L.A. Weathers the NFL Drought Just Fine : Sports: California may again be the finger in the wind for a trend. Good riddance to greedy football owners; bring on futbol.

The professional football season of our discontent is finally coming to an end.

But while the rest of the nation braces itself for another over-hyped Super Bowl game in which some hapless team from a snowbound city is soundly thrashed by the Dallas Cowboys, we Angelenos should feel proud and maybe even a little smug. We’ve proved that a major American metropolis can get along quite well, thank you, without a National Football League team.

Lots of folks didn’t think that was possible last summer when, within a few weeks of each other, the Rams left Anaheim Stadium for St. Louis and the Raiders abandoned the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for their former home stadium in Oakland.

Of course, early last autumn when both teams got off to an unexpected fast start, the angst among some of the more fanatical football fans hereabouts was palpable. Maybe the L.A. bashers were right, they mused. Maybe new surroundings and enthusiastic new fans were going to make a difference for the Rams and Raiders. Imagine how that would feed this city’s negative image in the sporting press: laid-back El Lay, where fans not only leave games early to beat the traffic but, in their haste, sometimes don’t even remember to cheer the home team.

But then--as I’d expected--the S.O.R. factor asserted itself: Same Old Rams. Same Old Raiders. While the home stadiums had changed, the players and mediocre team management had not. In the end, neither of our former home teams wound up with a winning season.

But then, few NFL teams or league officials can honestly count 1995 as a successful year. Television ratings were down, in no small part because the league had no team in the nation’s second largest TV market. It will also be remembered as the season football fans in two other major cities were stunned to learn that they will be abandoned by teams they had loyally supported, with the Houston Oilers leaving for Nashville and the Cleveland Browns fleeing to Baltimore next season.

The NFL has apparently not absorbed the hard lesson major league baseball learned last year, when play was resumed after a 232-day strike and fans stayed away in droves: It doesn’t pay to alienate your customers.

If this trend continues, 1995 could eventually be remembered as the year pro football began to decline in popularity. And Los Angeles could be remembered as the city where the downward spiral began.

Which is kind of appropriate, since it was this city that made pro football a major sport in 1946. That was the year the Rams moved here from Cleveland and started drawing crowds of 100,000 and more to the Memorial Coliseum, the same stadium the NFL now considers unfit for any NFL team. For the record, a committee made up of NFL teams owners recently reached the same conclusion about Anaheim Stadium, a far newer facility with more amenities. These guys are obviously hard to please.

But both the Coliseum and Anaheim Stadium are good enough for other sports, most notably soccer. And in case anyone has failed to notice amid all the hoopla leading up to the Super Bowl, that is exactly what both stadiums are promoting right now. Not just soccer, but world-class soccer.

The North American Soccer Confederation, which represents this part of the world in international futbol, is even now holding its semiannual Gold Cup tournament in Southern California. It’s a big event, featuring the national team from Brazil, which last year won the World Cup, along with teams from the United States, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador and Honduras. There also are two teams from the Caribbean.

The first games in Anaheim Wednesday night drew more than 27,000 fans. Games featuring Mexico, at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, and the championship round next weekend at the Coliseum, should draw even bigger crowds.

So who needs the NFL? The crass philistines who run pro football surely did not intend it this way (they’re greedy, not stupid), but by pulling out of the Los Angeles area they have created an opportunity for another sport to fill the vacuum. Soccer fits the bill nicely, not just with a major international tournament to grab fan interest in the two-week lull before another boring Super Bowl, but with the start of major league soccer’s first season later this year.

I am not suggesting that any day now pro soccer will replace pro football as the most popular spectator sport in this country or, for that matter, even in this city. But one can envision a time in the near future when pro soccer is as popular in Southern California as, say, ice hockey is in the Northeast or stock car racing is in the South.

When that happens, the NFL will no doubt be back in Los Angeles, probably with an expansion team owned by someone like the Dodgers’ Peter O’Malley or Disney’s Michael Eisner. By then, pro football will badly need the acumen of smart businessmen like those two, because the NFL will face added competition for the support--and hard-earned dollars--of L.A. sports fans.