No Team : In Sight

Peyton Manning has another year of college left, and it will be 1998 before the gifted Tennessee quarterback makes his NFL debut.

And then the race can begin, leaving you to guess which will come first: Peyton Manning’s NFL retirement announcement or the NFL’s pronouncement that football is returning to Los Angeles?

If heredity plays a role in the outcome--Manning’s father, Archie, played 14 seasons before calling it quits--it could be a race to the wire.

Here you are, Los Angeles, another year gone by and assured of moving into a third season without professional football with this telling piece of information: The NFL owners’ annual meetings are to begin here Monday and there is no mention of Los Angeles whatsoever on their agenda.

Los Angeles-area officials will be in attendance, begging for NFL attention with the lure of a hospitality room, but beyond the display of a toy model depicting a new Coliseum and happy chatter about hard work ultimately paying off, they are in no position to make a formal pitch for action.

They tried that at the last assemblage of owners in New Orleans last October, and their plans were reduced to rubble after several NFL owners ridiculed their Coliseum presentation, which lacked a financing strategy.

Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has been instrumental in rallying local political support for the new Coliseum, was in New Orleans and viewed the activities quite differently than those owners who had emerged scoffing.

“In going with this at the intensity that we have, I have seen no major mistakes on our part and do not believe we have erred in any noticeable way,” Ridley-Thomas said. “We were not hurt by New Orleans. To me, the test of whether it was a success or failure is whether you make it to the next step in the process. And there are more makings now of a partnership between the NFL and Los Angeles and a new Coliseum than in October.”

Peter O’Malley is selling his Dodgers and has offered his support to the Coliseum. Recent news from Tampa indicated that the Buccaneers had a deal in place to move to Hollywood Park if they lost their vote for a new stadium, but that presupposes the NFL would have approved such a move and that football fans in Los Angeles would have embraced such a loser.

No, for now it keeps coming back to the Coliseum.

“There has been progress,” Ridley-Thomas said. “This is a journey not always defined by hoopla. This is hard work. It has to be methodically executed in some respects and it is not always stuff that makes headlines or causes people to celebrate. Every play doesn’t necessarily result in a touchdown, but the important thing to appreciate is that we are in the game.”

The NFL brass, which includes most notably NFL President Neil Austrian, has been dealing exclusively the past few months with the folks pushing the new Coliseum plan. Given the sentiment of most NFL owners, who still consider the Coliseum area a combat zone, you would think that would be like betting on the New York Jets week after week.

But the old, the new, the whatever Coliseum you want to call it refuses to die. And now there is tangible evidence of a stadium site with some of the perks necessary to attract the big-money owner it will take to bring the NFL to Los Angeles.

Money already has been spent to improve the 110 Freeway and provide more access to the Coliseum. The California Science Center, a phase-one $70-million expansion in a series of three--with almost $30 million of hands-on exhibits--to the California Museum of Science and Industry will open in November and will be just a Ray Guy punt away from the Coliseum.

A number of eye-sore buildings skirting the 160-acre Exposition Park have been removed, and soon officials will begin tearing down fences and installing soccer fields to continue the fan-friendly theme.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Exposition Park can have the fiesta, Olympic-like atmosphere the NFL wants, which will encourage fans to come early and stay late for NFL games,” said Steve Soboroff, who has been working on behalf of the city for the return of the NFL--wherever that might be.

But as Rick Welch, chairman of the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission said this week, “We have to figure out a way for the NFL owners to realize what is happening there as opposed to what they might have experienced with the Raiders. It’s there, it can happen, but do they know that?”

In truth, the NFL owners really don’t care about the Coliseum, or Los Angeles for that matter. They care about money, and Los Angeles has none to offer now, and there are so many other ways right now to make it.

Later this year they will enter into negotiations for a new TV contract and they have already been advised their revenues may almost double because of competition between the bidding networks, so obviously the lack of football in the nation’s second-largest market has failed to hurt them financially.

And while they may not care about Los Angeles, that does not mean they won’t use Los Angeles.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue has appointed a new 11-man committee--how come Georgia Frontiere never gets put on a committee?--to study the challenges facing the NFL. Translation: How does the league maintain franchise stability and squeeze more dollars out of existing cities to build new stadiums, thereby providing more revenue opportunities?

The answer is very simple: Raise the specter of expansion. Tease cities such as San Antonio, Memphis, Toronto and Los Angeles into making commitments for new facilities, and then use them as leverage in their own home locales.

So if you are Pat Bowlen and you own the Broncos, you can tell the good people of Denver your team is moving to Los Angeles unless money is made available for a new Mile High Stadium. There are some observers in Denver who are convinced the Broncos are leaving, but currently there is no place to go.

Carmen Policy, president of the San Francisco 49ers, has suggested his team might have to move unless a new stadium is built. That’s what they are saying in Minnesota and in New England, and coincidentally all those owners are on this new committee.

The NFL needs Los Angeles to become interested in football again. The league has gone so far as to embrace the new Coliseum--because no one else is working that hard to make things happen in Los Angeles--although privately was loath to do so at the outset.

Late this season, or more likely early next year, the league will have to give Cleveland a team--be it an existing franchise or an expansion team. One logical scenario calls for Cleveland being awarded an expansion franchise for the 1999 season and Los Angeles getting the promise of the second expansion team beyond 2000, as long as it meets a list of criteria, much as Cleveland had to do after the loss of the Browns.

The NFL would be dictating terms of L.A.’s surrender: Take it or leave it, and the NFL’s demands would call for a new stadium, which probably would require an investment of some public money.

It would call for identifiable ownership willing to pay premium expansion fees for the privilege of joining the NFL fraternity, and it would call for the local populace to make a big-bucks commitment for personal-seat licenses.

OK, so Peyton Manning will never get the opportunity to play professional football in Los Angeles before being forced to retire.