NFL Advantage to Houston

Houston spoke in terms of what the NFL understands best Tuesday, grabbing its attention with a $700 million expansion fee offer and winning the approval of the expansion committee, which will meet today to formally recommend that the league bypass Los Angeles and award Houston the 32nd franchise.

The recommendation, while not binding, is expected to win the necessary 24 votes at a meeting of all 31 owners later today.

Michael Ovitz, who claimed last week that he would return to Los Angeles with the expansion team, fell $300 million short of Houston’s Texas-sized offer and rejected repeated attempts by league officials to increase his bid.

Ovitz offered the NFL an expansion fee of $400 million with the ability to add another $150 million in deferred money. His overall stadium and franchise fee offer would have cost him and his partner Ron Burkle $990 million.

The league said it gave no consideration to a last-minute surprise proposal from Eli Broad and Ed Roski on behalf of the Coliseum.

“We were given no choice,” said an owner on the committee. “Ovitz lacked the firepower after Bob McNair’s preemptive strike of $700 million. We were expecting maybe $600 million, but this was a blow-away offer. And the other thing [Broad and Roski’s offer]--just more of the same nonsense.”

Ovitz was crestfallen when told of the committee’s decision shortly before being called to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s suite for a meeting that lasted well past midnight.

“If Ovitz’s group had been able to get to $550 million in up-front money now, maybe we could have gotten there,” said a league official. “Maybe.”

The league, while prevented by its own philosophy from advocating the relocation of an existing team to Los Angeles, will offer the conflicting suggestion today that one day soon the NFL will return to Los Angeles.

League owners remain resolved not to expand again any time soon, however, so it will be up to Tagliabue to prop up Ovitz’s group so it can be used as leverage any time a troubled franchise wishes to seek a better stadium deal by threatening a move to Los Angeles.

The league hoped to convince Ovitz late last night to exercise his Hollywood Park option, which expires Friday, and buy the stadium site for $55 million, which would effectively allow him to control the relocation process, making L.A. more viable for a team on the move. But the league figures now a downtrodden Ovitz will walk away from Hollywood Park.

After five laborious years of debate, including nine NFL owners’ meetings to discuss expansion in the past 12 months, the final chapter looked more like a comedy sketch here than a high-level business meeting.

Roski, acting on behalf of Broad and the Coliseum, shocked the NFL by arriving with a new proposal and a satchel full of endorsements from Los Angeles politicians, who apparently had just woke up.

Broad said the bid was a serious one, but not so serious that he felt moved to attend the meeting, making it look more like an ego play to undermine Ovitz than an answer to whatever Houston might propose.

Houston representatives looked on with renewed confidence as Los Angeles chose to devour its own before hitting the finish line.

League officials gave Roski a courtesy visit, but did not afford him the same opportunity as Houston prospective owner Bob McNair and Ovitz, who spoke to the 12-man expansion committee at length.

“There proposal was the same one they’ve been making and included a $150 million from the league, something Michael Ovitz was not asking for,” said a league official. “So their franchise fee offer was effectively $350 million--far less than Michael’s. I think everybody was pretty irritated at what they were trying to do.”

While NFL owners lined up at the front desk to check into the meeting’s hotel, Roski stood a few feet away surrounded by the media, telling them there’s no way the NFL will be able to do a deal at Hollywood Park.

Imagine that--just hours before owners were to meet to make a decision between Houston and Hollywood Park, and a prominent businessman from Los Angeles is standing in the lobby telling the world that the No. 1 site being touted in Los Angeles is not acceptable.

“I don’t think it can be done there, personally,” said Roski, his handlers trying to pull him away from the media. “That’s my business and I would not want the challenge to try and get it done at Hollywood Park. We had a lot of experience with the Hollywood Park location. We had the two teams out there, the Kings and the Lakers, and we chose to move out of that location for a number of reasons, and one of those was traffic accessibility.

“The traffic is a major concern out there. Even when we had an arena [Forum] that had 17,500 capacity, it took you two to two-and-a-half hours to exit the facility. So you can imagine if you put a 65,000 seat stadium there what the traffic congestion will be.”

Roski’s rip job on Ovitz’s plan was reminiscent of what happened in St. Louis when the league took up expansion in 1993. St. Louis was the favorite going in, but the NFL said ownership squabbles within the St. Louis effort forced it to go to Jacksonville and Carolina instead.

The Rams then left Anaheim for St. Louis.

Roski, who deserves high marks for his dogged devotion to bringing football to L.A., said it was “absolutely 1,000% wrong” to suggest that Broad was making an ego play when he sent him here with a new proposal. He also took exception to any suggestion that it was muddying the waters as the NFL prepared itself to pick between Houston and Ovitz.

“We deserved the opportunity and the fans of Los Angeles deserved the opportunity of making an offer,” said Roski, although several NFL owners had advised Broad earlier in the week that there was no longer any interest in the Coliseum. “We made a very firm offer. Nobody else did in Los Angeles. I didn’t see anybody else [Ovitz], who works on a piece of property for a week, present a position to the NFL. We worked on our thing for over three years. We have every single elected official behind this. Why shouldn’t we make an offer.

“And let’s make this clear, having two sites and two owners did not impact this decision made by the NFL. It’s just that the economics in Houston are so much more compelling.”

Roski, still taking aim at Ovitz, said, “He never made an offer. They listened to every detail of our proposal. They didn’t have another proposal in Los Angeles. They only had ours. We made a firm offer, a written offer of $500 million for the franchise with $25 million in earnest money. We had Mayor Richard Riordan and a long list of city and county officials signing off on our financing plan. We would have needed City Council approval, but I got 12 of them when we did the Staples Center and I would have gotten 12 again. We only needed eight.”

Roger Goodell, the NFL’s vice president of football operations, said that was “absolutely not true. Ovitz made an offer in writing, and I will show it to prove it.”

Ovitz said he worked with the NFL in formulating his offer, and told the NFL he was willing to provide an expansion fee in the “$400 to $500 million range.”

Billionaire supermarket magnate Burkle surprised league officials by appearing to handcuff Ovitz, not allowing him to close the gap with Houston’s bid. Lacking the expansion fee and Burkle’s permission to increase his offer, Ovitz tried to convince the expansion committee in a pep talk that he had the marketing skills to make a team successful in Los Angeles, while warning the league that if it sent him home without a team, it would find it difficult to ever place a team in Los Angeles.

Houston, meanwhile, had done its homework, including a detailed plan on how it will assemble the inner workings of a football franchise, something the L.A. groups had not even begun to assemble.

“There were too many questions about the Hollywood Park project in the end and none with Houston,” said an NFL owner. “Give Ovitz credit for trying, but Bob McNair has spent a lot of time on this and how were we going to explain to everyone that he made the big offer and we didn’t take it?”

So Houston gets McNair and a team, Oliver Stone gets Cameron Diaz as owner of his football team in the movie, “Any Given Sunday,” and Los Angeles now enters limbo, doomed to become used by every team in the league searching for a better deal at home.

“We’re going to see a team in Los Angeles soon because it’s important to Los Angeles and to the NFL,” Roski concluded. “Eventually they will have a team in Los Angeles. I can guarantee you that.”

*

FINGER POINTING

Coach Jimmy Johnson criticizes Dan Marino for poor performance in Miami’s 23-18 loss to Buffalo Monday night. Page 8