At This Rate, the Picture Is Bleak

For everyone else, the NFL season started Sunday.

For those wanting football to come crawling back to Los Angeles, it started Monday, as it has started every Monday for the last five years.

That’s the day the initial TV ratings come out.

The day Los Angeles scores big.

The lower the ratings, the more the NFL realizes how much it needs us, and talk about your dramatic first-week victory.

The national average for the Fox doubleheader? A 13.1 rating.

The average in Los Angeles? An 8.4 rating.

Touchdown.

The national average for the CBS game? A 12.1 rating.

The average in Los Angeles? A 9.7 rating.

Extra point.

While celebrating the fact that the NFL will see it is clearly dying in Los Angeles and will finally pay that lousy $150 million for our lousy parking lot, I giddily called Neal Pilson.

He is a former longtime president of CBS Sports, a consultant specializing as a rare objective voice in a cluttered medium.

So, Los Angeles’ decreasing TV ratings are the electronic equivalent of a chop block on the NFL, right?

“Well, not exactly,” Pilson said. “I’m getting ready to go over to a meeting at the league offices, and I do not expect to see TV executives lined up at 280 Park Avenue demanding that they put a team in Los Angeles.”

He paused.

“Frankly, there is very little network pressure to go back there.”

And that was that.

This town’s ace in the hole, trumped, not just by Pilson’s opinions, but by various other TV and marketing executives summoned Wednesday to confirm them.

That phony Sept. 15 deadline has come and gone, and the only thing Los Angeles football fans are guaranteed is a bigger headache.

Those who thought TV would be the bottom-line reason for the NFL eventually placing an expansion team here this fall have apparently been, well, watching too much TV.

Executives with no monetary incentive to make such admissions said that the networks’ $17.6-billion deal with the NFL was fine without Los Angeles.

Decreasing ratings are offset by the extra game shown here each Sunday.

Decreasing ratings for the nation’s most popular sport still bring advertisers more consumers than they would get anywhere else in the fragmented TV market.

And considering the dreadful TV situation here when the Rams and Raiders left town in 1994, have things gotten any worse?

“The fundamental issue here is, if Los Angeles had a successful team and the games sold out and everybody was watching, the league would be better off with football there,” said Marc Ganis, president of Sports Corp. Ltd., a sports investment banking firm in Chicago. “But if it was like it was before, and the games didn’t sell out, and there are a lot of blackouts, then the league should not put a team there.”

In other words, what is happening now matters little to TV folks, despite what many of us have been thinking for the last couple of years.

“The lifestyle there makes Los Angeles only a fair sports TV market, period,” Pilson said. “The lower ratings now aren’t anything that affects the bigger picture.”

It is all about what happened back then, and what TV people are worried will happen again.

“Everybody accuses TV people of losing their minds, but they still have their memories,” Pilson said. “And the memories they have of televising football in Los Angeles is lousy.”

Maybe you also remember.

Because of poor crowds, there would often be a Sunday game blacked out, meaning only two games would be sent to this market.

And because the local teams were mediocre and unentertaining in recent years, when their road games were televised, the ratings weren’t great anyway.

Not to mention, there was rarely a “Monday Night Football” game played here because the league couldn’t afford to have its weekly centerpiece blacked out in its second-largest market.

“Los Angeles is seeing more football without a team than with a team,” Pilson said. “You can see that TV is not a factor here when the NFL is not going out of its way to bring a team there.”

This became clear, Pilson said, when Los Angeles was not a factor in the latest record-money TV deal.

“There were no conditions or exceptions for Los Angeles in there,” Pilson reminded. “There was nothing that said the networks would pay less money if Los Angeles was not on the schedule.”

Another TV executive put it differently.

“If it’s not broke, why fix it?” the exec said. “The NFL is clearly the number one TV sport even without Los Angeles.”

And if the initial first-week numbers are any indication, it is getting even bigger.

The ESPN Sunday night game between the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers scored a 9.6, making it the highest-rated cable NFL opener in history. “Monday Night Football,” which has struggled in recent years, pulled a 16.1 rating reminiscent of its glory days.

Fox and CBS also pulled numbers that were higher than last year’s average.

“The NFL is still king,” Ganis said. “It is the one program that advertisers can be sure will reach their target market en masse.”

Apparently with or without Los Angeles.

None of this, of course, addresses the issues of lost fans, and weakened merchandising, and an entire generation of millions who grow up loving baseball and basketball instead.

But there’s no way to quantify that.

The NFL and its partner networks trust mostly in numbers.

And when it comes to using TV as a wedge, it looks like Los Angeles’ number is up.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

COUCH ON SPOT: No. 1 pick Tim Couch will make first start for Browns against Titans. Page 8