September 5, 2007

Los Angeles doing fine without NFL

The National Football League begins its 13th season without a Los Angeles team tonight.

Once, the common wisdom was that the league would come to its senses eventually.

"The NFL needs LA more than LA needs the NFL," we all said.

Hate to break this to you, but each is getting along fine without the other. And as America's most popular sports entity rolls merrily along without a presence in the country's second-largest media market, there's no reason to believe the situation will change soon.

For years, the NFL and its owners would pay greater Los Angeles lip service, discussing the issue at league meetings and venturing out here occasionally to view potential stadium sites.

Let's see, in 2003 Paul Tagliabue projected that a team would be back in LA by 2006. The next spring, his projection was 2008.

As late as the summer of '06, Tagliabue led a delegation to Los Angeles and Anaheim, and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was quoted as saying: "We're farther along than we have been at any time since professional football left Los Angeles."

But nothing ever happened. And as long as Southern Californians maintain their aversion to public stadium funding, nothing will happen.

This past winter, the league didn't even bother to put the issue on the agenda at its meetings. LA City Councilman Bernard Parks showed up at the Super Bowl in Miami to pitch the Coliseum, but the dog and pony show appears to have been shut down.

The longer the league is absent from LA, honestly, the less it seems necessary.

TV money was supposed to be the reason we'd get another team. Without a presence in this market, ratings would be down and subsequent TV contracts would be worth less. Or so the theory went.

Wrong. The NFL's TV ratings are healthier than ever, a rarity in a sports landscape where every other league's numbers are down. The latest round of negotiations netted the league $3.735 billion a year from Fox, CBS, NBC and ESPN/Disney, an increase of $1.535 billion annually over the previous contracts (and $2.635 billion a year greater than in 1994, the last year the Rams and Raiders were here).

The current figure doesn't even count the $583 million a year the NFL gets from DirecTV for the rights to the "Sunday Ticket" package.

And "Sunday Ticket" happens to be one of the reasons this region has been able to cope so well. SoCal fans, if they choose, can jump back and forth between games and sate their appetite for the pro game to a degree they couldn't in '94.

"Between pay-per-view, cable and the ability to watch online, a lot of people can follow whatever team they want," said Tom Boyd, a marketing professor at Cal State Fullerton.

"With the cost of a ticket, most NFL fans never go to a game. Even if a team has a stadium that seats 100,000, chances are that not more than 200,000 different people out of 16 million would attend a game. So what's the difference whether you watch Seattle or St. Louis, as opposed to watching a team whose games you'll never go to in your city?"

Additionally, the raging popularity of fantasy football has diluted the angst. Even if you haven't adopted a real team, you probably have your own fantasy team and might very well follow the game closer now than you did then.

It's easy to not miss the physical presence of the NFL. And that doesn't even consider the people from LA, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties who drive to San Diego to watch the Chargers or fly to Oakland for Raiders home games.

Oh, and it's not like there's any shortage of things to do here.

The Dodgers and Angels are on a pace to draw more than seven million fans combined for the third straight year. USC football packs the Coliseum and is more entertaining than many NFL teams. The Ducks shut off season-ticket sales at 15,000 and could sell out every home game, coming off a Stanley Cup championship.

And you can make a case that when it comes to interest and passion, the Lakers still top all of them.

So don't weep for Southern California. And don't weep for the NFL. It may not have seemed that way in 1995, but this turned out to be a split that benefited both parties.