Who Will Be L.A.'s Next Football Team?

The nation's second-largest media market hasn't had an NFL franchise since 1994. But it is shopping around

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

1. Live from the Stadium Managers Association Conference
The stadium boom of the millennium is fast drawing to a close—what's next?

This week, we'll be taking in the 35th annual Stadium Managers Association conference, held this year at the Rancho Las Palmas resort in Palm Springs, Calif. Unlike PGA Tour sponsor Morgan Stanley (MS), which last week held a three-day conference at the five-star oceanfront Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., the SMA, the leading association in the sports industry with an exclusive stadium focus, is not currently seeking TARP funds; participants are thus free to gather at the beautiful desert resort reasonably free of taxpayer scrutiny.

The economy, TARP, how to navigate the recession from a sports facility perspective, and technology innovation as a key to the future are the top notes of the keynote address I will be giving to the conference's several hundred participants. Additionally, forward-looking panels on the state of the pro sports leagues, the "greening" of stadiums—and the stadium of the future, as narrated by the lead architects on the New York Yankees, Lucas Oil, and Dallas Cowboys stadiums, are sure to compel.

2. Super Bowl XLIII Afterburn
So, what did we learn from Super Bowl XLIII aside from Jack (Mr. Box) got hit by a bus, the Boss still rocks, and Arizona fields a pretty darn good football team, holding its own against the now six-time Super Bowl winning Steelers?

Actually, we learned a lot. We discovered that, like the movies, the Super Bowl provides a communal form of escapism from the realities of the grim recession—some 90 million people tuned in, representing a 42.1 Nielsen rating and 65 share, according to early Nielsen Media Research figures.

We found out that people still like to throw Super Bowl parties. The average Super Bowl party across the U.S. cost $172 this year, according to Visa (V), and most of the big players at the game itself still partied, though on a much-scaled-back basis. In Tampa, Maxim magazine cut its guest list in half, to 1,400 people, while across town the manager of Tijuana Iguana sports bar eschewed the $300 cover recommended to him by a promoter in favor of $10 general admission and discounted drinks; 800 people had bought tickets almost a week before the game.

We realized that a down economy didn't stop people from gambling—far from it. Las Vegas and friends were expecting close to $10 billion to be wagered on this year's game; the MGM Mirage (MGM) properties in Vegas alone were hoping for $90 million in wagers, and overall the city of Las Vegas saw only a 1% drop in occupancy from last year, according to that city's convention and visitors bureau.

We figured out that the Super Bowl still may be the best spot on the calendar to debut new products and services, as the last-minute sellout of advertising proved. While General Motors (GM) went from $45.9 million to zero in terms of ad spending, most firms that chose to advertise during the Super Bowl still scored big. However, we also learned that there is still no exact science to measuring the popularity and impact of these ads—in the dozens of news sources and Web sites we scoured on Monday, we never found two whose "best of" and "worst of" lists were even close to matching, while several companies stepped forward to declare such ads as the Go Daddy spot starring female Indy car driver Danica Patrick and Monster's (MWW) "moose" ad "the winner." In other words, it's still all so subjective.