ST. LOUIS STALLIONS SKUNKED BY NFL SELECTION COMMITTEE

One can use all the sports metaphors at hand -- the game went into overtime, the top players fumbled a big lead away, the underdog triumphed -- but the fact remains that St. Louis did not get a National Football League expansion team as hoped Tuesday. The St. Louis Stallions remain just an idea. The Jacksonville Jaguars are reality. Worse things have happened. In the end, however, it appears civic disunity doomed the St. Louis cause, and there is probably a lesson all communities can take from that.

On paper, St. Louis still looks like a better choice for a team than the city in Florida.

-- While Missouri's largest metropolitan area has 2.47 million people, Jacksonville and its environs have just 944,000.

-- St. Louis, the 18th largest television market in the nation (and the largest without an NFL team), far surpasses the media reach of Jacksonville, which is the 54th biggest market.

-- The per capita income in St. Louis is $2,525 higher than the city awarded the league's 30th franchise.

-- In St. Louis, the NFL was offered a new, $260 million domed stadium; in Jacksonville, the stadium is 68 years old.

So, with all these compelling numbers, the most often asked question Tuesday was, "What happened?"

What happened apparently was that NFL owners were frightened away by the in-fighting, legal problems and overall disorganization of the St. Louis effort. Though the campaign has been under way for years to get the Missouri city an expansion team, money was not in place for the franchise fee until October, and the lease agreement on the stadium was not resolved at the time NFL owners made their choice. The potential for litigation hung in the air. Only one owner, a St. Louis native, voted in favor of the supposed front runner.

What does all this mean for this part of the state? Obviously, the people of Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois feel an allegiance to the professional sports teams in St. Louis. It provides a rooting interest in a league that is now somewhat removed, and in some ways it provides an identity for this particular part of the country. Certainly, all citizens of Missouri, not just those in St. Louis, should feel some investment in the expansion team effort since state tax dollars were used in part to underwrite the stadium construction. St. Louis may now join the ranks of St. Petersburg as a city whose "Fields of Dreams" delusions didn't pan out ... they built it, and no professional team came.

In the meantime, city, county and state taxpayers will shell out $700 million over the next 30 years to pay off construction of this stadium. That does not include ongoing maintenance for a 70,000-seat facility that will not be used for its intended purpose.

Some people make the argument -- probably a fiscally sound one -- that St. Louis (and the state coffers) ultimately benefits by not having a professional football team that ties up local lodging facilities for up to 10 weekends a year; instead, they believe those weekends could be used in an aggressive convention strategy that would bring more money into the city. It is true that a 2,000-person convention probably means more to the city in terms of dollars and cents. However, such an event usually gets no national attention. But the world watches the Super Bowl, which has been hosted in domed stadiums in Minneapolis, Detroit and New Orleans, all NFL cities. The public relations value of such an event is incalculable.

But what can be learned by the expensive exercise in St. Louis that failed to capture the NFL's attention? Ego and conflicting interests pulled this endeavor apart.

In Jacksonville, the desire for a franchise was apparent and the effort was unified. Cooperation was the key, with the entire community putting the goal ahead of petty and divisive issues.

On a local and much smaller level, it took cooperation between the city and university to build the Show Me Center, a facility now enjoyed by people throughout the region. Debate and the gathering of divergent viewpoints are desirable in any civic undertaking, but once a goal is set, a unified effort is necessary to see it to realization. Wouldn't it be great if the passion of so many able people in Cape Girardeau were directed at, say, the attraction of a major industry or the expansion of an existing one? A lot can be accomplished when a community has an undivided purpose.

As stated before in this space, the sunrise does not hinge on which cities are worthy of pro football teams. St. Louis will go on being a city with many terrific assets, and the people of eastern Missouri will manage to pass the time -- sometimes even productively -- on autumn afternoons. It's a shame things didn't work out with the Stallions, but it's a greater shame that a city as fine as St. Louis can't pull together its plentiful resources in a way to accomplish something for civic betterment.