ST. LOUIS, EASTERN MISSOURI WOULD BENEFIT FROM NFL FRANCHISE

St. Louis must wait another month to see if the National Football League will accept the city's bid to host an expansion team. The city and its civic leaders have put themselves through a soul-searching wringer, set about building a new stadium and generally exhausted the community in an attempt to woo the NFL back to Missouri's largest city. Is this important? The answers is simple: yes and no.

Obviously, the city of St. Louis has managed since 1987 in the absence of a professional football team. The sun rose each day after the Cardinals departed, children were born, families were raised and life continued apace. (Wags might even suggest that the community's collective blood pressure decreased, given the frequently dismal performance of the team that fled to Phoenix.) Still, community leaders in St. Louis began making plans to get a new professional football team almost before the Cardinal moving vans made it out of the city limits.

It has been a process of fits and starts, of recriminations and civic finger-pointing, of false hope and ultimately bright promise. While having much of what the NFL wants in a franchise city (market, location, a stadium of adequate size and, at last, money for the franchise fee), NFL owners bypassed the opportunity to announce St. Louis as an expansion city Tuesday, instead putting off a decision until Nov. 30. Charlotte, N.C., became one of the expansion picks Tuesday, leaving St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore and Jacksonville, Fla., in the running for the remaining spot. Since St. Louis had an 11th-hour change in its partnership arrangement (that is, the money will come from a different source), NFL officials probably want more time to investigate the St. Louis bid, a move that might bode well for eastern Missouri getting a franchise.

Again, the question begs: Is this important? In the grand scheme of municipal betterment, a lot of things can happen that infuse money into a city like St. Louis. In fact, St. Louis celebrated something of a renaissance during the 1980s, using government incentives to attract private capital that pumped new life into the downtown area. It became a true civic success story. Still, the fact of modern culture is that this success story is not broadcast on national television every Sunday afternoon. Professional sports franchises, for better or worse, provide a civic identity. If St. Louis can capitalize on that with a football franchise (as it already does with a successful baseball team), so much the better.

Then, there is the matter of the stadium, a downtown dome built through the assistance (not altogether willing) of Missouri taxpayers. As a way of fulfilling this investment, an NFL franchise is almost a necessity. True, the building can be used for certain conventions and other events, but few things stand as underused as a football stadium without a home team.

If St. Louis is not awarded a franchise when NFL owners convene next on Nov. 30, that city and eastern Missouri will make out OK. We will be left without a rooting diversion on autumn Sunday afternoons and the distant possibility that one day the city might host a Super Bowl in its new domed stadium or, pinch us, field a team good enough to play in one. The chance of economic opportunity and increased national exposure is there with the presence of an NFL franchise, and we hope the league makes St. Louis its choice for an expansion city.