Locking horns

Sporting News, The, March 27, 1995 by Terry Frei

The white elephants

We're taking about Cleveland Stadium, Mile High Stadium, Riverfront Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, the Astrodome and the Kingdom. All outdated and mostly dumps, they make Anaheim Stadium seem less ghastly.

So you had moguls such as Pat Bowlen of Denver, Art Modell of Cleveland and Mike Brown of the Bengals thinking that the stadium trust fund concept was necessary not only to upgrade the league's presence in Los Angeles, but to provide seed money for better facilities elsewhere. Take Denver, where voters - already footing the bill for Denver International Airport's fearsome cost overruns - almost certainly would turn thumbs down on a new football stadium without major NFL/Broncos participation.

"It's a little premature to call it a key, but part of the question here seems to be that they want us to have a private-sector in-vestor," Bowlen says. "This is really what we're talking about - that the league would be in a position to make some contribution to the construction of a new stadium."

Those are some of the culprits.

Others are taking heat, but shouldn't. They are:

Leigh Steinberg

As the leader of the Save The Rams movement in Orange County, the prominent player agent was open to charges of conflict of interest and reviled in St. Louis. After sitting in that Arizona Biltmore press room all week at the NFL meetings and seeing steam fly off computer keyboards from competent, theoretically objective professional journalists whose viewpoints and passions obviously are affected because they Eve in Orange County or St. Louis, this judgment was reinforced: It would be ridiculous, and hypocritical of the media, to hold Steinberg's loyalty to his home area against him.

Fox TV

This was a red herring. In 1993, after months of dragging feet in an attempt to allow St. Louis to get its potential ownership structure straightened out the NFL awarded its second 1995 expansion franchise to Jacksonville - the No. 55 television market in the country. Not only is St. Louis a far more attractive market (No. 18), so are San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando, Memphis and Nashville. So much for blind obedience to the Nielsen families.

Fox is Los Angeles-based, and not having a franchise near its pregame show studio would have been a little bit of an embarrassment. Yet it is clear that Fox, without much discouragement from the league front office, and perhaps even with some encouragement merely saw this as a way to campaign for a rebate on its $1.58-billion, four-year contract. That's business opportunism; and for that, you can't fault Fox. Business opportunism is the reason the Rams were going to move, and the reason the St. Louis deal was so alluring.

In the short term, the fact that Rams' home games were - and perhaps will be - blacked out in the Los Angeles market means that Fox wasn't getting much out of the Rams' presence in Anaheim in the first place.

Best of both worlds for Fox? The Rams move. Fox gets its rebate. St. Louis fanaticism means higher ratings and higher gate receipts for visiting teams, taking some of the sting out of the rebate. In this best-case scenario for Fox, the network sticks with the NFC beyond its four-year contract and willing a couple of years is rewarded with the placement of another NFC franchise - expansion or existing - in the Los Angeles market And Rupert Murdoch has another reason to gloat But 17 bet Fox knows all that.