For Openers, This League Has Never Had More Feeling

It is opening day in the NFL, a chance for fans in places such as Chicago to be inspired by the likes of Erik Kramer, Steve Stenstrom and Moses Moreno.

Feel the excitement. There is a waiting list of more than 9,000 to purchase Chicago Bears’ season tickets. Add your name today, says Kendra Lindborg, the team’s assistant ticket manager, and in eight to 10 years there might be an opportunity to purchase end zone seats.

By then there’s also a good chance the Bears will have a won a game.

But “Feel the Power,” as the NFL suggests in its promotions, as Bear fans willingly shiver in December, spending an average of $38.18 a ticket, a consolation of sorts only because NFL fans everywhere else will be spending an average of $42.86 a ticket, more than $74 a ticket to watch the Redskins collapse again.

Say you wouldn’t do it, but the fact is people are lining up to pay, filling club seats and luxury boxes, and while Los Angeles might be beginning its fourth season without pro football, the NFL’s grip on the public has never been stronger.

Every game this opening weekend sold out more than two days ago--the first time that has happened on any regular-season weekend since the NFL instituted TV blackout rules in 1973.

NFL owners are getting richer and richer. Each will each receive $73.3 million a season for the next eight years because of a new TV deal. Tuesday they convene in Chicago to get richer, selecting a new owner for Cleveland, who will be paying more than $500 million in initiation fees. And then they will meet again in October, inviting Houston, the New Coliseum Partners and Michael Ovitz to make their best financial pitch for a 32nd team.

Feel the lure. The Ravens will play in a new publicly funded football stadium in Baltimore today, the Buccaneers will open their new publicly funded stadium the third week of the season, and after Cleveland starts play next season in its publicly funded new home, the NFL will have moved into 10 new money-making facilities this decade. Eleven other NFL owners have already begun the process of trying to collect public money to get their own new stadiums, and no one seems to think they will fail.

Feel the hype. ESPN begins its football coverage every Sunday now with a two-hour show, while ABC starts Monday night coverage an hour earlier, but with a 20-minute preview show before opening kickoff. CBS mortgaged its future outbidding NBC for this year’s AFC games because it discovered life without the NFL is more than just another “60 Minutes.”

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s contract has been extended through 2005, the labor agreement with the players has been advanced through 2003 and the league is coming off one of its most exciting Super Bowls, Denver upsetting Green Bay, and most everyone sharing in John Elway’s jubilation.

This year, as everyone knows by now, Kansas City wins Super Bowl XXXIII.

Knowing the ultimate outcome, of course, does not spoil the NFL season for anyone. A year ago at this time here, the public was advised Denver would shock the world and defeat Green Bay in Super Bowl XXXII, and the NFL’s popularity has only mushroomed.

It’s all the subplots, the questions that cannot be answered until late December, Barry Sanders’ amazing moves, Scott Mitchell and Drew Bledsoe’s disappointments, Jim Harbaugh’s heroics and Bill Parcells’ tantrums that make the NFL so compelling.

Take San Francisco, which has the assignment of simply showing up this season in order to secure 12 or 13 wins against the likes of the Panthers, Rams, Saints and Falcons. The 49ers play games against only three teams that went to the playoffs last season--none in September or October. More than any team in the league, they can make blunders and get away with them.

They pay Green Bay defensive end Gabe Wilkins $20 million for five years to join them, he agrees, limping to San Francisco on a sore knee and now sits on the team’s physically unable to perform bench, ineligible to play until after the sixth week.

They trade a second-round pick for tackle Jamie Brown, a Denver bust who failed to take advantage of a starting opportunity a year ago and was a candidate to be cut. Brown shows up, disappears, gets fined $5,000, comes back, shows up a half-hour late for a preseason game, and then gets suspended three weeks for “conduct detrimental to the team.” Wait until they try playing him.

Feel the appeal. It’s a game that gives us a smiling Ironhead Heyward standing in the shower doing soap commercials, cut by the Rams now because he was too fat and replaced with a third-year player who wasn’t good enough last year to play a single down. “Guys,” Dick Vermeil said in saying goodbye to Heyward, “it’s the National Football League. Not Hillsdale High School. Not Napa College. Not UCLA. It’s the St. Louis Rams. It’s not his right to play in it. It’s a privilege to play in the National Football League.”

That’s what the Redskins were telling Sean Gilbert a year ago, but he stayed home because he said God had instructed him to do so. God gave him permission to return this year, a short time after the Carolina Panthers had agreed to pay Gilbert $46.5 million.

Feel the changes. Only 18 players remain from the Jets’ team taken over by Parcells in 1997. The Saints ranked fourth on defense a year ago, forced 55 turnovers and recorded a league-high 59 sacks, but start this season with seven new defensive starters. Only eight players remain from the Ram team that played in Anaheim in 1994. Saftey LeRoy Butler is the only survivor from the cast of 57 players that Ron Wolf inherited when he became general manager of the Packers after the ’91 season.

Feel the paranoia. “No matter how well we do, I have a sense that there are going to be some people who think it’s not enough to score 30 points a game and get 400 yards of offense,” said Brian Billick, the Vikings’ offensive coordinator. “There are going to be some people who say we ought to be doing better.”

Feel the hope. The Saints look like a team that won’t win a game. But as wide receiver Sean Dawkins pointed out, “When I see our schedule [at St. Louis, Carolina, at Indianapolis], I see that it’s possible that we start 3-0.”

Frank Reich, 36, has come out of retirement to back up Detroit’s Mitchell. Steve DeBerg, 44, has returned to play behind Atlanta’s Chris Chandler. Webster Slaughter, 34 and out of football last year, has come back with the Chargers.

A young Jake Plummer gives the Cardinals a chance to record their first winning season since moving to Arizona in 1988. A move to Vanderbilt Stadium gives the Oilers a chance to play in front of a full house in Nashville. Ricky Watters gives the Seahawks a running chance to catch Denver and Kansas City.

Feel for the losers. Chicago, San Diego, St. Louis, Marshall Faulk, New Orleans, Oakland. Philadelphia loses offensive coordinator Jon Gruden, who becomes coach of the Raiders and hires Dana Bible, who directed Stanford to a last-place finish in total offense. The Eagles’ first-string offense scored one touchdown in four exhibition games.

Feel the moment. Elway’s farewell tour, and one last matchup with Dan Marino on Monday night, Dec. 21, in Miami.

Feel the loss. The Giants’ best player, cornerback Jason Sehorn, volunteered to return kicks during the preseason. He was lost for the season because of a knee injury on a kickoff return.

Feel a cheap shot. Former Giant coach Dan Reeves, who wouldn’t let Sehorn return kicks, said, “I can find a punt returner, but I can’t find a cornerback.”

Feel the competition. Ryan Leaf trying to be better than Peyton Manning and vice versa. Emmitt Smith trying to hold off Chris Warren once Warren recovers from a groin injury. Doug Flutie waiting for Rob Johnson to falter in Buffalo. Lion fans counting on rookie quarterback Charlie Batch to step in eventually for Mitchell. Neil O’Donnell and Jeff Blake in Cincinnati, Glenn Foley and Vinny Testaverde in New York with the Jets, Jeff George and himself.

Feel the class. Denver guard Mark Schlereth, winner of the Halas Award, the Pro Football Writers Assn. honor for courage on the field, is sending his plaque to Mark Rypien, whose 3-year-old son, Andrew, recently died of a brain tumor. Schlereth, a former teammate of Rypien’s with the Redskins, left a preseason game in Green Bay at halftime to attend the child’s funeral.

Schlereth plans to have the plaque engraved with the inscription, “In living memory of Andrew.”