Say no, don't go

Sporting News, The, August 19, 1996 by Paul Attner

Buying a seat to an Oilers or Seahawks game is a vote for incompetent management at club and league levels

The NFL and Houston have never been a comfortable fit. This maverick town was far more suited for the franchise when it belonged to the AFL. The Oilers of those days were a wild and informal team playing in a wild and crazy city. The crowds weren't huge, never really have been, but the support was genuine and emotional. What the fans saw on the field was entertaining and successful; no one in the league put on a better show than quarterback George Blanda, who also was the team's kicker and a telling advertisement for life after 35.

Even joining the NFL didn't alter the Oilers' appearance, particularly their practice facility, which was awful. Find the fake oil derrick sticking up in the parking lot and you had the right place. Players' cars were jammed everywhere and there hardly was room inside to walk around. But those inadequacies seemed less important when Bum Phillips became the head coach. It was a perfect match, one that worked only in Houston. Anywhere else, including New Orleans, where Phillips later toiled, Bum's drawl and down-home sayings were out of place. He was as Texas as the sprawling city that became his home. But he also was so different from the rest of his straight-laced peers that you felt as if you had walked into some football never-never land, as far away from league headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan as you possibly could get.

Now the Oilers find themselves in another form of football never-never land, one that keeps their alienation from their NFL brethren as noticeable as ever. They are a lame-duck franchise facing two years of enforced football purgatory, playing in a city they want to leave, in front of fans that don't want them, in a league whose dignity is diminished considerably by allowing this scenario to exist. As awful as the Browns situation was in Cleveland, at least the team is gone and the city understands its NFL future. But Houston? It is a woeful embarrassment to everyone involved.

I think of Houston whenever another talk show calls, wanting predictions about the upcoming season. No matter what has transpired in the months since the Super Bowl, this always is the time of year when the future, not the past, seems most important to football fans. A certain rush of anticipation about the new season overwhelms the off-field dealings, probably because speculation is a lot more fun than dealing with reality.

Maybe that is why there was silence at the other end of the phone recently when I brought up Houston and Seattle, another situation-from-hell problem, during a talk-show appearance. Seattle owner Ken Behring wanted to move the Seahawks to Los Angeles, using a trumped-up excuse about earthquakes bringing down the Kingdome. Now megamillionaire Paul Allen has an option to buy the club, but until he exercises it, the public-relations damage done by Behring has deflated what once was a solid franchise. The most embarrassing remembrance of the 1996 season will be the god-awful support teams in those cities will receive over the coming months. But the talk-show folks didn't want to hear that.

The Oilers and Seahawks have the potential to be exciting and, yes, contending teams this season. Houston's Jeff Fisher has emerged as one of the league's most admired young coaches; Seattle's Dennis Erickson's NFL career began promisingly--the Seahawks went 8-8 last season--even if his reading of the NCAA rulebook at Miami earned him an F. But ask team officials in either city if they are optimistic that fans will support their teams if they develop into playoff possibilities, and the answer, without fail, is no. And that is the point: why should these fans buy costly tickets when every seat purchased is a vote for poor management on the franchise and league levels?

This is what the NFL and these clubs deserve: December home games in Seattle and Houston where 20,000 fans show up even though a victory could mean a postseason berth. The empty seats will be testimony to blunder and incompetence. They won't be a slap at the players, who for once can't be blamed for such ludicrous developments. But fans in both cities must stay away; to show up is to endorse this franchise bungling that casts a pall over all of pro sports.

So far, fans seem to understand this. In Seattle, which once sold 61,000 season tickets, the Seahawks expect to have no more than 40,000 this season, a drop-off of more than 9,000 from last year. For the first exhibition game, the lack of attendance was particularly significant. Only 30,284 showed up, the fewest in the franchise's 21-year history.

Houston, deservedly, has an even more dire problem. The Oilers' season-ticket count is the league's lowest, a mere 14,000 after selling 35,000 last season. In the early 1990s, the total topped 47,000. The team has prepared itself for crowds of 20,000 or less in the 59,969-seat, outdated Astrodome; in 1991, average attendance was 60,341, which makes you wonder what the fire marshal was doing on game days.