Showing posts with label Roger Goodell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roger Goodell. Show all posts
Monday, December 24, 2012
Goodell and why the bounty scandal backfired
Roger Goodell and why the bounty scandal backfired
The Saints bounty suspensions have been officially vacated thanks to Paul Tagliabue, and nine months later, the bounty scandal finally has a conclusion that makes sense.
Andrew Sharp on Dec 12, 2012
http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2012/12/12/3757574/roger-goodell-paul-tagliabue-saints-bounty-suspensions
Robalini's Note: This article is not only a deserved praise of the level-headed ruling by Paul Tagliabue (who hopefully will make the Hall of Fame soon) but indictment of how horribly Roger Goodell has handled both Bountygate and the entire player safety issue. If player safety was really at the core of how Goodell was behaving, nobody (including myself) would have a problem with what he is doing. Instead, Goodell is using "player safety" as a bogus mantra to arbitrarily punish players with fines and suspensions, and turning NFL games into Playstation scorefests in the process...
Never forget that Roger Goodell created the bounty scandal. We will probably reference this scandal for years in one way or another, and so let's be clear: none of this went public until an NFL press release on a Friday afternoon in March.
It ended Tuesday, when Paul Tagliabue gave us a disturbingly levelheaded ruling in the player appeals -- a ruling that loyally protects the NFL against possible defamation lawsuits from the players and pays respectful lipservice to Goodell's "findings" while dismissing every single one of his suspensions and their rationale. The insanity is finally over.
But while everyone points to the scoreboard and celebrates Goodell losing in his crusade against the Saints players, they're missing the best part. Roger Goodell didn't just lose, he lost a game he'd rigged from the beginning. With evidence he never had to share, a judiciary process he controlled, and a melodramtic PR campaign that was supposed to make this case easy.
In fairness, the Saints got caught breaking rules, then breaking them again, and not punishing them would've been just as reckless as what happened. Goodell had to do something to address it, lest a Real Sports segment or a grainy YouTube video explode onto the scene and make pro football look awful. But that's the thing: Somehow a scandal that was supposed to make the NFL look bad became an opportunity for Goodell to show the world how great his NFL is.
Instead of quietly hammering the Saints as an organization and Gregg Williams as a the bounty ringleader, Goodell went into scorched-earth grandstanding mode, emphasizing how disgusted and dismayed he was by the whole affair, then handing down historic punishments across the board. Goodell took this scandal and made it ten times bigger. What should've been Spygate Part Two became something closer to the Black Sox scandal, mostly because Goodell treated it that way.
This backfired SO HARD.
As Tagliabue explained in his ruling, "When an effort to change a culture rests heavily on prohibitions, and discipline and sanctions that are seen as selective, ad hoc or inconsistent, then people in all industries are prone to react negatively - - whether they be construction workers, police officers or football players." Goodell's attitude was so ridiculous that eventually everyone started asking more questions about the Commissioner than they did about bounties. The longer this wore on, the worse Goodell looked.
He deserves it, too. He used the Saints as a prop. With the NFL facing a thousand different lawsuits and concerns about player safety, Goodell decided to release the evidence in March, emphasizing his disgust in the initial league statement.
"The payments here are particularly troubling because they involved not just payments for 'performance,' but also for injuring opposing players. The bounty rule promotes two key elements of NFL football: player safety and competitive integrity.
"It is our responsibility to protect player safety and the integrity of our game, and this type of conduct will not be tolerated. We have made significant progress in changing the culture with respect to player safety and we are not going to relent. We have more work to do and we will do it."
If Goodell had stopped after somehow turning a press release about an organized head-hunting program into a player safety PSA, that would have been fine.
But then, suspending Sean Payton for an entire season AND publicly singling out four Saints players as villains who betrayed the integrity of the game ... that's where the "selective, inconsistent, ad hoc" punishments made the whole world do a double take.
When you look closer, the most scandalous aspect of this whole scandal was the idea that bounties are rare, or really any different than a defensive player's salary. For instance, the Giants defense planned to targeted Kyle Williams, a player with a history of concussions in the NFC Championship Game last year. Does it matter whether any of them made an extra $5,000 that day? The strategy worked. Williams fumbled twice in crucial moments, and each Giant made an extra $62,000 for making the Super Bowl--a much bigger payout that's alleged in any of the Saints evidence.
Once you start thinking hard about the morality "bounties", it's only a matter of time before you realize that football itself is a sport where breaking down the other team's best player is the goal on every play. The entire sport is a bounty system at its core, and once you get that far, the Commissioner asking you to blame the Saints players seems like the most dishonest man in football.
Look at the difference between Goodell and Tagliabue:
"I am profoundly troubled by the fact that players - including leaders among the defensive players - embraced this program so enthusiastically and participated with what appears to have been a deliberate lack of concern for the well-being of their fellow players. ... [T]hey must not let the quest for victory so cloud their judgment that they willingly and willfully target their opponents and engage in unsafe and prohibited conduct intended to injure players."
— Roger Goodell, NFL statement, March 21, 2012
"The undeniable fact is that over many years a pattern and practice of abuse of the rules seems to have developed - - a culture has evolved - - that has led to acceptance of pay-for-performance reward programs. ... Most important, no matter what the League rules and policies are or have been, if many teams in the League allow pay-for-performance programs to operate in the locker room, as seems to be the case, and, in the main, the League has tolerated this behavior without punishment of players, then many players may not have a clear understanding that such behavior is prohibited or where the lines are between permissible and impermissible conduct."
— Paul Tagliabue, Final Decision on players appeals, December 11, 2012
Goodell wanted to blame his players for what happened here, and in one paragraph Tagliabue perfectly explains why that is historically absurd.
There's a reason things happened the way they did, though. The Saints were framed as some grave villains because that allowed the NFL to play the hero. The bounty suspensions were always just an excuse to go on record saying that (1) The NFL has zero tolerance for rule breakers when it comes to player safety, and (2) Roger Goodell is personally disgusted by any player who would try to injure another football player.
Instead, this scandal gave football fans the loudest reminder yet that (1) even the most basic NFL rules about player safety are blurry and unenforceable in any logical or fair way, and (2) aside from PR pontificating, the NFL Commissioner doesn't actually care about the rights, reputation, or welfare of individual players.
So yes, if we remember anything about the bounty scandal, let's remember that Roger Goodell was the mastermind behind the entire disaster. And next time Roger Goodell tells Time Magazine, "I don't do things for public relations, I do things because they're the right thing to do," remember that he's not just a liar, but also a complete failure.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Empty Suit: Roger Goodell's 'Wall Street Journal' Op-Ed
Dave Zirin
On Wednesday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was as hypocritical as it was bizarre. I would even call it “career ending” if the sports media wasn’t so terrified of Goodell, or football fans actually read the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. In this malformed missive Goodell excoriates Judge Susan Nelson’s injunction against the owners’ lockout of the players. He said that the game America loves is now on a dark path to destruction.
It’s a stunning piece. Goodell begins by writing, “Late Monday afternoon, US District Court Judge Susan Richard Nelson issued a ruling that may significantly alter professional football as we know it. For six weeks, there has been a work stoppage in the National Football League as the league has sought to negotiate a new collective-bargaining agreement with the players.”
This is not a “work stoppage.” Some Frank Luntz protégé might have massaged that phrase for Goodell. Calling it a “work stoppage” makes the situation sound like a weather pattern. “When will the work stoppage blow over?” Own it, sir: It’s a lockout. You and the owners chose to rip up the collective bargaining agreement two years before it was due to expire. You chose to reject the NFLPA’s offer to continue under the existing CBA until a new agreement could be reached. You are the reason there is a lockout and the reason it was overturned.
But Goodell doesn’t own it. Instead he chooses to not even reckon with the judge’s decision, writing, “Nelson ordered the end of the stoppage and recognized the players’ right to dissolve their union.” I want to hear Roger argue why Nelson was wrong. Is she wrong that the lockout is doing “serious harm” to a workforce that on average only has three and a half years to ply their trade? Was she wrong to invoke the number of injuries on the field? We don’t know.
But the true chutzpah is yet to come. Goodell writes, “By blessing this negotiating tactic, the decision may endanger one of the most popular and successful sports leagues in history. What would the NFL look like without a collectively bargained compromise? For many years, the collectively bargained system—which has given the players union enhanced free agency and capped the amount that owners spend on salaries—has worked enormously well for the NFL, for NFL players, and for NFL fans.”
Let’s leave aside that the above comment would be news for fans priced out of seats and the players who end up crippled without medical care. Goodell is arguing that the status quo has been a resounding success. On a financial and ratings level, this is absolutely true. But it also flies in the face of every utterance the man has made over the last year. For months all we’ve heard is that the status quo was “unsustainable.” The league needed more games, an expanded playoff system, more off-field discipline and more money back from the players or the league wouldn’t survive. Now we’re hearing that the status quo was great but then this psycho judge and uppity union could potentially be destroying it. This about-face amounts to the kind of jaw-dropping sophistry that would shame a sophist. With this, Goodell has confirmed his legacy as the Don Draper of commissioners. He looks great in a gray suit, but beyond the terrific hair, he’s empty of substance. He’s the man who isn’t there.
But it gets more bizarre. Goodell then attacks Nelson’s support of union decertification by writing, “Under this vision, players and fans would have none of the protections or benefits that only a union (through a collective-bargaining agreement) can deliver.”
Hey! It’s Norma Rae! Who would have thought that the man who has waged a relentless financial and public relations war against the NFLPA was actually Eugene Debs in a $5,000 suit? When a CEO starts praising unions, one word of advice: set your skepticism on high alert.
The rest of the piece involves Goodell painting a picture of a dystopian, barren future where there is “no draft,” “no limits on free agency” and every effort to “discipline” players or test for steroids is met with a lawsuit. Drew Magary does a brilliant send-up of the coded racism and ham-faced authoritarianism embedded in Goodell’s cry of dispair, so I won’t try.
It is stunning, though, to read Goodell’s apocalyptic vision of an NFL future that looks like outtakes from Road Warrior, and then remember that he and his masters in the owner’s box brought us to this point. Only someone isolated enough to be influenced by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal would take any of this prattle seriously. It’s the panicked response of a man who was handed the keys to the greatest luxury boat on earth and made an unprovoked beeline for the nearest iceberg. If Goodell really wants to save his league, he should be respecting the decision of Judge Nelson and opening the gates for the start of training camp. But the owners are filing an appeal. Of course they are. When the entitled and arrogant among us find themselves in a hole with a shovel, all they can do is keep digging.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
On Wednesday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was as hypocritical as it was bizarre. I would even call it “career ending” if the sports media wasn’t so terrified of Goodell, or football fans actually read the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. In this malformed missive Goodell excoriates Judge Susan Nelson’s injunction against the owners’ lockout of the players. He said that the game America loves is now on a dark path to destruction.
It’s a stunning piece. Goodell begins by writing, “Late Monday afternoon, US District Court Judge Susan Richard Nelson issued a ruling that may significantly alter professional football as we know it. For six weeks, there has been a work stoppage in the National Football League as the league has sought to negotiate a new collective-bargaining agreement with the players.”
This is not a “work stoppage.” Some Frank Luntz protégé might have massaged that phrase for Goodell. Calling it a “work stoppage” makes the situation sound like a weather pattern. “When will the work stoppage blow over?” Own it, sir: It’s a lockout. You and the owners chose to rip up the collective bargaining agreement two years before it was due to expire. You chose to reject the NFLPA’s offer to continue under the existing CBA until a new agreement could be reached. You are the reason there is a lockout and the reason it was overturned.
But Goodell doesn’t own it. Instead he chooses to not even reckon with the judge’s decision, writing, “Nelson ordered the end of the stoppage and recognized the players’ right to dissolve their union.” I want to hear Roger argue why Nelson was wrong. Is she wrong that the lockout is doing “serious harm” to a workforce that on average only has three and a half years to ply their trade? Was she wrong to invoke the number of injuries on the field? We don’t know.
