Football fans enjoy benefits of not having a home team

Tuesday, October 7, 1997

Football fans enjoy benefits of not having a home team

COLUMN: Los Angelenos should appreciate perks of uncluttered
sports pages and extensive TV coverageBy Mark ShapiroDaily Bruin
Staff

I’ll tell you what, Sunday was a beautiful day.

You turn on the television in the morning and the first thing
that you see is the undefeated Tampa Bay Buccaneers slugging it out
with defending Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers.

You flip the channels and you find Dan Marino and the Dolphins
battling the Kansas City Chiefs right down to the final gun.

All morning long and throughout the weekend, showcase games were
the main features, and they were all there for the watching because
Los Angeles doesn’t have a football franchise.

There’s no home team to clog up the set and the sports page, no
high ticket prices to worry about, and no game traffic to
negotiate.

Yup, Los Angeles is the best place in the country to be a pro
football fan.

That is why I don’t understand why Los Angelenos are so
dedicated to bringing a professional football team back to the
Southland. It’s really not that great.

Living up north, you’re guaranteed that your morning game will
be an AFC shlock-fest pitting the Raiders against another haven of
mediocrity, and that your afternoon game would feature the 49ers
unloading all over one of the armpits of the NFC.

Any time one of those two teams was actually in a game of some
import, say the Niners against the Cowboys, it would always be on
Monday Night Football.

So every other weekend, your set is packed with crummy games
wherein you see the same teams over and over.

There never is a Green Bay-Dallas battle or Miami-New York
shootout because the home team always gets in the way.

Ah, but living in Los Angeles, every weekend we get treated to
the best games of the week, and on Monday, there are no obnoxiously
long game summaries to clog up the Los Angeles Times sports page.
Instead, their football writer goes to the premiere game of the
week, giving us the inside scoop on the game that we just watched
on television.

That’s why I don’t understand why anyone would want to change
this absolutely blissful situation.

Let’s just assume, in a breakdown on judgement, the NFL returns
to Los Angeles. Let’s continue on this trip and assume that the
team is lousy (history will back me up here). So now the team can’t
draw a sellout crowd, which is hard to do anyway in the cavernous
Coliseum.

Now, with no sellout, we wouldn’t even get to watch the home
team play because league and network contracts stipulate if a game
isn’t sold out, it gets blacked out in the home market.

Could you imagine the agony of turning on your set on a Sunday
and finding an "I Love Lucy" rerun instead of grid-iron action?
Hell hath no fury …

And who can confidently say that this would not be an
every-weekend occurrence? The Raiders never sold out the Coliseum,
and the Rams – well, who would want to watch the Rams anyway?

Further compounding the problem is the fact that Los Angelenos
were never rabid followers of football, otherwise their old teams
would never have left in the first place.

So, you’ve got apathetic fans faced with absurd ticket prices,
and people really think that fans will come out in droves?
Uh-uh.

People always say that the largest media market in the country
should have a professional team, but, in reality, it’s better for
the game and for overall exposure to have that publicity machine
bringing the best that the league has to offer week in and week out
to a population that obviously cares enough about football to check
the scores and watch the fourth quarter on TV, but not enough to
support a home team.

Shapiro is a fourth-year student and a Daily Bruin staff writer.
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