Lacter/edit/nov. 2/MIKE1ST
Hd Football
High Jinks
Maybe, just maybe, L.A. is back on track for getting pro football. Last week, National Football League team owners heard proposals from two L.A. groups: one led by real estate developer Ed Roski and the other by former Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz. Roski wants to build a 68,000-seat stadium on the site of the Coliseum, while Ovitz is pushing for a 77,000-seat stadium in Carson that will be surrounded by a shopping mall.
As a business proposition, both are of dubious value. They require an intricate mix of public and private dollars little of which are yet secured or even specified plus a franchise fee that will likely run at least $500 million. That pushes the cost of bringing pro football back to L.A. to almost $1 billion a whopper of an investment that Roski and the others would find hard to justify in the real business world.
But of course, this isn’t the real business world it’s the rarified world of the NFL, where the admission requirements tend to resemble a Rubik’s cube. Just when you think you’re on target with this or that financial requirement, the rules seem to change. And above and beyond these ever-changing rules are the set-in-stone perceptions among them that the Coliseum is in a bad neighborhood and that L.A. can’t support a pro team.
To their credit, Roski and L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas who has backed the Coliseum from the start have battled the NFL’s misperceptions and capriciousness for more than two years. And Roski has made significant adjustments to his stadium proposal in recent weeks, especially in light of the effort by Ovitz and the city of Houston.
Now, finally, it appears as if the NFL is paying attention. After last week’s presentations in Kansas City, the owners are talking about a decision within the next few months and this time, they actually might mean it.
Why the stepped-up interest? The league would never acknowledge as much, but perhaps it has something to do with pro football’s terrible start this year on TV.
After ABC, CBS, Fox and ESPN agreed to pay the NFL $2.2 billion a year through 2005 for broadcast rights, ratings are down as much as 11 percent from a year ago and ABC’s “Monday Night Football” is practically in the cellar. As the season unfolds, those numbers are sure to improve, but insiders are betting that the networks will lose money on football.
Voting in another expansion team will hardly change those results. After all, it will be 2002 before a new franchise takes the field. But it just so happens that under its agreement with the networks, the NFL has the option of renegotiating a new contract in 2002. And let’s not forget that L.A. happens to be the nation’s second-largest media market and a market that most of the owners acknowledge should have a team.
The question is whether all this justifies a $1 billion investment especially if the money originates largely from public sources. Now that the NFL’s hard-to-get act appears to be fading, it’s time for local officials to take a hard look at the numbers behind both the Roski and Ovitz proposals. It might turn out that pro football needs L.A. a lot more than L.A. needs pro football.