But the true chutzpah is yet to come. Goodell writes, “By blessing this negotiating tactic, the decision may endanger one of the most popular and successful sports leagues in history. What would the NFL look like without a collectively bargained compromise? For many years, the collectively bargained system—which has given the players union enhanced free agency and capped the amount that owners spend on salaries—has worked enormously well for the NFL, for NFL players, and for NFL fans.”
Let’s leave aside that the above comment would be news for fans priced out of seats and the players who end up crippled without medical care. Goodell is arguing that the status quo has been a resounding success. On a financial and ratings level, this is absolutely true. But it also flies in the face of every utterance the man has made over the last year. For months all we’ve heard is that the status quo was “unsustainable.” The league needed more games, an expanded playoff system, more off-field discipline and more money back from the players or the league wouldn’t survive. Now we’re hearing that the status quo was great but then this psycho judge and uppity union could potentially be destroying it. This about-face amounts to the kind of jaw-dropping sophistry that would shame a sophist. With this, Goodell has confirmed his legacy as the Don Draper of commissioners. He looks great in a gray suit, but beyond the terrific hair, he’s empty of substance. He’s the man who isn’t there.
But it gets more bizarre. Goodell then attacks Nelson’s support of union decertification by writing, “Under this vision, players and fans would have none of the protections or benefits that only a union (through a collective-bargaining agreement) can deliver.”
Hey! It’s Norma Rae! Who would have thought that the man who has waged a relentless financial and public relations war against the NFLPA was actually Eugene Debs in a $5,000 suit? When a CEO starts praising unions, one word of advice: set your skepticism on high alert.
The rest of the piece involves Goodell painting a picture of a dystopian, barren future where there is “no draft,” “no limits on free agency” and every effort to “discipline” players or test for steroids is met with a lawsuit. Drew Magary does a brilliant send-up of the coded racism and ham-faced authoritarianism embedded in Goodell’s cry of dispair, so I won’t try.
It is stunning, though, to read Goodell’s apocalyptic vision of an NFL future that looks like outtakes from Road Warrior, and then remember that he and his masters in the owner’s box brought us to this point. Only someone isolated enough to be influenced by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal would take any of this prattle seriously. It’s the panicked response of a man who was handed the keys to the greatest luxury boat on earth and made an unprovoked beeline for the nearest iceberg. If Goodell really wants to save his league, he should be respecting the decision of Judge Nelson and opening the gates for the start of training camp. But the owners are filing an appeal. Of course they are. When the entitled and arrogant among us find themselves in a hole with a shovel, all they can do is keep digging.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
NFL Labor Pains and the Press Release that Redefined Chutzpah
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159211/nfl-labor-pains-and-press-release-redefined-chutzpah
Please click on the link and facebook-share and tweet this week's column. The more popular it is on the Nation's site, the more sports articles they will crave.
In struggle and sports,
Dave Zirin
Beyond all the self-pity and spin coming from the offices of National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell, here is the naked truth. We face the prospect of no football in 2011 because the players made a three word demand that would not have cost the owners a dime: open your books.
DeMaurice Smith and the NFL Players Association wanted 10 years of financial audits so they could see why the most successful sports league on earth was claiming to be financially embattled. They wanted to see how the owners could feel justified to ask for a rookie pay scale and 18% cuts in player compensation. They wanted to see how, despite all we now know about the brutal hazards of the sport, the owners could insist on adding two more regular season games. But the owners refused to open the books, offering instead “a single sheet of paper with two numbers on it.” This single sheet would only be available to the union after being vetted by an independent third-party.
It’s unclear why the owners have made a deal-breaking fetish of financial secrecy. We can only assume that the "books" would not be flattered by the light of day. We don't know whether their private ledgers would provoke the IRS to give the NFL something slightly less pleasant than a body cavity search. We don’t know if the audits would demonstrate that owners leveraged their franchises and then took a bath in the 2008 economic crash. We don’t know if individual NFL owners - like their MLB counterparts - lied to local governments so they could get more taxpayer cash for stadiums. Given the financial state of baseball’s New York Mets, whose owners flushed their liquidity by partnering up with a guy by the name of Bernie Madoff, you’d forgive us for fearing the worst.
The NFLPA also offered to consider all cuts in return for an ownership stake in the teams. The owners responding like the players arrived at negotiations wearing white after Labor Day. NFL lead counsel Bob Batterman reportedly responded, "My clients aren't interested in being partners with your guys." It’s this kind of plutocratic noblesse contempt that’s poisoned the well.
The NFL Players Association, feeling derided and disrespected has now decertified so they can sue the league and forestall the owners from shutting down the sport. Litigation isn't pretty, but going to the courts means that the NFLPA can get an injunction and prevent a lockout. An injunction means we will have football this fall.
The owners have responded by confusingly calling for a return to the bargaining table, while stating their intent to move forward with the lockout. This is like claiming to care about concussions while calling for two extra games a season.
After negotiations broke off, NFLPA leader DeMaurice Smith said, “As businessmen, we asked the owners two years ago to consider two basic tenets to getting a fair deal: financial transparency and the health and safety of our players. Financial transparency would help us reach a compromise. Even until the last moment, we were rebutted. And as for health and safety, that’s a non-negotiable issue. To our players, I will not ever yield on this point. There is no price tag for your arms, legs, backs, necks, shoulders and brains.”
Then the owners released a statement that took the chutzpah scale to new, unimagined heights. They wrote, "At a time when thousands of employees are fighting for their collective bargaining rights, this union has chosen to abandon collective bargaining in favor of a sham 'decertification' and antitrust litigation."
Gobsmacked does not begin to describe my reaction. NFL owners are people who in their personal politics, respect unions about as much as Peter King respects Ramadan (that's congressional Islamaphobic goon Peter King, not Starbucks-swilling NFL writer, Peter King.)
It would be nice to think their press release is simply a respectful tribute to the heroic struggles of the public sector unions. It would be nice to think that even NFL owners have been moved by the plight of Wisconsin's teachers, nurses, and ambulance drivers, but let's be real. The owners are trying to drive a wedge between working class fans and players by portraying the members of the union as greedy, entitled and out-of-touch.
Professional football players average three and a half years in the league. They severely injure their bodies, and die 22 years before the typical American male. Yet the owners would like us to see them as ungrateful, cloistered, creatures of privilege. If the owners really want to see people who match that description, they'd be better off investing in a mirror.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Please click on the link and facebook-share and tweet this week's column. The more popular it is on the Nation's site, the more sports articles they will crave.
In struggle and sports,
Dave Zirin
Beyond all the self-pity and spin coming from the offices of National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell, here is the naked truth. We face the prospect of no football in 2011 because the players made a three word demand that would not have cost the owners a dime: open your books.
DeMaurice Smith and the NFL Players Association wanted 10 years of financial audits so they could see why the most successful sports league on earth was claiming to be financially embattled. They wanted to see how the owners could feel justified to ask for a rookie pay scale and 18% cuts in player compensation. They wanted to see how, despite all we now know about the brutal hazards of the sport, the owners could insist on adding two more regular season games. But the owners refused to open the books, offering instead “a single sheet of paper with two numbers on it.” This single sheet would only be available to the union after being vetted by an independent third-party.
It’s unclear why the owners have made a deal-breaking fetish of financial secrecy. We can only assume that the "books" would not be flattered by the light of day. We don't know whether their private ledgers would provoke the IRS to give the NFL something slightly less pleasant than a body cavity search. We don’t know if the audits would demonstrate that owners leveraged their franchises and then took a bath in the 2008 economic crash. We don’t know if individual NFL owners - like their MLB counterparts - lied to local governments so they could get more taxpayer cash for stadiums. Given the financial state of baseball’s New York Mets, whose owners flushed their liquidity by partnering up with a guy by the name of Bernie Madoff, you’d forgive us for fearing the worst.
The NFLPA also offered to consider all cuts in return for an ownership stake in the teams. The owners responding like the players arrived at negotiations wearing white after Labor Day. NFL lead counsel Bob Batterman reportedly responded, "My clients aren't interested in being partners with your guys." It’s this kind of plutocratic noblesse contempt that’s poisoned the well.
The NFL Players Association, feeling derided and disrespected has now decertified so they can sue the league and forestall the owners from shutting down the sport. Litigation isn't pretty, but going to the courts means that the NFLPA can get an injunction and prevent a lockout. An injunction means we will have football this fall.
The owners have responded by confusingly calling for a return to the bargaining table, while stating their intent to move forward with the lockout. This is like claiming to care about concussions while calling for two extra games a season.
After negotiations broke off, NFLPA leader DeMaurice Smith said, “As businessmen, we asked the owners two years ago to consider two basic tenets to getting a fair deal: financial transparency and the health and safety of our players. Financial transparency would help us reach a compromise. Even until the last moment, we were rebutted. And as for health and safety, that’s a non-negotiable issue. To our players, I will not ever yield on this point. There is no price tag for your arms, legs, backs, necks, shoulders and brains.”
Then the owners released a statement that took the chutzpah scale to new, unimagined heights. They wrote, "At a time when thousands of employees are fighting for their collective bargaining rights, this union has chosen to abandon collective bargaining in favor of a sham 'decertification' and antitrust litigation."
Gobsmacked does not begin to describe my reaction. NFL owners are people who in their personal politics, respect unions about as much as Peter King respects Ramadan (that's congressional Islamaphobic goon Peter King, not Starbucks-swilling NFL writer, Peter King.)
It would be nice to think their press release is simply a respectful tribute to the heroic struggles of the public sector unions. It would be nice to think that even NFL owners have been moved by the plight of Wisconsin's teachers, nurses, and ambulance drivers, but let's be real. The owners are trying to drive a wedge between working class fans and players by portraying the members of the union as greedy, entitled and out-of-touch.
Professional football players average three and a half years in the league. They severely injure their bodies, and die 22 years before the typical American male. Yet the owners would like us to see them as ungrateful, cloistered, creatures of privilege. If the owners really want to see people who match that description, they'd be better off investing in a mirror.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Those Non-Profit Packers
Dave Zirin
In a season where N.F.L. owners have steadily threatened to lock out the players next year unless they secure more profits in the next collective bargaining agreement, it’s poetic justice to see the Green Bay Packers, the team without an owner, make the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say the Packers are without an owner. They have a hundred and twelve thousand of them. The Packers are owned by the fans, making them the only publicly owned, not-for-profit, major professional team in the United States. The Pack have been a fan-owned operation since the primitive pro football days of the nineteen-twenties, when N.F.L. teams could be won in card games and no one foresaw the awesome power this sport would hold over both the American imagination and the American wallet.
In 1923, the Packers were just another hardscrabble team on the brink of bankruptcy. Rather than fold they decided to sell shares to the community, with fans each throwing down a couple of dollars to keep the team afloat. That humble frozen seed has since blossomed into a situation wherein more than a hundred thousand stockholders own more than four million shares of a perennial playoff contender. Those holding Packers stock are limited to no more than two hundred thousand shares, keeping any individual from gaining control over the club. Shareholders receive no dividend check and no free tickets to Lambeau Field. They don’t even get a foam cheesehead. All they get is a piece of paper that says they are part-owners of the Green Bay Packers. They don’t even get a green and gold frame for display purposes.
The shareholders elect a board of directors and a seven-member executive committee to stand in at N.F.L. owners meetings. But football decisions are made by General Manager Ted Thompson, perhaps the luckiest and happiest G.M. in sports. This structure allows Thompson to execute decisions, even unpopular ones, without an impatient, jittery billionaire breathing down his neck. Since his hire in January 2005, Thompson has made his share of controversial moves. But unlike his G.M. brethren around the league, who carry little or no job security, Thompson has been given the space to see his moves succeed or fail on their own accord. It was Thompson who decided to jettison legendary quarterback Brett Favre in 2008 for the unproven but younger and considerably lower maintenance Aaron Rodgers. Today, Favre is officially (we hope) retired and Rodgers stands at the pinnacle of his sport.
