Dallas Down the Drain

Even the eyes of Texans popped a little last week at the size of the deficit run up by the National Football League's fledgling Dallas Texans, successors to the defunct and debt-ridden New York football Yankees. After two months of the season, the Dallas club was almost $250,000 in the red.

The franchise had been transferred to Dallas this year with notable hullabaloo. Texans, priding themselves on the biggest and best of everything, foresaw a bright future for their professional team with an estimated 1,000,000 fans to draw from. In theory, all that the 16 owners of the $100,000 Dallas franchise needed to do was draw crowds of 24,000 a game to break even. Anything above that figure would be gravy. In practice, as the outmanned Dallas team lost seven straight league games, attendance dropped off to 12,000 a game.

Last week, unable to finance the team for the remainder of the season, the Dallas owners dumped the whole mess back in the lap of N.F.L. Commissioner Bert Bell, who announced that the team would complete its schedule playing on the road. Texans who have been clamoring loudly for the transfer of a major-league baseball franchise (e.g., the St. Louis Cardinals) clearly had good reason now to restudy that project.

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