NFL Spurns L.A., Votes to Put New Team in Houston

After years of go-nowhere debate, bouncing from Chavez Ravine to the Coliseum to Carson and finally Hollywood Park, the NFL said no more Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to place its 32nd franchise in Houston.

Houston billionaire Bob McNair’s bid of $700 million, the largest known price for a sports franchise, and a new $310-million stadium with glass walls and a retractable roof, were too much for two belated Los Angeles proposals that the NFL said were still filled with too many uncertainties.

“The key thing was both the quality of the stadium, the fan interest in the NFL in Texas and in Houston and the past support there for the NFL, and the quality of ownership in Bob McNair,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. “We were not just making a decision based on price. We were making it on price, quality of what we were getting in proposed franchise operation, stadium and ownership. They all went together.”

Developer Ed Roski Jr., who made Los Angeles’ pitch to the NFL owners, said: “What it boiled down to in the end was that Houston was able to make an offer far in excess of anything that we could do.”

Tagliabue offered no hope of Los Angeles getting a team any time soon, but Los Angeles can be expected to be used in the future by troubled franchises, which will threaten to move to seek better stadium deals at home.

“At some point the NFL is going to have to be in Los Angeles,” said Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood agent who failed to make good on his promise to bring an expansion team to Los Angeles. “But I think it’s going to be years and years away before anyone sees a team here.”

After a unanimous recommendation from the league’s influential Expansion Committee, comprised of 14 owners, the Houston proposal carried by a vote of 29 to 0 with two abstentions.

“In Los Angeles there won’t be a tear shed because they didn’t get the franchise,” said Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills. “We just never felt any passion there.”

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan seemed to take it all in stride.

“I haven’t met anybody yet who feels depressed because of this,” Riordan said. “We have so much going on in our city. Sure, it would have been nice to have a team, but I’m not going to miss a moment’s sleep over this.”

The NFL announced that it will prepare in May to realign the league from its current six divisions to eight divisions with four teams each. Houston will begin play in 2002. The Houston team will play in the American Football Conference, which will require an unidentified team to switch to the National Football Conference.

NFL owners reported almost no difference of opinion when it came time to discuss giving an expansion team to Houston. Owners also privately suggested that backers of the Coliseum undermined Los Angeles’ chances by failing to deliver on promises and denigrating other sites throughout the process.

“Beginning 40 years ago when the American Football League started, we had a team in L.A., and at that point the Coliseum was not a very good place to play football,” said Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. “And it’s still not a very good place 40 years later. . . . That’s the problem, an insurmountable one as it turned out. Los Angeles needs a new football stadium.”

Houston Had to Pay More

The NFL, adamant in saying that it will be some time before it expands again, had hoped to put a team in Los Angeles and then use Houston to encourage better deals elsewhere before getting an existing team on the move. The delay resulted in no marked progress in Los Angeles, but clearly drove up the franchise fee in Houston, an unexpected bonus for the league.

“I think we made ourselves clear back in March as a league that there were two outstanding groups of fans out there, two outstanding cities, and that we were committed as an Expansion Committee to recommend Houston if certain specifications were not met in L.A.,” Tagliabue said. “Both made solid proposals, but the committee felt on balance that Houston’s proposal was superior.

“There were concerns in both places [Hollywood Park and the Coliseum] in the distance that still had to be traveled down the road to ensure the stadiums would be state of the art and guarantee the success of the team. The committee emphasized from the beginning that we did not just want a team in the market, but a team the fans would view as being successful and sell out on a constant basis with no games blacked out on a local basis.”

Ovitz and partner Ron Burkle, a Los Angeles financier who made his fortune in supermarkets, offered to pay the NFL $400 million, agreeing to add an additional $150 million from revenue earned on a new stadium three years after a new team began play.

Tagliabue, motivated by his own legacy, had led the charge for Los Angeles behind the scenes and had advised Ovitz that his ownership group could gain approval for a Hollywood Park stadium with a bid approaching $500 million in anticipation of McNair offering $600 million.

But McNair, Houston’s champion since the Oilers left for Tennessee in 1997, came to the meetings here with the intention of shocking the NFL owners with an offer they could not refuse.