The Packers’ unique setup has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the N.F.L. Wisconsin fans get to enjoy the team with the confidence that their owner won’t threaten to move to Los Angeles unless the team gets a new mega-dome. Volunteers work concessions, with sixty per cent of the proceeds going to local charities. Even the beer is cheaper than at a typical N.F.L. stadium. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team routinely puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response. It doesn’t matter how beloved the Cowboys are in Dallas; if Jerry Jones ever put out a call for free labor, he’d be laughed out of town.
Here are the Packers: financially solvent, competitive, and deeply connected to the hundred thousand person city of Green Bay. It’s a beautiful story but it’s one that the N.F.L. and Commissioner Roger Goodell take great pains both to hide and make sure no other locality replicates. It’s actually written in the N.F.L. bylaws that no team can be a non-profit, community owned entity. The late N.F.L. commissioner Pete Rozelle had it written into the league’s constitution in 1960. Article V, Section 4—otherwise known as the Green Bay Rule—states that “charitable organizations and/or corporations not organized for profit and not now a member of the league may not hold membership in the National Football League.”
I talked with Rick Chernick, a member of the Packers board of directors, about whether other communities should challenge the N.F.L. constitution and be like Green Bay. Chernick expressed doubt, saying:
"I’m just not sure in today’s day and age a team could follow the Packer way. The cost of ownership is a ton today, thus being almost an impossible task without deep pockets. Green Bay is truly a special, special situation."
Chernick makes a valid point. But there is a strong counterargument as well. It may be exorbitantly expensive to run a team, but people don’t buy N.F.L. teams as a civic service. Being an N.F.L. owner is like having a license to print money. Television contracts alone run in the billions, with the 2006-2011 contracts valued at approximately $3 billion annually, $800 million more than the previous contracts. In addition, N.F.L. teams have received $6 billion in public funds to build the current crop of stadiums. In other words, the public is already shouldering a great deal of the cost and debt for N.F.L. franchises. But these public dollars, through some sort of magic alchemy, morph into private profits that often flow away from the communities that ponied up the dough. In the United States, we socialize the debt of sports and privatize the profits. Green Bay stands as a living, breathing, and, for the owners, frightening example, that pro sports can aid our cities in tough economic times, not drain them of scarce public resources.
Fans in San Diego and Minnesota, in particular, where local N.F.L. owners are threatening to uproot the home teams and move them to Los Angeles, might look toward Green Bay and wonder whether they could do a better job than the men in the owner’s box. And if N.F.L. owners go ahead and lock the players out next season, more than a few long suffering fans might look at their long suffering franchises and ask, “Maybe we don’t need owners at all.” It has worked in Green Bay—all the way to the Super Bowl.
In a season where N.F.L. owners have steadily threatened to lock out the players next year unless they secure more profits in the next collective bargaining agreement, it’s poetic justice to see the Green Bay Packers, the team without an owner, make the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say the Packers are without an owner. They have a hundred and twelve thousand of them. The Packers are owned by the fans, making them the only publicly owned, not-for-profit, major professional team in the United States. The Pack have been a fan-owned operation since the primitive pro football days of the nineteen-twenties, when N.F.L. teams could be won in card games and no one foresaw the awesome power this sport would hold over both the American imagination and the American wallet.
In 1923, the Packers were just another hardscrabble team on the brink of bankruptcy. Rather than fold they decided to sell shares to the community, with fans each throwing down a couple of dollars to keep the team afloat. That humble frozen seed has since blossomed into a situation wherein more than a hundred thousand stockholders own more than four million shares of a perennial playoff contender. Those holding Packers stock are limited to no more than two hundred thousand shares, keeping any individual from gaining control over the club. Shareholders receive no dividend check and no free tickets to Lambeau Field. They don’t even get a foam cheesehead. All they get is a piece of paper that says they are part-owners of the Green Bay Packers. They don’t even get a green and gold frame for display purposes.
The shareholders elect a board of directors and a seven-member executive committee to stand in at N.F.L. owners meetings. But football decisions are made by General Manager Ted Thompson, perhaps the luckiest and happiest G.M. in sports. This structure allows Thompson to execute decisions, even unpopular ones, without an impatient, jittery billionaire breathing down his neck. Since his hire in January 2005, Thompson has made his share of controversial moves. But unlike his G.M. brethren around the league, who carry little or no job security, Thompson has been given the space to see his moves succeed or fail on their own accord. It was Thompson who decided to jettison legendary quarterback Brett Favre in 2008 for the unproven but younger and considerably lower maintenance Aaron Rodgers. Today, Favre is officially (we hope) retired and Rodgers stands at the pinnacle of his sport.
The Packers’ unique setup has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the N.F.L. Wisconsin fans get to enjoy the team with the confidence that their owner won’t threaten to move to Los Angeles unless the team gets a new mega-dome. Volunteers work concessions, with sixty per cent of the proceeds going to local charities. Even the beer is cheaper than at a typical N.F.L. stadium. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team routinely puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response. It doesn’t matter how beloved the Cowboys are in Dallas; if Jerry Jones ever put out a call for free labor, he’d be laughed out of town.
Here are the Packers: financially solvent, competitive, and deeply connected to the hundred thousand person city of Green Bay. It’s a beautiful story but it’s one that the N.F.L. and Commissioner Roger Goodell take great pains both to hide and make sure no other locality replicates. It’s actually written in the N.F.L. bylaws that no team can be a non-profit, community owned entity. The late N.F.L. commissioner Pete Rozelle had it written into the league’s constitution in 1960. Article V, Section 4—otherwise known as the Green Bay Rule—states that “charitable organizations and/or corporations not organized for profit and not now a member of the league may not hold membership in the National Football League.”
I talked with Rick Chernick, a member of the Packers board of directors, about whether other communities should challenge the N.F.L. constitution and be like Green Bay. Chernick expressed doubt, saying:
"I’m just not sure in today’s day and age a team could follow the Packer way. The cost of ownership is a ton today, thus being almost an impossible task without deep pockets. Green Bay is truly a special, special situation."
Chernick makes a valid point. But there is a strong counterargument as well. It may be exorbitantly expensive to run a team, but people don’t buy N.F.L. teams as a civic service. Being an N.F.L. owner is like having a license to print money. Television contracts alone run in the billions, with the 2006-2011 contracts valued at approximately $3 billion annually, $800 million more than the previous contracts. In addition, N.F.L. teams have received $6 billion in public funds to build the current crop of stadiums. In other words, the public is already shouldering a great deal of the cost and debt for N.F.L. franchises. But these public dollars, through some sort of magic alchemy, morph into private profits that often flow away from the communities that ponied up the dough. In the United States, we socialize the debt of sports and privatize the profits. Green Bay stands as a living, breathing, and, for the owners, frightening example, that pro sports can aid our cities in tough economic times, not drain them of scarce public resources.
Fans in San Diego and Minnesota, in particular, where local N.F.L. owners are threatening to uproot the home teams and move them to Los Angeles, might look toward Green Bay and wonder whether they could do a better job than the men in the owner’s box. And if N.F.L. owners go ahead and lock the players out next season, more than a few long suffering fans might look at their long suffering franchises and ask, “Maybe we don’t need owners at all.” It has worked in Green Bay—all the way to the Super Bowl.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Roger Goodell's Message to NFL Players and Fans: Drop Dead
http://www.thenation.com/blog/157438/roger-goodell%E2%80%99s-message-nfl-players-and-fans-drop-dead
Roger Goodell's Message to NFL Players and Fans: Drop Dead
by Dave Zirin | January 3, 2011
Leave it to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to end a thrilling NFL regular season on a sour, ugly note. As football fans, sports radio devotees and chat-room obsessives gathered Monday to discuss the playoff seedings, Goodell issued an ill-timed letter [1]laying out the state of negotiations with the NFL Players Association. Both sides are striving to secure a new collective bargaining agreement and avoid labor Armageddon, but based on Goodell's letter, that's where the similarities end.
In the letter, Goodell seems to be following a tried-and-true strategy: blame the union and sow resentment between the fans and the players they pay to watch. But in taking a closer look at his musty missive, Goodell also establishes himself as a stalking horse for a broader, systemic strategy being used by governors and captains of industry across the country. It’s a strategy that for all the focus-tested language has one end-goal: getting workers to work harder for less.
First, blame the economy: Goodell writes: "Economic conditions have changed dramatically inside and outside the NFL since 2006 when we negotiated the last CBA. A 10 percent unemployment rate hurts us all. Fans have limited budgets and rightly want the most for their money. I get it." Does he get it? There is nothing about lowering prices for tickets, concessions or parking. Instead he goes on to blame the greedy unions for making decent wages and benefits as the reason there may be no football in 2011. As Goodell writes, "Yes, NFL players deserve to be paid well. Unfortunately, economic realities are forcing everyone to make tough choices and the NFL is no different." This is the sporting version of something far broader and more pernicious, as public sector workers are becoming the Willie Hortons of our economy. They have become the 2011 scapegoat of choice as politicians impose the coming austerity. AFSCME has even started a campaign called "No More Lies [2]" to counter the myths of the greedy unionists destroying state budgets.
Goodell goes on to lay out his vision for a brighter future. This brighter future includes players not only playing for less but also working more. As Goodell writes, "An enhanced season of 18 regular season and two preseason games would not add a single game for the players collectively, but would give fans more meaningful, high-quality football." Then without irony and with no transition, Goodell leaps right into his deep care and concern for players' health, writing, "Our emphasis on player health and safety is absolutely essential to the future of our game." Yes, play longer but nothing is more essential than the health of the players. As Pittsburgh Steelers Wide Receiver Hines Ward said in comments aimed at Goodell [3], "If you were so concerned about the safety, why are you adding two more games? They don't care about the safety of the game.... They're hypocrites."
Then Goodell goes after the salaries of rookies, calling for a "rookie pay scale." He writes, "All we're asking for is a return to common sense in paying our rookies. Other leagues have done this and we can too." This is also ridiculous if not immoral. Any sport where each play can be your last should reject any notion of a pay scale. Players in this most violent of games should be able to make as much as the market will bear and not a penny less.
Goodell finally ends with some blather about wanting to achieve this kind of "forward looking CBA" and "protecting the integrity of the game." But there is no integrity in Goodell's vision: only the same blueprint for workers we are seeing across the country: work more, take less. I am sure that there are many who would read this with little sympathy for NFL players as workers. But please consider: a typical NFL career is three and a half years, and as NFL player Scott Fujita said to me, "We're the only business with a 100 percent injury rate." The ratings for the NFL this season have never been higher and no one ever paid hundreds of dollars to see Jerry Jones stalk the sidelines.
But it's even bigger than all of that. Goodell finishes this ill-timed screed by writing, "This is about more than a labor agreement. It's about the future of the NFL." It's also about the future of this country. We are living in a time of severe economic crisis. Whether the bosses or workers are made to pay for this crisis will be decided in battles large and small taking place around the country. But for all of these conflicts, there will be no greater stage or more amplified battleground than that between NFL owners and players. The vast majority of fans have a side in this fight. And it's not with Roger Goodell.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Links:
[1] http://communityvoices.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/sports/bob-smiziks-blog/26836-goodells-letter-to-nfl-fans
[2] http://leftlaborreporter.wordpress.com/
[3] http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/Pulling-No-Punches/December-2010/Hines-Ward-Puts-the-Smack-Down-on-Goodell/
Roger Goodell's Message to NFL Players and Fans: Drop Dead
by Dave Zirin | January 3, 2011
Leave it to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to end a thrilling NFL regular season on a sour, ugly note. As football fans, sports radio devotees and chat-room obsessives gathered Monday to discuss the playoff seedings, Goodell issued an ill-timed letter [1]laying out the state of negotiations with the NFL Players Association. Both sides are striving to secure a new collective bargaining agreement and avoid labor Armageddon, but based on Goodell's letter, that's where the similarities end.
