NFL's Saints Face Long Season on Road

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ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

The National Football League season began right where it ended at the Super Bowl with the New England Patriots winning last night. They defeated the Oakland Raiders 30-to-20. The season gets into full swing on Sunday and Monday night. One of Sunday's match-ups, the New Orleans Saints, open on the road against the Carolina Panthers. The Saints will not play at all this season in their hometown, perhaps not for a long time to come. Stefan Fatsis of The Wall Street Journal joins us now, as he does most Fridays.

Welcome, Stefan.

Mr. STEFAN FATSIS (The Wall Street Journal): Hey, Robert.

SIEGEL: The Saints are expected to play some games in San Antonio, where they've relocated their operations; some at the College Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Realistically, can they ever return to New Orleans? Problems look pretty insurmountable.

Mr. FATSIS: Well, let's start with the stadium, the Superdome. It's a wreck. There was a preliminary report this week by a state agency that said it could be repaired at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, but there's also a chance that it would have to be demolished. It's also hard to see how you could ever overcome the image of the Superdome as anything but this place of squalor and depredation after the hurricane. Beyond that, New Orleans already was a marginal NFL market--small population, small corporate base. It could take years for the city to recover even to those levels.

SIEGEL: On the other hand, cities, some people say, irrationally want to have sports team, which they consider great civic assets. So it's possible that New Orleans might want the Saints to come back.

Mr. FATSIS: Oh, definitely they're going to want them to come back. The question is whether it's feasible for them to come back. There's going to be enormous pressure on the Saints' owner, Tom Benson, to return. He had a very, very lucrative deal with the state before the hurricane--direct annual subsidy of millions of dollars, 15 million after the season, right to the Saints. We have no idea now whether the state will have any interest in giving the team money for a new stadium or for subsidies or for anything as part of rebuilding New Orleans. And, of course, we have no idea whether the Saints could survive in the meantime if they went back.

SIEGEL: Right. On the other hand, if Mr. Benson doesn't bring the Saints back to town, what an accusation of running out on New Orleans. It would be worse than Mr. Irsay, who took the Baltimore Colts off to Indianapolis in the middle of the night.

Mr. FATSIS: Right, which is why I don't think we're going to see any permanent decisions made on the future of the Saints for months, maybe even a year. Ultimately, I think business realities are going to have to intervene here. New Orleans might not be able to support an NFL team to the levels that franchises require these days. And other NFL team owners, who are expected to help subsidize the Saints this year--they may not have the appetite to keep doing that for years.

SIEGEL: OK. On to the current season. The Patriots picked up where they left off, winning. Are they likely to win yet another Super Bowl?

Mr. FATSIS: They very well could. They're going for their third in a row. No team in the NFL has ever done that. The thing to keep in mind is how the Patriots have done this--without big, huge superstars and big, huge superstar contracts. Colleague of mine, Jon Weinbach, has a piece in today's Weekend section of The Wall Street Journal, in which he includes a list of the highest-paid players in the NFL by position. There's only one Patriot on it, and he's the kicker, Adam Vinatieri.

SIEGEL: Yeah. Something you've written about, usual for the National Football League, and that is disharmony, dissent among the owners of the 32 franchises. What's the problem?

Mr. FATSIS: The problem is that the new owners that have come into the league and have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for their teams and pumped more money into renovating or building stadiums want to keep as much of the new revenues that they're generating in these facilities as they can. On the other side, you've got traditionalist owners, who want to preserve the league's long-standing policy of sharing as much of their revenues as they can to avoid a real divide in the league between the haves and the have-nots. This has been a very contentious issue. There's no resolution in sight. I think it's a real crossroads for the NFL and for its commissioner, Paul Tagliabue.

SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.

Mr. FATSIS: Thanks, Robert.

SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis with The Wall Street Journal, who talks with us on Fridays about sports and the business of sports.

MELISSA BLOCK (Host): You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

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