Not Much Material for This L.A. Story

There’s no NFL team in Los Angeles, and -- despite plans to the contrary -- there was very little talk of Los Angeles at the NFL meetings.

Even though team owners had the nation’s second-largest market on the agenda, the subject came up only briefly Wednesday during Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s opening remarks to them on the last day of the annual meetings. There was no formal update on the Coliseum, Carson and Rose Bowl proposals.

“We had a report, and it was similar to the one we had made to the finance committee and our Los Angeles working group three weeks ago in Florida, and we just decided that we’d do better to continue working for another two months and then give an update at the May meeting,” said Tagliabue, referring to an upcoming meeting in Jacksonville. “We had covered about a dozen owners with the report, and there just didn’t seem to be much purpose to repeating it here.”

The Coliseum is furthest along in the proposal process, especially because it’s the only one of the three with a completed environmental-impact report, and team owners who once rejected it out of hand are beginning to warm to it again. After a series of design setbacks, Rose Bowl backers are trying to regain their equilibrium and stay in the race. And, although no one seems to know exactly how much it will cost to clean up the Carson site, the prospect of putting a stadium on that land still intrigues some NFL owners and executives.

In other words, not much has changed.

Tagliabue was asked when the league might narrow the field of contending concepts.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That was something we talked about three weeks ago: How close are we to providing direction? How close are we to making some initial decisions that will set a course in one direction or another? I don’t know right now, but that’s something that we’ve been actively discussing and working at.”

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In terms of rules changes, these meetings were among the least contentious in memory. Teams agreed on several minor on-the-field adjustments.

Most significant, club owners adopted a 15-yard penalty to go along with the traditional fines for choreographed group celebrations. A single player can still perform, say, a touchdown dance or dunk the ball over the crossbar. But if one or more teammates get involved, it will draw a flag. Incorporating “hard objects” such as felt-tip pens and cellular phones into celebrations is grounds for ejection.

Other rules changes:

* Pending approval of the NFL Players Assn., teams can carry as many as eight practice-squad players instead of the traditional five. The rule was voted in for the 2004 season only.

* A punt or missed field-goal attempt that goes untouched will be a dead ball immediately when it lands in the end zone, and thus the clock will stop. In the past, the clock has stopped only when the ball is downed.

* Head coaches are now allowed to call timeouts from the sideline, rather than having a player on the field call one.

* Assistant coaches on playoff teams now have a bit more time to interview with potential new employers. Whereas they used to only have five days during wild-card week to do so, they now have seven days.

* Free-kick, fair-catch and personal-foul rules have been slightly modified.

* Receivers can now wear jersey Nos. 10-19, whereas they could only do so in past seasons if all the 80s were gone.

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Red McCombs, owner of the Minnesota Vikings, reiterated to The Times that his franchise is for sale and he has talked to three “very qualified” buyers who are moderately interested in purchasing the club. But he said he doubts anything will happen until there is a clearer picture of whether the Vikings will get a new stadium.

“I would say the interest level on the scale of one to 10 is a five,” said McCombs, who has been angling for a Metrodome replacement since buying the Vikings for about $240 million in 1998.

McCombs said he expects to have an idea within two months whether the latest Viking stadium proposal has a chance of getting traction.