In the letter, Goodell seems to be following a tried-and-true strategy: blame the union and sow resentment between the fans and the players they pay to watch. But in taking a closer look at his musty missive, Goodell also establishes himself as a stalking horse for a broader, systemic strategy being used by governors and captains of industry across the country. It’s a strategy that for all the focus-tested language has one end-goal: getting workers to work harder for less.
First, blame the economy: Goodell writes: "Economic conditions have changed dramatically inside and outside the NFL since 2006 when we negotiated the last CBA. A 10 percent unemployment rate hurts us all. Fans have limited budgets and rightly want the most for their money. I get it." Does he get it? There is nothing about lowering prices for tickets, concessions or parking. Instead he goes on to blame the greedy unions for making decent wages and benefits as the reason there may be no football in 2011. As Goodell writes, "Yes, NFL players deserve to be paid well. Unfortunately, economic realities are forcing everyone to make tough choices and the NFL is no different." This is the sporting version of something far broader and more pernicious, as public sector workers are becoming the Willie Hortons of our economy. They have become the 2011 scapegoat of choice as politicians impose the coming austerity. AFSCME has even started a campaign called "No More Lies [2]" to counter the myths of the greedy unionists destroying state budgets.
Goodell goes on to lay out his vision for a brighter future. This brighter future includes players not only playing for less but also working more. As Goodell writes, "An enhanced season of 18 regular season and two preseason games would not add a single game for the players collectively, but would give fans more meaningful, high-quality football." Then without irony and with no transition, Goodell leaps right into his deep care and concern for players' health, writing, "Our emphasis on player health and safety is absolutely essential to the future of our game." Yes, play longer but nothing is more essential than the health of the players. As Pittsburgh Steelers Wide Receiver Hines Ward said in comments aimed at Goodell [3], "If you were so concerned about the safety, why are you adding two more games? They don't care about the safety of the game.... They're hypocrites."
Then Goodell goes after the salaries of rookies, calling for a "rookie pay scale." He writes, "All we're asking for is a return to common sense in paying our rookies. Other leagues have done this and we can too." This is also ridiculous if not immoral. Any sport where each play can be your last should reject any notion of a pay scale. Players in this most violent of games should be able to make as much as the market will bear and not a penny less.
Goodell finally ends with some blather about wanting to achieve this kind of "forward looking CBA" and "protecting the integrity of the game." But there is no integrity in Goodell's vision: only the same blueprint for workers we are seeing across the country: work more, take less. I am sure that there are many who would read this with little sympathy for NFL players as workers. But please consider: a typical NFL career is three and a half years, and as NFL player Scott Fujita said to me, "We're the only business with a 100 percent injury rate." The ratings for the NFL this season have never been higher and no one ever paid hundreds of dollars to see Jerry Jones stalk the sidelines.
But it's even bigger than all of that. Goodell finishes this ill-timed screed by writing, "This is about more than a labor agreement. It's about the future of the NFL." It's also about the future of this country. We are living in a time of severe economic crisis. Whether the bosses or workers are made to pay for this crisis will be decided in battles large and small taking place around the country. But for all of these conflicts, there will be no greater stage or more amplified battleground than that between NFL owners and players. The vast majority of fans have a side in this fight. And it's not with Roger Goodell.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Links:
[1] http://communityvoices.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/sports/bob-smiziks-blog/26836-goodells-letter-to-nfl-fans
[2] http://leftlaborreporter.wordpress.com/
[3] http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/Pulling-No-Punches/December-2010/Hines-Ward-Puts-the-Smack-Down-on-Goodell/
Monday, December 6, 2010
New Orleans Saints' Drew Brees named SI's Sportsman of the Year
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/magazine/11/29/sportsman/
Tuesday November 30, 2010
New Orleans Saints' Drew Brees named SI's Sportsman of the Year
Story Highlights
Drew Brees not only won Super Bowl, but also helped and embraced city in need
Roger Goodell: "He symbolizes the people of New Orleans in many, many ways"
Brees Dream Foundation has raised more than $6 million for cancer, children
For not only leading the New Orleans Saints to the first Super Bowl title in the franchise's history, but also for helping lead the city of New Orleans' rebirth after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, quarterback Drew Brees is the recipient of Sports Illustrated's 57th Sportsman of the Year award. Brees will be honored at a ceremony Tuesday evening in New York City.
The SI award comes as Brees and the Saints have won four consecutive games and, with an 8-3 record, moved solidly into playoff contention in defense of the championship they won a year ago in Miami. Brees, 31, was the MVP of that Super Bowl game, but he wins SI's highest honor for much more than just his ability to play football.
Jessie Aney, a 12-year-old tennis and hockey star from Rochester, Minn., was named Sports Illustrated Kids' SportsKid of the Year. The No. 1-ranked tennis player in the USTA's 12-and-under and 14-and-Under Northern Section, she was runner-up in Minnesota's Class 2A high school state singles championships as a seventh grader. A 4.0 student, Aney school five goals in her varsity hockey debut for Century High.
Nearly five years ago, in the early spring of 2006, Brees was a broken player. After surgery to repair a catastrophic shoulder injury, the Saints were the only team that offered to make him their starting quarterback. Meanwhile, New Orleans was a desperate city, trying to find traction after one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Brees would later say his landing in New Orleans was much more than just an athlete's change of venue. "It was a calling,'' he said. "We were brought here for a reason.''
Brees and his wife, Brittany, showed love for New Orleans when the city felt abandoned by so many others. Not only did Brees help the Saints make the playoffs in his first year in the city and begin the four-year climb to last year's title, but he also threw himself into helping the city recover, and its people to feel like they were not alone. "He symbolizes the people of New Orleans in many, many ways,'' says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. "Drew believes in that community. He believes in doing what's right. He's one of the most genuine people I've ever met.''
Upon settling in a home in Uptown New Orleans, Drew and Brittany Brees established The Brees Dream Foundation, with the goal of "Advancing research in the fight against cancer and providing care, education and opportunities for children in need.'' In the ensuing years, Brees's foundation has helped raise more than $6 million, primarily in and around New Orleans, but also in San Diego (where Brees began his career and played five seasons with the Chargers) and West Layfayette, Ind. (where Brees played college football at Purdue, and met his wife in 1999).
"New Orleans was the perfect fit for Drew,'' says Brian Schottenheimer, who coached Brees in San Diego and is now offensive coordinator of the New York Jets. "There were questions about Drew and there were questions about New Orleans. But things happen for a reason.''
The steady revival of New Orleans owes to the efforts of many civic leaders, but none are more visible than the quarterback of the city's beloved Saints, so long lovable losers, but now on top of the football world. "You could see it in Drew from the beginning,'' says Billy Miller, who joined the team with Brees in 2006 and played four seasons. "He had this attitude that just said: `If I lead, people will follow.'''
Most poignant of all, Brees has dug deep roots in a city that opened its arms when he was wounded. He and Brittany have two sons: Baylen, who will turn two in January; and Bowen, born Oct. 19. Two weeks ago Brees held Bowen in his arms and said, "Life is a miracle.''
And some would say the same for what has happened since Brees arrived in New Orleans.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
“It's bigger than professional football”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/156606/%E2%80%9Cits-bigger-professional-football%E2%80%9D-talking-nflpa-president-demaurice-smith
“It's bigger than professional football”: Talking with NFLPA President DeMaurice Smith
Dave Zirin
This past week, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross showed why many owners choose to let National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell do their talking for them. Ross spoke out for the logic of extending the current 16 game season to 18 games, saying, "The additional games, the studies show will not really increase injuries. We're still playing 20 games, we're eliminating two preseason games and adding two regular-season games, which is really what helps with the revenues, and make the fans a lot happier and those games will be a lot more meaningful. But in terms of the players, they're still playing 20 games."
The idiocy of this argument is dizzying. Of course more games will mean more injuries. Of course even someone who wouldn’t know Tom Brady from Tommy Tune could surmise the differences in intensity between preseason and an actual football game. It’s like comparing a tofurky to the real deal. These comments were especially galling coming from Ross, whose Dolphins are injury depleted to the point where their starting quarterback is third stringer Tyler Thigpen.
NFL Players Association President DeMaurice Smith wasted no time striking back at Ross. "Comments like that tell me that they just don't get it,” he said. “Their teammates lost two franchise quarterbacks in the same game ... and the message is we shouldn't worry about adding two more games? Men are not expendable and neither are their families." This question about whether to extend the season by two extra games has become one of the great sticking points in the ongoing negotiations aimed at avoiding a 2010 lockout in the country’s most popular sport.
I asked Smith two weeks ago about the owners’ push for an 18 game season and whether it was a deal-breaker in the current negotiations. He said, "Our only strong stance is about signing a new collective bargaining agreement. That's it. I'm willing to discuss anything that guarantees that football continues for our players. There's an 18 game proposal from the NFL that we have looked at - we're going to respond to it,- but there are some things that are inviolate. When I show up at a team meeting and I've got half the guys sitting in a conference room wrapped up in ice, three or four guys already on crutches, well anybody who wants to know how brutal this game is, show up at a team meeting on a Monday morning after a Sunday game where you watch some of the best athletes in the world tip-toe down two steps, where if you want to shake hands, you had better be gentle. So it's not an enhanced season, as the owner's call it. It's two more end of the season games where players are already beat up, nicked up, and knocked out."
It’s this heightened awareness of injuries and the owners desire to throw on two new games without increased compensation that has the two sides in a Buffalo Stance. I asked Smith in May, on a scale of 1-10, what the chances were for a lockout to start the 2011 season. He put it at a 14. When I asked Smith again, he said, "Still at 14... We are still far away from a deal being signed by the deadline in March. Just [five] weeks ago the NFL informed us that they were going to cancel the NFL players and their family's health insurance in March if a lock-out occurs if you're sitting where I'm sitting and you want to know if a lock-out is on the table, I'm not sure that any player in the National Football League would disagree with me that there's a strong likelihood that this is going to happen."
The scheduled canceling of health care benefits for players and their families has been received by the players as a heartless, aggressive act, especially with the recent avalanche of press stories about the physical toll of playing the game. "Our players risk everything on the field," he said. "There's been a lot of media coverage of the helmet to helmet hits, over the last few weeks, and the cover of Sports Illustrated is about concussions...There has been recently a great deal of concern expressed by ownership about it. The thing that we wanted to point out to our fans is that the NFL, right now as we speak, has sued 262 players over their workers comp. It still takes at least a three year NFL career to get any health care after you retire. We had to fight legislation from a team last year to take away workers comp from the players who play the game, being notified in March that their health insurance will be canceled. The players, and likely their families, are saying 'How can you express a concern about health and safety, after watching four hits on Sunday, and then snap your fingers and say that health care is over in March?' It seems both hypocritical and misleading... They put out a press release about larger fines, larger punishments, perhaps suspensions, but oh by the way, ignore the fact that we're going to cancel the health insurance for people who have kids, at least two players whose kids are in need of heart transplants. We have several who have kids on kidney dialysis. Right now we as a union are trying to figure out how to provide supplemental health insurance for the players families.”
Most strikingly, at the end of our discussion, Smith made an open plea to involve fans in struggle to avoid a lockout and made clear that this issue transcends sports. "Fans [who want to help] can go to NFLOCKOUT.com. We will send people to speak at any union meetings or community meetings.... Only the owners make money when there is a lockout, making four billion dollars from the networks and paying nothing in salaries. But everybody else loses. Every city would lose about a hundred and fifty million a year in revenue. Every city will lose jobs. It's bigger than professional football. We all have an interest to avoid a lockout."
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
“It's bigger than professional football”: Talking with NFLPA President DeMaurice Smith
Dave Zirin
This past week, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross showed why many owners choose to let National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell do their talking for them. Ross spoke out for the logic of extending the current 16 game season to 18 games, saying, "The additional games, the studies show will not really increase injuries. We're still playing 20 games, we're eliminating two preseason games and adding two regular-season games, which is really what helps with the revenues, and make the fans a lot happier and those games will be a lot more meaningful. But in terms of the players, they're still playing 20 games."