“We knew we had to differentiate ourselves [from L.A.], and that was what we were attempting to do,” said McNair, chairman of Cogen Technologies, an energy producing company. “We wanted to do something that was so outstanding we would break through this period of indecision.

“It is an awful lot of money and it’s certainly more than I ever anticipated. But we have a passion for football, a dynamic market, and with the NFL product and a stadium that’s just going to knock your socks off, you put all those together, and we think we’re going to have a successful business enterprise.”

Jacksonville and Carolina joined the NFL as expansion teams in 1993, each paying $140 million, and Cleveland last year paid an initiation fee of $476 million. The Washington Redskins and its new stadium were recently sold for $800 million with the estimated value of the franchise being $600 million.

McNair’s offer of $700 million, called a “blow-away bid” by one owner on the Expansion Committee, sent the NFL back to Ovitz on Tuesday repeatedly requesting that he raise his ante.

“The NFL wanted us to go to $600 million, and we just couldn’t do it,” Ovitz said. “It would have been irresponsible on my part to try and match Houston’s bid.”

The league dismissed a last-gasp proposal from Roski and Eli Broad on behalf of the Coliseum, noting that the Coliseum offer asked for a $150-million loan, reducing the Broad-Roski expansion fee to $350 million.

“The best way for it to work in L.A. is to have a team move to L.A.,” said Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones, who has advocated a return to Southern California for the Raiders. “I can see that happening.”

Al Davis, the Raiders’ owner dressed in black, might have been mistaken as a man in mourning after the NFL waved aside Los Angeles in favor of Houston if his real intentions were not so well known.

Davis let it be known as recently as last week in a Chicago Tribune article that his team cannot survive in Oakland under the present circumstances. He has told others he intends to return to Los Angeles.

“The Raiders? With or without Al Davis?” said Ovitz, asked by the NFL late Tuesday night to stay in the hunt in the event another team attempts to move to Los Angeles.

Ovitz has an option on 97 acres at Hollywood Park, but must either buy the land for $55 million by Friday or allow the option to lapse. He said he will talk to Burkle, his partner, after taking some time to re-energize before deciding whether he will buy the property. If he does not, Hollywood Park officials said, they have a deal to sell it to housing developers.

Representatives of the Raiders made three attempts to acquire the Hollywood Park option last week but were rebuffed. Davis now must wait for a court in Sacramento to hear a January case that offers the possibility of freeing his team from the remaining 10 years on its stadium lease in Oakland.

In addition to the Raiders, teams rumored to be in need of new stadium deals and therefore in a position to consider a move include the Arizona Cardinals, New Orleans Saints, Minnesota Vikings and Buffalo Bills.

It would not make financial sense for any existing team to move to Los Angeles unless a stadium is built with public money and revenue generated from the stadium is given to the team. Based on the mood of the public and elected officials throughout this expansion process, that does not seem likely.

“I know we have to be there, and maybe more than anyone else I stood up saying we need to expand to Los Angeles,” said Wilson, owner of the Bills since 1960. “But watching what happened in Los Angeles in recent months really turned me away.

“It was like, this is all the money we’re going to put up and you need to do the rest and then we’ll think about whether we’re going to let you into our city or not. That’s how it came across to me, and well, that’s not going to fly. The city should supply the stadium, and we’ll supply the franchise. I don’t think we should go in and build the stadium and the franchise. Sure, we get a lot of TV money, but players get quite a bit of that.”

St. Louis Rams President John Shaw joined Arizona owner Bill Bidwill, who has an unsatisfactory stadium situation, in abstaining from the Houston-Los Angeles vote.

As part of the Rams’ agreement with the league when it moved to St. Louis, owner Georgia Frontiere will not be given a share of the $700-million expansion fee. Had the league voted to award the team to Los Angeles, Frontiere would have been included in the payoff, receiving a little more than $22 million.

“I guess I feel somewhat vindicated at this point,” said Shaw, who left Anaheim claiming that the Los Angeles area had failed to support the Rams. “I guess that’s the conclusion now by the league. That’s too bad.”

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L.A.’s Time Runs Out

Key mileposts in the city’s bid to get an NFL team, beginning in September 1996:

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