NFL Is Missing Big L.A. Picture : Owners need to see it’s in their best interest to forget public money and lower the franchise fee to get team here.

The stadium is half-empty in Oakland. Taxpayers are forced to buy tickets in San Diego. The season is already over in St. Louis.

There is no NFL team in Los Angeles because who needs Los Angeles?

A team president is demoted by his mother in Chicago. A felon in a gambling scandal fights his sister for control in San Francisco. Jerry Jones is in handcuffs in Dallas.

There is no NFL team in Los Angeles because there are no suitable owners in Los Angeles.

As the NFL prepares for the fifth season that does not include a team from the nation’s second-largest city, league officials are in town today for last-gasp meetings with possible owners.

They will meet with Ed Roski on behalf of the Coliseum, Marvin Davis on behalf of Hollywood Park, and city officials from Carson and Anaheim.

If things go as well as expected, the NFL folks will then throw up their hands and grab the next plane to Houston.

They will grumble that there is no leadership here, no public support here, no energy here.

All of which will mask the real irritation that they are not being handed enough money here.

And so in two weeks another ghost of an NFL season will begin here. And like a wet football on the fingers of a distracted receiver, the league will continue to let 16 million people slip away.

Fewer people will buy NFL merchandise. Fewer TVs will be tuned to NFL games. More 10-year-old future consumers will start following basketball and hockey.

The ultimate shame is not ours, but theirs.

The solution is simple. But the NFL owners in such quaint outposts as Charlotte and Tampa and Nashville are apparently too simple to understand it.

Although nothing is official, most are guessing that the NFL wants our taxpayers to pony up more than $150 million for parking structures.

Our taxpayers won’t do it because sports here are still not as important as schools and police. Because we’re not Cleveland, and we’re not Jacksonville, and thank goodness for that.

This doesn’t mean people here wouldn’t flock to watch the next team that shows up (as long as it wasn’t owned by that weirdo in the white satin sweatsuit).

This doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be 70,000 out of 16 million who would attend eight home games.

Stop by any sports bar on Sundays, check the TV ratings on Fridays, there are still plenty of pro football fans in town.

If the team is entertaining, the owner here will be not merely very popular, but very rich.

But not before his quarterback has taken a snap.

And not if we have to pay that quarterback out of our own pockets when, right now, we can watch plenty of quarterbacks free.

With football having become a religion in certain parts of the country, some NFL owners see themselves as deities worthy of unconditional faith.

But in a town where, at any moment, the earth could rumble or the traffic could stop or the hillside could burn, we believe what we can touch.

The NFL needs to come down off the altar long enough to see this.

And then it would see that solution.

Those millions it seeks in public money? The league gives it to the new Los Angeles owner in a move that wouldn’t feel as if it cost the other owners a penny.

It simply deducts that sum from an arbitrary franchise fee that could be about $500 million.

Owners in Minneapolis, Buffalo and Kansas City will complain that reducing the fee will set bad precedent for future franchise transactions.

Owners in Phoenix, Seattle and Baltimore will argue that they need the money from that check to pay the bills.

But Commissioner Paul Tagliabue needs to convince them that this is not about next week, or next month, or even next year.

He needs to turn their eyes from their mirrors, their egos, their individual towns, and focus them on the entire league and its future.

He needs to do what Pete Rozelle did in the early 1960s, when the late commissioner instituted the television revenue-sharing plan that has made the NFL so fat and happy.

That success was Rozelle’s legacy.

A Los Angeles failure will be a part of Tagliabue’s legacy.

The commissioner has done great things with labor peace and TV competition. But it was on Tagliabue’s watch that St. Louis and Baltimore were bypassed by smaller Charlotte and Jacksonville during the expansion derby of 1993.

The league never realized this would leave two warm places for restless owners in Los Angeles and Cleveland.

With every tub-thumping trip to Los Angeles, they are paying the price for this mistake.

There is a feeling that Tagliabue knows it too. But he is only as strong as the 31 sometimes small-minded men who hired him.

Later this month, when they all cluck and snort and smile at the announcement that a team is going to Houston, the joke will be on them.

The new 34-year-old owner of the Washington Redskins fires more than 20 employees after promising they would be retained. Quirky new instant-replay rules mean games could be decided in the television truck. A Heisman Trophy winner poses for a magazine cover wearing a wedding dress.

There is no NFL team in Los Angeles because we aren’t serious enough in Los Angeles.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].