The idiocy of this argument is dizzying. Of course more games will mean more injuries. Of course even someone who wouldn’t know Tom Brady from Tommy Tune could surmise the differences in intensity between preseason and an actual football game. It’s like comparing a tofurky to the real deal. These comments were especially galling coming from Ross, whose Dolphins are injury depleted to the point where their starting quarterback is third stringer Tyler Thigpen.
NFL Players Association President DeMaurice Smith wasted no time striking back at Ross. "Comments like that tell me that they just don't get it,” he said. “Their teammates lost two franchise quarterbacks in the same game ... and the message is we shouldn't worry about adding two more games? Men are not expendable and neither are their families." This question about whether to extend the season by two extra games has become one of the great sticking points in the ongoing negotiations aimed at avoiding a 2010 lockout in the country’s most popular sport.
I asked Smith two weeks ago about the owners’ push for an 18 game season and whether it was a deal-breaker in the current negotiations. He said, "Our only strong stance is about signing a new collective bargaining agreement. That's it. I'm willing to discuss anything that guarantees that football continues for our players. There's an 18 game proposal from the NFL that we have looked at - we're going to respond to it,- but there are some things that are inviolate. When I show up at a team meeting and I've got half the guys sitting in a conference room wrapped up in ice, three or four guys already on crutches, well anybody who wants to know how brutal this game is, show up at a team meeting on a Monday morning after a Sunday game where you watch some of the best athletes in the world tip-toe down two steps, where if you want to shake hands, you had better be gentle. So it's not an enhanced season, as the owner's call it. It's two more end of the season games where players are already beat up, nicked up, and knocked out."
It’s this heightened awareness of injuries and the owners desire to throw on two new games without increased compensation that has the two sides in a Buffalo Stance. I asked Smith in May, on a scale of 1-10, what the chances were for a lockout to start the 2011 season. He put it at a 14. When I asked Smith again, he said, "Still at 14... We are still far away from a deal being signed by the deadline in March. Just [five] weeks ago the NFL informed us that they were going to cancel the NFL players and their family's health insurance in March if a lock-out occurs if you're sitting where I'm sitting and you want to know if a lock-out is on the table, I'm not sure that any player in the National Football League would disagree with me that there's a strong likelihood that this is going to happen."
The scheduled canceling of health care benefits for players and their families has been received by the players as a heartless, aggressive act, especially with the recent avalanche of press stories about the physical toll of playing the game. "Our players risk everything on the field," he said. "There's been a lot of media coverage of the helmet to helmet hits, over the last few weeks, and the cover of Sports Illustrated is about concussions...There has been recently a great deal of concern expressed by ownership about it. The thing that we wanted to point out to our fans is that the NFL, right now as we speak, has sued 262 players over their workers comp. It still takes at least a three year NFL career to get any health care after you retire. We had to fight legislation from a team last year to take away workers comp from the players who play the game, being notified in March that their health insurance will be canceled. The players, and likely their families, are saying 'How can you express a concern about health and safety, after watching four hits on Sunday, and then snap your fingers and say that health care is over in March?' It seems both hypocritical and misleading... They put out a press release about larger fines, larger punishments, perhaps suspensions, but oh by the way, ignore the fact that we're going to cancel the health insurance for people who have kids, at least two players whose kids are in need of heart transplants. We have several who have kids on kidney dialysis. Right now we as a union are trying to figure out how to provide supplemental health insurance for the players families.”
Most strikingly, at the end of our discussion, Smith made an open plea to involve fans in struggle to avoid a lockout and made clear that this issue transcends sports. "Fans [who want to help] can go to NFLOCKOUT.com. We will send people to speak at any union meetings or community meetings.... Only the owners make money when there is a lockout, making four billion dollars from the networks and paying nothing in salaries. But everybody else loses. Every city would lose about a hundred and fifty million a year in revenue. Every city will lose jobs. It's bigger than professional football. We all have an interest to avoid a lockout."
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Goodell, owners support 18-game season; players concerned
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d81a0299a/article/goodell-owners-pledge-support-to-18game-season
Goodell, owners support 18-game season; players concerned
Associated Press
Aug. 25, 2010
ATLANTA -- NFL owners are eager to increase the regular season from 16 to 18 games.
The players aren't so sure.
During a five-hour meeting at a posh hotel in downtown Atlanta, the push to add two more games to the regular season picked up steam Wednesday -- at least among those who sign the checks.
"I think it's a win-win all around," said Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
The NFL could adopt an 18-game schedule as soon as 2012, and players might not start workouts until May instead of March to allow more recovery time, Jason La Canfora writes. More ... The owners also unanimously approved Stan Kroenke's proposal to purchase majority ownership of the St. Louis Rams, assuming he turns over control of two other teams he owns -- the NBA's Denver Nuggets and the NHL's Colorado Avalanche -- to his son.
Kroenke owns 40 percent of the downtrodden Rams and exercised his right to purchase the rest of the team from the Rosenbloom family for a reported $750 million.
"Obviously, all of us know and respect Stan," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. "He's been a terrific owner in the NFL, and we're confident he will continue to be a great owner."
Kroenke must turn over operational and financial control of the Nuggets and Avalanche to his 30-year-old son, Josh, by the end of the year. He must give up his majority stake in the teams by December 2014 to meet NFL rules against cross-ownership of franchises in other NFL cities.
But talks on the expanded season dominated most of the meeting.
Goodell pointed out that the league already has the right to impose an 18-game schedule -- and keep four preseason games for each team -- under the current labor agreement with the players. But that contract expires after this season, and it's clear the expanded schedule will be a central issue in talks on a new collective bargaining agreement.
Don't miss any of the action with NFL Preseason Live, which showcases preseason games in high-definition. Find out more here.
The owners would like to keep the season at 20 weeks, reducing the number of preseason games from four to two.
"We want to do it the right way for everyone, including the players, the fans and the game in general," Goodell said. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum for it. We think it's the right step."
The owners held off on voting on a specific proposal that could be presented to the NFL Players Association. Among the issues that still must be resolved: when to start the expanded regular season, possible roster expansion to cope with more games, and changes in training camp and offseason routines to come up with ways for evaluating younger players who wouldn't have as many preseason games to make an impression.
"We want to continue to address a variety of issues before putting together a specific proposal, which our negotiating team will provide to the union's negotiating team," Goodell said. "There's tremendous support for it. Almost all the questions, all the discussions, are how to do it in a way that's fan friendly."
Around the NFL, however, many players questioned the wisdom of making an already grueling season even longer. At the very least, they want more money -- and several proposed changes in the rules governing injured players, or adding an extra bye week to deal with the grind.
"With 16 games, every game is important and therefore the fans are very into it, the stadiums are packed because they know if their team loses, it pushes them further and further away from making the playoffs," Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer said. "I think if you go to 18, each game kind of loses a little bit of its significance."
The players clearly expect to be receive a bigger chunk of the multi-billion-dollar NFL pie if they're going to be putting their bodies on the line in two more games that count.
"Obviously the players want to be compensated for two more games," San Francisco 49ers linebacker Matt Wilhelm said. "That's the one thing the players have to get met."
They also are concerned about an increased risk of injuries and fret that it could shorten their careers or increase the number of health problems they endure after retirement.
"I would vote to eliminate two preseason games and then keep it at a 16-game season because the longer you're out there playing, the more your body breaks down," Chicago Bears tight end Desmond Clark said. "When you get into December, you're like walking zombies. You can't feel your joints."
Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita said the timing of the proposal is odd, considering the owners want the players to accept a smaller share of the revenue in the next labor agreement.
"They are asking you to play more games and put yourself at more risk, and they are also asking us to take a pay cut," Fujita said. "That's a lot to ask. All those things don't make a whole lot of sense. We need to sit down and talk through it all and find out what it is they're really trying to do and see if it makes sense or not."
But Kraft said the expanded season is the most obvious step to bring in more money while the economy is struggling.
"I really think going to an 18-game season is critical to us getting a labor deal," he said. "There's not a lot of ways in this economic environment we can generate incremental revenues. That's the best way.
"The other thing," he added, "our fans have said pretty loud and clear they'd like us to have fewer preseason games."
Several players and coaches have pointed out that having just two preseason games likely would make it more difficult for fringe players to get enough of a look to make the team.
Already, teams have been experimenting with joint workouts in training camp, believing those sessions could help replace the shorter preseason. This year, for instance, the Atlanta Falcons worked out with both the Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars.
"If it was a two-game preseason, then the starters are going to see most of that time because they've got to get ready for the season, so if you're third string, good luck," said Indianapolis Colts linebacker Gary Brackett, the team's defensive captain. "When I was a rookie, I needed every bit of those four games."
But some figure it's a foregone conclusion that the owners will get their way.
"Personally, I don't see how it helps the game, or the quality of the game," said Barry Cofield, a defensive tackle for the New York Giants. "But if they demand it, they will probably get it."
Goodell, owners support 18-game season; players concerned
Associated Press
Aug. 25, 2010
ATLANTA -- NFL owners are eager to increase the regular season from 16 to 18 games.
The players aren't so sure.
During a five-hour meeting at a posh hotel in downtown Atlanta, the push to add two more games to the regular season picked up steam Wednesday -- at least among those who sign the checks.
"I think it's a win-win all around," said Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
The NFL could adopt an 18-game schedule as soon as 2012, and players might not start workouts until May instead of March to allow more recovery time, Jason La Canfora writes. More ... The owners also unanimously approved Stan Kroenke's proposal to purchase majority ownership of the St. Louis Rams, assuming he turns over control of two other teams he owns -- the NBA's Denver Nuggets and the NHL's Colorado Avalanche -- to his son.
Kroenke owns 40 percent of the downtrodden Rams and exercised his right to purchase the rest of the team from the Rosenbloom family for a reported $750 million.
"Obviously, all of us know and respect Stan," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. "He's been a terrific owner in the NFL, and we're confident he will continue to be a great owner."
Kroenke must turn over operational and financial control of the Nuggets and Avalanche to his 30-year-old son, Josh, by the end of the year. He must give up his majority stake in the teams by December 2014 to meet NFL rules against cross-ownership of franchises in other NFL cities.
But talks on the expanded season dominated most of the meeting.
Goodell pointed out that the league already has the right to impose an 18-game schedule -- and keep four preseason games for each team -- under the current labor agreement with the players. But that contract expires after this season, and it's clear the expanded schedule will be a central issue in talks on a new collective bargaining agreement.
Don't miss any of the action with NFL Preseason Live, which showcases preseason games in high-definition. Find out more here.
The owners would like to keep the season at 20 weeks, reducing the number of preseason games from four to two.
"We want to do it the right way for everyone, including the players, the fans and the game in general," Goodell said. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum for it. We think it's the right step."
The owners held off on voting on a specific proposal that could be presented to the NFL Players Association. Among the issues that still must be resolved: when to start the expanded regular season, possible roster expansion to cope with more games, and changes in training camp and offseason routines to come up with ways for evaluating younger players who wouldn't have as many preseason games to make an impression.
"We want to continue to address a variety of issues before putting together a specific proposal, which our negotiating team will provide to the union's negotiating team," Goodell said. "There's tremendous support for it. Almost all the questions, all the discussions, are how to do it in a way that's fan friendly."
Around the NFL, however, many players questioned the wisdom of making an already grueling season even longer. At the very least, they want more money -- and several proposed changes in the rules governing injured players, or adding an extra bye week to deal with the grind.
"With 16 games, every game is important and therefore the fans are very into it, the stadiums are packed because they know if their team loses, it pushes them further and further away from making the playoffs," Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer said. "I think if you go to 18, each game kind of loses a little bit of its significance."
The players clearly expect to be receive a bigger chunk of the multi-billion-dollar NFL pie if they're going to be putting their bodies on the line in two more games that count.
