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As he concludes his tenure as commissioner of the National Football League, Paul Tagliabue has one final item on his agenda: Bringing professional football back to the nation's second-largest television market.
Tagliabue met last week with the mayors of Los Angeles and Anaheim to try to get closer to a deal that would return a team to the area that lost both the Raiders and the Rams after the 1994 season.
But for the NFL to succeed in its efforts to return to Los Angeles, the league must do more than simply allow the owner of an existing club to move his franchise or allow the highest bidder to purchase the rights to a Los Angeles-based expansion team. Tagliabue needs to spend his remaining weeks as commissioner identifying the right owner to run the team, someone with a proven track record of attracting fans and building a championship contender, because Los Angeles fans aren't going to spend their autumn Sundays sitting in traffic to go out and see a boring team struggle through a 4-12 season.
Fortunately for the NFL, there is a perfect owner available, a man who has the money needed to buy an NFL team, the demonstrated ability to build a winner and the marketing savvy needed to reach the diverse fan base of Southern California. And the owner shouldn't be hard for Tagliabue to find, as he's gotten more television face time than President Bush in the last couple of weeks.
The right man for the job is Mark Cuban, who bought the Dallas Mavericks six years ago and has made it clear ever since that he is more interested in winning an NBA championship than in making money. He's done plenty of the latter, and his Mavs got within two wins of doing the former.
At first blush, Cuban might seem like the wrong fit for the NFL, which has built itself into the country's most successful sports league in large part because its owners cooperate on all the major issues, from the television contract to the salary cap. The word "maverick" with a lower-case "m" describes Cuban well, and he wouldn't go along with everything the other NFL owners want to do.
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5714172
Tagliabue met last week with the mayors of Los Angeles and Anaheim to try to get closer to a deal that would return a team to the area that lost both the Raiders and the Rams after the 1994 season.
But for the NFL to succeed in its efforts to return to Los Angeles, the league must do more than simply allow the owner of an existing club to move his franchise or allow the highest bidder to purchase the rights to a Los Angeles-based expansion team. Tagliabue needs to spend his remaining weeks as commissioner identifying the right owner to run the team, someone with a proven track record of attracting fans and building a championship contender, because Los Angeles fans aren't going to spend their autumn Sundays sitting in traffic to go out and see a boring team struggle through a 4-12 season.
Fortunately for the NFL, there is a perfect owner available, a man who has the money needed to buy an NFL team, the demonstrated ability to build a winner and the marketing savvy needed to reach the diverse fan base of Southern California. And the owner shouldn't be hard for Tagliabue to find, as he's gotten more television face time than President Bush in the last couple of weeks.
The right man for the job is Mark Cuban, who bought the Dallas Mavericks six years ago and has made it clear ever since that he is more interested in winning an NBA championship than in making money. He's done plenty of the latter, and his Mavs got within two wins of doing the former.
At first blush, Cuban might seem like the wrong fit for the NFL, which has built itself into the country's most successful sports league in large part because its owners cooperate on all the major issues, from the television contract to the salary cap. The word "maverick" with a lower-case "m" describes Cuban well, and he wouldn't go along with everything the other NFL owners want to do.
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5714172
