Finally, an NFL Winning Play: Pro Football Foots the Bill

It’s been nine years since pro football abandoned Los Angeles. And neither the city nor the National Football League seems any worse off for the prolonged separation.

Sports fans here have focused on all the Laker basketball championships. Or on the Angels finally winning a World Series. And soccer has flourished nicely in this increasingly Latino city, filling any void the St. Louis Rams and Oakland Raiders left in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where both teams played in their glory days. The NFL, meanwhile, remains bloated and rich, despite declining TV ratings that worry its marketing gurus.

But amid all the hoopla about last week’s announcement of a new plan to bring the NFL back to L.A. (there have been about a dozen, by my count) one detail was very significant. If it is true -- a big if -- the NFL has finally blinked in its long standoff with Los Angeles.

Not about coming back to town. The NFL needs L.A. more than we need it, so the eventual return of pro football to the second-largest media market in the country has always been a foregone conclusion. Even when it might happen, or which team the league puts here, is not all that important.

What really matters to the people who count most -- the local taxpayers who pay for the upkeep of the aging Coliseum and Pasadena’s Rose Bowl -- is who pays for what everyone agrees is the main element of an NFL deal: a state-of-the-art stadium.

Last week, promoters of a scheme to bring pro football to the Rose Bowl acknowledged that the NFL would pay.

That would be a political earthquake of truly Californian proportions. It means the pro sports league -- the one that sets the standard for ripping off cities, counties and even whole states to build itself new stadiums -- finally understands that L.A. is different.

And the only reason I give any credence at all to claims that the NFL has had a change of heart is that proponents of the Rose Bowl plan include a well-connected Baltimore investment banker named John Moag.

Moag was a pivotal actor in the relocation of the NFL’s Cleveland franchise to Baltimore in 1995. That is why Pasadena hired him last year, on a contingency basis.

He stands to make about $5 million if he can craft a deal that puts an NFL team in the Rose Bowl for 15 years, and he’s done some impressive groundwork so far.

Moag and the city of Pasadena propose to modernize the 81-year-old Rose Bowl by preserving its outer shell and reconfiguring the interior. In a best-case scenario, they would even enhance the stadium’s Arroyo Seco setting by replacing several acres of asphalt with underground parking.

But the most important part of the plan was summarized by Moag: “Not a penny of taxpayer money is going into this. We basically turn over the opportunity to make revenue out of this building to the NFL in return for their spending about $500 million to give us a truly renovated stadium.”

If Moag can get the pirates who run the NFL to fork over that much of their loot, I’ll take back every nasty thing I’ve ever written about pro football and welcome the NFL back to L.A. with open arms.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that column.

It will take at least three years to refurbish the Rose Bowl, including months of environmental impact studies before the first spadeful of earth is turned.

Meanwhile, residents of the prosperous hillside neighborhoods that surround the Arroyo Seco are sure to raise objections to having 20 or more big-crowd events in the Rose Bowl every year to help the NFL pay for the “new” stadium.

My one quibble with Moag’s plan is that he’s looking at the wrong stadium. His deal would work perfectly in the Coliseum, which actually wants more events in its urban Exposition Park setting.

Then there’s the small matter of convincing 32 NFL owners to sign off on a deal that sets a precedent sure to be remembered the next time one of them tries to hold up a hard-pressed municipality for a new stadium or more luxury boxes.

But at least from this point forward, Angelenos can watch the L.A.-NFL standoff play itself out with a little more assurance that some naive or overeager public official won’t hand the NFL the keys to some city’s treasury. (Lest anyone forget, it’s been 15 years since Irwindale lost $10 million to the Raiders in a failed bid to lure them to a new stadium a few miles east of the Rose Bowl.)

So it’s clearer than ever that the NFL will be back in our sunny clime, sooner or later.

But we now have it on the record that the league -- and not we -- will pay for the privilege.

Frank del Olmo is associate editor of The Times.