"Obviously the players want to be compensated for two more games," San Francisco 49ers linebacker Matt Wilhelm said. "That's the one thing the players have to get met."
They also are concerned about an increased risk of injuries and fret that it could shorten their careers or increase the number of health problems they endure after retirement.
"I would vote to eliminate two preseason games and then keep it at a 16-game season because the longer you're out there playing, the more your body breaks down," Chicago Bears tight end Desmond Clark said. "When you get into December, you're like walking zombies. You can't feel your joints."
Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita said the timing of the proposal is odd, considering the owners want the players to accept a smaller share of the revenue in the next labor agreement.
"They are asking you to play more games and put yourself at more risk, and they are also asking us to take a pay cut," Fujita said. "That's a lot to ask. All those things don't make a whole lot of sense. We need to sit down and talk through it all and find out what it is they're really trying to do and see if it makes sense or not."
But Kraft said the expanded season is the most obvious step to bring in more money while the economy is struggling.
"I really think going to an 18-game season is critical to us getting a labor deal," he said. "There's not a lot of ways in this economic environment we can generate incremental revenues. That's the best way.
"The other thing," he added, "our fans have said pretty loud and clear they'd like us to have fewer preseason games."
Several players and coaches have pointed out that having just two preseason games likely would make it more difficult for fringe players to get enough of a look to make the team.
Already, teams have been experimenting with joint workouts in training camp, believing those sessions could help replace the shorter preseason. This year, for instance, the Atlanta Falcons worked out with both the Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars.
"If it was a two-game preseason, then the starters are going to see most of that time because they've got to get ready for the season, so if you're third string, good luck," said Indianapolis Colts linebacker Gary Brackett, the team's defensive captain. "When I was a rookie, I needed every bit of those four games."
But some figure it's a foregone conclusion that the owners will get their way.
"Personally, I don't see how it helps the game, or the quality of the game," said Barry Cofield, a defensive tackle for the New York Giants. "But if they demand it, they will probably get it."
Friday, December 4, 2009
The NFL's Concussion Conundrum
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-zirin/the-nfls-concussion-conun_b_368982.html
Dave Zirin
Sports correspondent for the Nation Magazine
November 24, 2009
The NFL's Concussion Conundrum
On Sunday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell made a startling concession to medical ethics, one resisted by all of his predecessors. Goodell said that when a player sustains a concussion, teams will now be required to seek advice from "independent" neurologists. As the commissioner said on NBC's Football Night in America, "As we learn more and more, we want to give players the best medical advice. This is a chance for us to expand that and bring more people into the circle to make sure we're making the best decisions for our players in the long term."
There is a reason why this story made the front page of the New York Times. It marks a major change in policy and would be like the tobacco industry bringing the American Cancer Institute into its boardroom or Exxon Mobil stating that they needed more input from Greenpeace.
The official NFL line has always been that team doctors held no conflict of interest when evaluating players. The NFL said this despite the stories of former players suffering early-onset dementia at alarming rates and being told to "shake it off" as the ringing continued in their ears.
Former Commissioner Pete Rozelle ignored this issue even when players like the Colts' Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Another former commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, did the same, even when Hall of Fame center Mike Webster died at age 50, homeless and incoherent. It has even been said that Webster was suffering from dementia when he was still an active player in the league.
And Goodell continued to defend the system even though Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, who suffered from concussions, said that his coach Bill Belichick bullied him back into games (something Belichick denies). There was still no action taken after the 2006 suicide of Eagles pro-bowler Andre Waters, 44, whose brain tissue was that of an 80-year-old with Alzheimer's. The absence of medical oversight has been nothing short of breathtaking.
Goodell has been forced to shift his stance because the issue has simply reached a tipping point. Fittingly, New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell wrote a blistering critique of the NFL's treatment of ex-players last month, in the magazine, and concluded, "In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was [also] widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport."
I'm going to guess that the NFL has let its subscription to The New Yorker lapse. But they do have to care what Congress, the NFLPA union and former players are saying. In a hearing last month, The House Judiciary Committee flayed Goodell under the hot lights. It played footage of Dr. Ira Casson, chairman of the NFL's committee on concussions, saying that there was no connection between football and brain injuries, which is like saying there is no connection between smoking and lung cancer. When Goodell commented that the health of retired players is a priority for the league, committee member Maxine Waters said, "We've heard from the NFL time and time again--you're always 'studying,' you're always 'trying,' you're 'hopeful.' I want to know what are you doing...to deal with this problem and other problems related to injuries?"
While Goodell dangled off the ledge, NFLPA union chief DeMaurice Smith felt no compunction to lend a hand, saying that the union "has not done its best in this area. We will do better."
Chester Pitts, a lineman and union rep for the Houston Texans, told the New York Times, "I don't want to call it forced, but it's been strongly urged because of the awareness of the issue these days. When you have Congress talking about the antitrust exemption and them calling them the tobacco industry, that's pretty big. But it's a good thing it's transpiring."
But the main reason this situation has reached crisis proportions, is that every Sunday we see evidence of the problem and now we are much more aware of the tragic consequences. On November 22, the two quarterbacks who ended last season in the Super Bowl, finished their games on the sidelines. Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers was captured on camera, glassy-eyed and attempting to follow a trainer's finger after taking a knee to the head. Kurt Warner of the Arizona Cardinals, who also took a shot to his head, denied having a serious injury. "I've had a couple minor concussions. Nothing that has been prolonged. Haven't had anything in a number of years," Warner said. There is simply no such thing as a minor concussion.
It's time for a change. A concussion is caused by a blow to the head and can happen to any player, on any play. Goodell, I believe, sees the handwriting on the wall: Brain damaged players and the perception of indifferent owners hold the potential to permanently damage the sport. But before we collectively pat his back, consider the task before him. Goodell and the league will now embark on an effort to sell a slickly packaged three-hour slice of Sunday violence while simultaneously "doing no harm" to its players. Can NFL doctors serve the league and uphold the Hippocratic Oath? Doesn't take a Mayan calendar to see that this will not end well.
Dave Zirin is the author of "A People's History of Sports in the United States" (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Dave Zirin
Sports correspondent for the Nation Magazine
November 24, 2009
The NFL's Concussion Conundrum
On Sunday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell made a startling concession to medical ethics, one resisted by all of his predecessors. Goodell said that when a player sustains a concussion, teams will now be required to seek advice from "independent" neurologists. As the commissioner said on NBC's Football Night in America, "As we learn more and more, we want to give players the best medical advice. This is a chance for us to expand that and bring more people into the circle to make sure we're making the best decisions for our players in the long term."
There is a reason why this story made the front page of the New York Times. It marks a major change in policy and would be like the tobacco industry bringing the American Cancer Institute into its boardroom or Exxon Mobil stating that they needed more input from Greenpeace.
The official NFL line has always been that team doctors held no conflict of interest when evaluating players. The NFL said this despite the stories of former players suffering early-onset dementia at alarming rates and being told to "shake it off" as the ringing continued in their ears.
Former Commissioner Pete Rozelle ignored this issue even when players like the Colts' Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Another former commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, did the same, even when Hall of Fame center Mike Webster died at age 50, homeless and incoherent. It has even been said that Webster was suffering from dementia when he was still an active player in the league.
And Goodell continued to defend the system even though Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, who suffered from concussions, said that his coach Bill Belichick bullied him back into games (something Belichick denies). There was still no action taken after the 2006 suicide of Eagles pro-bowler Andre Waters, 44, whose brain tissue was that of an 80-year-old with Alzheimer's. The absence of medical oversight has been nothing short of breathtaking.
Goodell has been forced to shift his stance because the issue has simply reached a tipping point. Fittingly, New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell wrote a blistering critique of the NFL's treatment of ex-players last month, in the magazine, and concluded, "In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was [also] widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport."
I'm going to guess that the NFL has let its subscription to The New Yorker lapse. But they do have to care what Congress, the NFLPA union and former players are saying. In a hearing last month, The House Judiciary Committee flayed Goodell under the hot lights. It played footage of Dr. Ira Casson, chairman of the NFL's committee on concussions, saying that there was no connection between football and brain injuries, which is like saying there is no connection between smoking and lung cancer. When Goodell commented that the health of retired players is a priority for the league, committee member Maxine Waters said, "We've heard from the NFL time and time again--you're always 'studying,' you're always 'trying,' you're 'hopeful.' I want to know what are you doing...to deal with this problem and other problems related to injuries?"
While Goodell dangled off the ledge, NFLPA union chief DeMaurice Smith felt no compunction to lend a hand, saying that the union "has not done its best in this area. We will do better."
Chester Pitts, a lineman and union rep for the Houston Texans, told the New York Times, "I don't want to call it forced, but it's been strongly urged because of the awareness of the issue these days. When you have Congress talking about the antitrust exemption and them calling them the tobacco industry, that's pretty big. But it's a good thing it's transpiring."
But the main reason this situation has reached crisis proportions, is that every Sunday we see evidence of the problem and now we are much more aware of the tragic consequences. On November 22, the two quarterbacks who ended last season in the Super Bowl, finished their games on the sidelines. Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers was captured on camera, glassy-eyed and attempting to follow a trainer's finger after taking a knee to the head. Kurt Warner of the Arizona Cardinals, who also took a shot to his head, denied having a serious injury. "I've had a couple minor concussions. Nothing that has been prolonged. Haven't had anything in a number of years," Warner said. There is simply no such thing as a minor concussion.
It's time for a change. A concussion is caused by a blow to the head and can happen to any player, on any play. Goodell, I believe, sees the handwriting on the wall: Brain damaged players and the perception of indifferent owners hold the potential to permanently damage the sport. But before we collectively pat his back, consider the task before him. Goodell and the league will now embark on an effort to sell a slickly packaged three-hour slice of Sunday violence while simultaneously "doing no harm" to its players. Can NFL doctors serve the league and uphold the Hippocratic Oath? Doesn't take a Mayan calendar to see that this will not end well.
Dave Zirin is the author of "A People's History of Sports in the United States" (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Coming Labor War in the NFL
By Dave Zirin
When Rush Limbaugh was unceremoniously dumped in his efforts to secure a minority share of the St. Louis Rams, he may have been little more than collateral damage in a brewing collision between NFL owners and the NFL Players Association. After the union raised objections, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell squashed Limbaugh like a waterbug. Given the potential conflict brewing between NFL management and labor, Rush was a public relations disaster Goodell could hardly afford.
The collective bargaining agreement is due to expire at the end of the 2010 season and all signs are that an era of labor/management partnership is not at hand. As Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King wrote this week, “It's going to get ugly. There's better than a 50-percent chance, I believe, of some work stoppage in 2011, as incredibly golden-goose-killing as that sounds.”
The idea of a labor stoppage could revive a rack of memories the owners want best buried. During the 1980s, the NFL was the site of two of the most bitter sports strikes/lockouts in history. In 1987, when “scab football” was played by “the replacements” in front of half empty stadiums, locked out players in some NFL cities brought rifles to their picket lines. In others, they physically assaulted the scab players that attempted to break the lines. In today’s 24-hour sports media environment, the idea of round-the-clock picket line drama, is nothing the owners want.
The negotiations also occur within the context of a new study showing that retired NFL players suffer from advanced Alzheimer’s disease and other brain trauma at five times the national rate among men over 50. For men under 50, the number is 19 times the national rate. Congress held hearings in the subject last week and both the union and the owners are going to be pressed to explain why so little has been done for so long. For years the owners have spoken about concussions the way the tobacco industry used to bleat about lung cancer. They would say “research has not shown” that football causes the attendant brain injuries. Those days are done. Both the union and owners will be pressed to address this during the upcoming negotiations.
But that will require a spirit of cooperation that may not exist as negotiations are brought to a boil. The issues that separate them seem minor: NFLPA President Smith and the union want more financial transparency. The owners want to dial back concessions they made in the last CBA and get a larger share of the revenue back.
