousand Oaks campus in the past several weeks, according to Leon Scott, the university’s vice president for business and finance. But both teams later informed Scott that they were not interested in holding training camp at the campus.

“We are not pursuing anyone,” Scott said. “We are open to proposals, but we are not actively pursuing an NFL team. The Chiefs approached us and then came to visit, but they decided not to make a move this year. They did leave the possibility open for the future.”

Bob Moore, the Chiefs’ public-relations director, said it was simply a case of getting better offers.

“Thousand Oaks was one of at least eight places that we have explored,” he said. “Our training site now, in Liberty (Mo.), offers us no chance to bring in other teams to practice against. The nearest NFL camps are in Wisconsin and Texas.”

Moore said the team is considering sites in Wisconsin and Steamboat Springs, Colo., among others.

“We have had a number of proposals from cities that quite frankly won’t require us to pay them any money,” he said. “We would have had to pay Cal Lutheran for the use of their facility.”

The Raiders inquired, Cal Lutheran’s Scott said, because of the often chilly conditions at their current training camp in Oxnard. After a visit that lasted several hours, Scott said he was told that the Raiders were not interested. The team has since announced plans to move back to Oakland, and a Raider official said this week that the Raiders might return to the Oxnard training site this summer or return to their former training site in Santa Rosa.

“Our primary purpose here is instruction and education,” Scott said. “We’re not in the business of hosting professional football teams. To have had the Cowboys here for 25 years was a wonderful relationship, but it was just a sideline for us, and it was certainly not the most profitable sideline you could imagine.

“It was important to us, and there was prestige attached to having the Cowboys here every year. But we didn’t depend on it for any significant amount of revenue.”

Scott said that hosting an NFL team was more important 25 years ago, before the school had a foundation in the community.

“We believe now that we have matured and have a solid academic reputation based upon our own actions,” he said. “Basically, having an NFL team here is not very important to us anymore.”