But the two main sources of tension aren’t on the bargaining table: The first is the economy. The NFL, long thought to be recession proof is feeling the squeeze. In the best of times, football is a blue-collar game at white-collar prices. But this year attendance has dropped, in no small part because ticket prices remain prohibitive even amidst the crisis. A family of four, purchasing modest concessions, will now pay over $400. The result is that empty seats dot stadiums around the country. This leads to “blackouts” where games aren’t broadcast in local markets. In 2008, only nine games were blacked out during the entire season. In 2009 Jacksonville alone has already announced that they will have to blackout eight. The league will want to cut costs in this climate and the union will feel a need to hold the line. The golden goose has lost a bit of its luster.
It’s worth noting that the NFL is only highest profile example of the economic crisis pervading the world of sports. The National Football League's red-headed stepchild, the Arena Football League, had to cancel its last season. In 2009, 21 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams saw attendance drops. The Ladies Professional Golf Association has seen their corporate sponsorships flee and the Women’s National Basketball Association eliminated roster spots in preparation for a downturn.,
The National Basketball Association in particular has looked vulnerable in the current climate. The league took out a $175 million line of credit to aid financially failing teams even though Commissioner David Stern tried to spin this as a sign of the league's health, which was a little bit sad. The NBA also has contract negotiations after the 2010 season which could make the NFL battle look tepid by comparison. It’s this dire economy which stands as the primary reason labor peace won’t be coming to the NFL.
While the dire economy is the primary reason to bet against labor peace in the NFL, another good one is new Players Association president DeMaurice Smith. The NFLPA is generally seen as the weakest of the sports unions because it’s the only league without guaranteed contracts. Smith, a connected Capitol Hill lawyer, was elected in March following the sudden death of Gene Upshaw, wants to show that despite not being a former player he will be strong for his players. Upon assuming leadership he said, “There isn’t a day where I don’t hope for peace, but at the same time, there isn’t a day where we won’t prepare for war.”
Smith has told ESPN that he has called upon his players to put aside 25 percent of their salaries over the next two years. “I look at the way in which it looks like we’re moving to this lockout, and first and foremost, we have to be in a position where our young men are in a position to be able to take care of themselves and their families,” he said.
It’s this combative stance, along with declining revenues that signal to many an NFL watcher that the golden goose might soon be cooked.
Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .
When Rush Limbaugh was unceremoniously dumped in his efforts to secure a minority share of the St. Louis Rams, he may have been little more than collateral damage in a brewing collision between NFL owners and the NFL Players Association. After the union raised objections, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell squashed Limbaugh like a waterbug. Given the potential conflict brewing between NFL management and labor, Rush was a public relations disaster Goodell could hardly afford.
The collective bargaining agreement is due to expire at the end of the 2010 season and all signs are that an era of labor/management partnership is not at hand. As Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King wrote this week, “It's going to get ugly. There's better than a 50-percent chance, I believe, of some work stoppage in 2011, as incredibly golden-goose-killing as that sounds.”
The idea of a labor stoppage could revive a rack of memories the owners want best buried. During the 1980s, the NFL was the site of two of the most bitter sports strikes/lockouts in history. In 1987, when “scab football” was played by “the replacements” in front of half empty stadiums, locked out players in some NFL cities brought rifles to their picket lines. In others, they physically assaulted the scab players that attempted to break the lines. In today’s 24-hour sports media environment, the idea of round-the-clock picket line drama, is nothing the owners want.
The negotiations also occur within the context of a new study showing that retired NFL players suffer from advanced Alzheimer’s disease and other brain trauma at five times the national rate among men over 50. For men under 50, the number is 19 times the national rate. Congress held hearings in the subject last week and both the union and the owners are going to be pressed to explain why so little has been done for so long. For years the owners have spoken about concussions the way the tobacco industry used to bleat about lung cancer. They would say “research has not shown” that football causes the attendant brain injuries. Those days are done. Both the union and owners will be pressed to address this during the upcoming negotiations.
But that will require a spirit of cooperation that may not exist as negotiations are brought to a boil. The issues that separate them seem minor: NFLPA President Smith and the union want more financial transparency. The owners want to dial back concessions they made in the last CBA and get a larger share of the revenue back.
But the two main sources of tension aren’t on the bargaining table: The first is the economy. The NFL, long thought to be recession proof is feeling the squeeze. In the best of times, football is a blue-collar game at white-collar prices. But this year attendance has dropped, in no small part because ticket prices remain prohibitive even amidst the crisis. A family of four, purchasing modest concessions, will now pay over $400. The result is that empty seats dot stadiums around the country. This leads to “blackouts” where games aren’t broadcast in local markets. In 2008, only nine games were blacked out during the entire season. In 2009 Jacksonville alone has already announced that they will have to blackout eight. The league will want to cut costs in this climate and the union will feel a need to hold the line. The golden goose has lost a bit of its luster.
It’s worth noting that the NFL is only highest profile example of the economic crisis pervading the world of sports. The National Football League's red-headed stepchild, the Arena Football League, had to cancel its last season. In 2009, 21 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams saw attendance drops. The Ladies Professional Golf Association has seen their corporate sponsorships flee and the Women’s National Basketball Association eliminated roster spots in preparation for a downturn.,
The National Basketball Association in particular has looked vulnerable in the current climate. The league took out a $175 million line of credit to aid financially failing teams even though Commissioner David Stern tried to spin this as a sign of the league's health, which was a little bit sad. The NBA also has contract negotiations after the 2010 season which could make the NFL battle look tepid by comparison. It’s this dire economy which stands as the primary reason labor peace won’t be coming to the NFL.
While the dire economy is the primary reason to bet against labor peace in the NFL, another good one is new Players Association president DeMaurice Smith. The NFLPA is generally seen as the weakest of the sports unions because it’s the only league without guaranteed contracts. Smith, a connected Capitol Hill lawyer, was elected in March following the sudden death of Gene Upshaw, wants to show that despite not being a former player he will be strong for his players. Upon assuming leadership he said, “There isn’t a day where I don’t hope for peace, but at the same time, there isn’t a day where we won’t prepare for war.”
Smith has told ESPN that he has called upon his players to put aside 25 percent of their salaries over the next two years. “I look at the way in which it looks like we’re moving to this lockout, and first and foremost, we have to be in a position where our young men are in a position to be able to take care of themselves and their families,” he said.
It’s this combative stance, along with declining revenues that signal to many an NFL watcher that the golden goose might soon be cooked.
Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Los Angeles has a shot to host 2016 Super Bowl
http://www.latimes.com/sports/printedition/la-sp-super-bowl-quickhits31-2009jan31,0,6126001.story
Roger Goodell says Los Angeles has a shot to host 2016 Super Bowl
The NFL commissioner says league will take a hard look at it, regardless of whether Los Angeles has a team by then.
By Sam Farmer
January 31, 2009
Reporting from Tampa, Fla. -- In his annual Super Bowl news conference Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would take a hard look at bringing the Super Bowl back to Los Angeles in 2016 -- the 50th anniversary of the game -- whether or not the city has a team.
The first Super Bowl was held in L.A., at the Coliseum, and 2016 would also mark the 70th anniversary of the 1946 L.A. Rams, the first integrated major professional sports team. L.A. businessmen Casey Wasserman and Tim Leiweke are trying to position L.A. to play host to Super Bowl L and the Pro Bowl that precedes it, either in the Coliseum or Rose Bowl -- or in a new stadium, if one is built by then.
Overtime changes?
Goodell said the NFL is going to take a hard look at how overtime games are decided, including the possibility of ruling out games being decided by a field goal on the opening drive of the extra period.
"It's been considered before, and I'm sure it will be considered among the alternatives," he said. "There are other ways of addressing the field goal on the first drive, and I think it's something the competition committee needs to consider."
He said that while historically about 30% of overtime games are decided when the team that wins the coin flip scores on its opening possession, that number has recently risen to roughly 47%.
"I think that's significant," he said. "It's something our committee needs to look at. When you couple that with the fact that our field-goal kickers are much more accurate than they have been in the past, that's a danger.
"We have talked about different concepts, and the committee will discuss this."
Roger Goodell says Los Angeles has a shot to host 2016 Super Bowl
The NFL commissioner says league will take a hard look at it, regardless of whether Los Angeles has a team by then.
By Sam Farmer
January 31, 2009
Reporting from Tampa, Fla. -- In his annual Super Bowl news conference Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would take a hard look at bringing the Super Bowl back to Los Angeles in 2016 -- the 50th anniversary of the game -- whether or not the city has a team.
The first Super Bowl was held in L.A., at the Coliseum, and 2016 would also mark the 70th anniversary of the 1946 L.A. Rams, the first integrated major professional sports team. L.A. businessmen Casey Wasserman and Tim Leiweke are trying to position L.A. to play host to Super Bowl L and the Pro Bowl that precedes it, either in the Coliseum or Rose Bowl -- or in a new stadium, if one is built by then.
Overtime changes?
Goodell said the NFL is going to take a hard look at how overtime games are decided, including the possibility of ruling out games being decided by a field goal on the opening drive of the extra period.
"It's been considered before, and I'm sure it will be considered among the alternatives," he said. "There are other ways of addressing the field goal on the first drive, and I think it's something the competition committee needs to consider."
He said that while historically about 30% of overtime games are decided when the team that wins the coin flip scores on its opening possession, that number has recently risen to roughly 47%.
"I think that's significant," he said. "It's something our committee needs to look at. When you couple that with the fact that our field-goal kickers are much more accurate than they have been in the past, that's a danger.
"We have talked about different concepts, and the committee will discuss this."
Monday, September 15, 2008
And so is Matt Drudge...
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/female_fans_out_for_season_withFemale Fans Out For Season With Tom Brady's Knee Injury
September 11, 2008 Onion Sports
FOXBOROUGH, MA — More than 90 percent of female football fans were lost for the season on Sunday when New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady suffered a left knee injury that will require extensive treatment. The Patriots announced Monday that Brady, the 2007 NFL Most Valuable Player and arguably the NFL's most handsome man, will be placed on injured reserve, where despite being no less attractive than before his injury, he will only be partially visible for the rest of the 2008-2009 season.
Bill Belichick held a press conference Tuesday confirming that Brady will have surgery, ending his 128-game combined starting-and-high-visibility streak, the third longest for a quarterback and the longest ever for a quarterback heartthrob.
Brady left Sunday's game against Kansas City after suffering an ugly anterior cruciate ligament tear in his incredibly handsome left knee after being hit by merely average-looking Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard.
"We feel badly for the nation's women about the injury," Belichick said. "And for Tom, of course. You hate to see anyone with that kind of masculine yet boyish appeal go down. No one has worked harder or done more for this team's female fan base than Tom has, and we expect him to set his rugged, chiseled jaw, keep his twinkling blue eyes on the prize, and be ready to get back on the field and in front of the cameras by next year."
Matt Cassel, who analysts say looked "consistent and confident" while guiding New England to its 20th straight regular-season win after Brady was hurt and "okay but not remarkable" in jeans and a polo shirt after the game, will start Sunday at the New York Jets, although there are doubts Cassel can win as many games and women as Brady.
"Well, as far as my role on this team goes, I'm not trying to be Tom Brady. I'm just trying to be Matt," Cassel said when subbing for Brady on his regular weekly radio show. "I mean, I have to just be myself, or else the ladies will sense I'm faking it, and in the end, that'll make it worse. I just hope there's one special fan group out there for me."
Cassel has been a second fiddle his entire football career, even in college at Southern California, where he was backup and wingman to lovable tousle-headed manchild Matt Leinart.
But football and demographics analysts agree that Brady's injury surely changes the rugged, weatherbeaten complexion of the entire NFL, where the Patriots, winners of three Super Bowls since 2001 with Brady as their quarterback and spokesmodel, were the strong female-fan favorite. However, Belichick denied the team reached out to any other more experienced or handsome quarterbacks.
Although losing Brady's strong arm and sculpted face will not be easy for the Patriots, the impact of his loss is expected to be felt around the NFL, where Brady has been the leading performer both on and off the field for the last several seasons. League commissioner Roger Goodell called an emergency owner's meeting Monday in which attendees discussed measures designed to compensate for Brady's loss, such as giving poise and diction lessons to Peyton or Eli Manning, getting Brett Favre a new wardrobe and a decent haircut, or teaching Ben Affleck how to play football.
Unfortunately for the NFL, Brady's loss seems to have affected more than just the Patriots and women. Many Boston-area fans of both genders, claiming that the team isn't worth watching without Brady, have concentrated their attention on the waning and somewhat disheveled Red Sox season or the attractive upcoming Celtics' NBA title defense. The sports media has likewise gone into shock, with columnist Bill Simmons saying he will no longer watch football this season, Sports Illustrated canceling large Brady-themed sections of this years' upcoming swimsuit issue, and NBC Football Night In America analyst Cris Collinsworth bursting into tears and collapsing into Peter King's arms upon receiving the news.
"No one else in football has Brady's unique talents—the physical gifts of build, height, arms, cheekbones, piercingly sultry field vision, the combination of arm strength and accuracy with a sense of tenderness, the combination of smirk and pout—along with the intangibles and the ability to look good in everything," said Tom Chiarella, who scouted and evaluated Brady for the September issue of Esquire. "It's impossible to estimate the impact of his loss, but it will almost certainly mean the loss of most female fans, many Boston-area fans, fair-weather fans, and the majority of mainstream media fans. The NFL is really looking at a worst-case scenario here, one that it never wanted to happen: A football season that's only watched by actual football fans."
Monday, April 14, 2008
NFL owners pass some proposals, ignore others
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nflmeetings
NFL owners pass some proposals, ignore others at annual meetings
By BARRY WILNER, AP Football Writer
Apr 3, 2008
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The coin toss was altered and the playoffs weren’t touched.
Hate forceouts? They’re gone.
Afraid of more looks by referees at instant replay. These might be worthwhile.
A busy NFL owners meetings ended Wednesday with a show of hands that made it obvious reseeding the playoffs wasn’t such a good idea. So the league’s competition committee withdrew the proposal Wednesday after an informal vote sent it “down in flames,” according to New York Giants co-owner John Mara.
“The more we can keep tradition,” said Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose hand most decidedly did not go up in support of a wild-card team with a better record than a division winner getting a home game in the first playoff round. “There’s something to be said about competition at the end of the season, but look at our game against the Giants. Tom Coughlin didn’t hold back and we had something to play for.
“I do believe if you win a division, it’s good for your fans to know you will have a home game. “To win a division, there is a reward and we wanted to keep that.”
Competition committee co-chairman Rich McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons, was not surprised about the lack of support for reseeding.
“This idea we wanted to push this year to get the discussion going,” McKay said. “There were not a lot of hands up, so we withdrew the proposal for now.
“There is the historical idea that a division champion should have a home game.”
The owners did pass several resolutions, including eliminating the forceout on receptions; allowing teams to defer their decision to the second half when winning the opening coin toss; and making field goals and extra points subject to replay review to determine whether the ball passes over the crossbar and through the uprights.
Reviewing field goals was a slam dunk for the owners after a kick by Cleveland’s Phil Dawson to tie a game at Baltimore hit the support behind the crossbar, then came back onto the field. Officials got the call correct despite not being allowed to use replay. Now they can.
Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher said eliminating the forceout rule was approved unanimously and that it will help officiating. A receiver now must get two feet inbounds unless he actually is carried out of bounds by a defender after catching the ball.
Fisher also noted how strongly deferring the choice on the coin toss, currently the rule in college, was accepted 30-2.
“I was surprised by the support. We’ll see how that goes,” he said. “It now gives coaches a third option. After talking to a number of coaches, many prefer to start on offense. I think we may see (more) deferrals later in the year with weather considerations.”
In addition, any direct snap from center that is untouched by the quarterback now will be a live ball; in the past it was considered a false start and the play was blown dead. The 5-yard penalty for incidental contact with a facemask has been eliminated, with the 15-yarder remaining for any grasping or twisting of the facemask.
On Tuesday, the owners approved a communication device in the helmet of one defensive player.
Goodell also was given a pledge by the owners to support his protection of the integrity of the game, something for which he has been praised in his 18 months in charge. The NFL’s image has taken some hits with the Michael Vick and Pacman Jones situations and the Spygate scandal. Goodell acted swiftly in all those cases, impressing the league membership.
Also:
— Goodell reiterated he wants to meet with former Patriots employee Matt Walsh, who has indicated he has more information about the team taping opponents’ signals. But Goodell added “at some point, I will run out of patience.”
— McKay said the competition committee will look into scheduling more games between division opponents late in the season to combat the possibility of meaningless matchups.
— The committee will investigate what to do with the defensive player who has the communication device when that player also is on special teams. He suggested the device would be cut off during such plays.
— Goodell emphasized the owners’ support for NFL Network and his optimism that the channel will wind up on the main tiers of the major cable outlets with which the league currently is feuding.
NFL owners pass some proposals, ignore others at annual meetings
By BARRY WILNER, AP Football Writer
Apr 3, 2008
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The coin toss was altered and the playoffs weren’t touched.
Hate forceouts? They’re gone.
Afraid of more looks by referees at instant replay. These might be worthwhile.
A busy NFL owners meetings ended Wednesday with a show of hands that made it obvious reseeding the playoffs wasn’t such a good idea. So the league’s competition committee withdrew the proposal Wednesday after an informal vote sent it “down in flames,” according to New York Giants co-owner John Mara.
“The more we can keep tradition,” said Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose hand most decidedly did not go up in support of a wild-card team with a better record than a division winner getting a home game in the first playoff round. “There’s something to be said about competition at the end of the season, but look at our game against the Giants. Tom Coughlin didn’t hold back and we had something to play for.
“I do believe if you win a division, it’s good for your fans to know you will have a home game. “To win a division, there is a reward and we wanted to keep that.”
Competition committee co-chairman Rich McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons, was not surprised about the lack of support for reseeding.
“This idea we wanted to push this year to get the discussion going,” McKay said. “There were not a lot of hands up, so we withdrew the proposal for now.
“There is the historical idea that a division champion should have a home game.”
The owners did pass several resolutions, including eliminating the forceout on receptions; allowing teams to defer their decision to the second half when winning the opening coin toss; and making field goals and extra points subject to replay review to determine whether the ball passes over the crossbar and through the uprights.
Reviewing field goals was a slam dunk for the owners after a kick by Cleveland’s Phil Dawson to tie a game at Baltimore hit the support behind the crossbar, then came back onto the field. Officials got the call correct despite not being allowed to use replay. Now they can.
Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher said eliminating the forceout rule was approved unanimously and that it will help officiating. A receiver now must get two feet inbounds unless he actually is carried out of bounds by a defender after catching the ball.
Fisher also noted how strongly deferring the choice on the coin toss, currently the rule in college, was accepted 30-2.
“I was surprised by the support. We’ll see how that goes,” he said. “It now gives coaches a third option. After talking to a number of coaches, many prefer to start on offense. I think we may see (more) deferrals later in the year with weather considerations.”
In addition, any direct snap from center that is untouched by the quarterback now will be a live ball; in the past it was considered a false start and the play was blown dead. The 5-yard penalty for incidental contact with a facemask has been eliminated, with the 15-yarder remaining for any grasping or twisting of the facemask.
On Tuesday, the owners approved a communication device in the helmet of one defensive player.
Goodell also was given a pledge by the owners to support his protection of the integrity of the game, something for which he has been praised in his 18 months in charge. The NFL’s image has taken some hits with the Michael Vick and Pacman Jones situations and the Spygate scandal. Goodell acted swiftly in all those cases, impressing the league membership.
Also:
— Goodell reiterated he wants to meet with former Patriots employee Matt Walsh, who has indicated he has more information about the team taping opponents’ signals. But Goodell added “at some point, I will run out of patience.”
— McKay said the competition committee will look into scheduling more games between division opponents late in the season to combat the possibility of meaningless matchups.
— The committee will investigate what to do with the defensive player who has the communication device when that player also is on special teams. He suggested the device would be cut off during such plays.
— Goodell emphasized the owners’ support for NFL Network and his optimism that the channel will wind up on the main tiers of the major cable outlets with which the league currently is feuding.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Patriots taped Rams before Super Bowl
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs07/news/story?id=3227245
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Report: Source claimed Patriots taped Rams before Super Bowl
ESPN.com news services
An unnamed source has claimed a New England Patriots employee secretly videotaped the St. Louis Rams' pre-game walkthrough the day before Super Bowl XXXVI, the Boston Herald reported Saturday.
According to the report, an unnamed source close to the team during the 2001 season said that following the Patriots' walkthrough at the Louisiana Superdome, a member of the team's video staff stayed behind and taped the Rams' walkthrough -- a non-contact, no-pads practice at reduced speed in which a team goes through its plays.
The cameraman was not asked to identify himself or produce a press pass and rode the media shuttle back to the Patriots' hotel after it was over, a source told the Herald. It is not known what became of the tape afterwards, or whether the cameraman made the tape on his own initiative or at someone else's instruction, according to the report.
Asked about the report, Patriots media relations Stacey James said "The coaches have no knowledge of it," according to the Herald.
The next day, the Patriots upset the favored Rams 20-17 for their first Super Bowl championship. New England will play the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII on Sunday, in a bid to become the first NFL team to finish a season 19-0.
Former St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, currently with the Arizona Cardinals, told ESPN.com investigative reporter Mike Fish that if the league has heard those claims, he's surprised the NFL has not spoken to former Patriots video department employee Matt Walsh. He said if Walsh or any other source has information, it should be investigated.
Walsh, a former Patriots video assistant, has suggested to ESPN.com that he has information that could have exposed the Patriots prior to the NFL catching New England taping the New York Jets' defensive signals during the 2007 season opener. The Patriots were fined $750,000 and lost a first-round draft pick as punishment.
"If I had a reason to want to go public, or tell a story, I could have done it before it even broke," Walsh told ESPN.com. "I could have said everything rather than having [Jets head coach Eric] Mangini be the one to bring it out."
"If they're doing a thorough investigation -- they didn't contact me," Walsh told ESPN.com. "So draw your own conclusions. Maybe they felt they didn't need to. Maybe the league feels they got satisfactory answers from everything the Patriots sent them."
Walsh, 31, now an assistant golf pro at the Ka'anapli Golf Resort in Lahaina, Hawaii, worked for the Patriots from 1996 until the winter of 2002-03 when he was fired. He has hinted to ESPN.com that he has information that could be damaging to both the league and the Patriots, but declined to make it available, saying that it could possibly be seen as stolen property.
Walsh said he is fearful of potential legal action against him by either the league or Patriots if he details what he knows. He has refused to provide evidence of potential wrongdoing unless ESPN agreed to pay his legal fees related to his involvement in the story, as well as an indemnification agreement that would cover any damages found against him in court. ESPN denied his requests.
Friday, Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he had written NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, seeking an explanation as to why evidence in the NFL's investigation of the Patriots videotaping was destroyed.
"I am very concerned about the underlying facts on the taping, the reasons for the judgment on the limited penalties and, most of all, on the inexplicable destruction of the tapes," Specter said in the letter to Goodell.
Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the matter could put the league's antitrust exemption at risk. In a phone interview with The New York Times, which first reported Specter's interest in Spygate, he said the committee at some point will call on Goodell to address the antitrust exemption as well as the destruction of the tapes.
Goodell, in his previously scheduled news conference Friday from Phoenix, said, "I am more than willing to speak with the senator. There are very good explanations why the tapes were destroyed by our staff -- there was no purpose for them."
There were six tapes, according to Goodell -- some from the 2007 preseason, and the rest from 2006. He said he had them destroyed because he was confident that the Patriots had turned over all of the tapes and notes the NFL had requested in its investigation. He also said they were destroyed in order to prevent leaks to the media -- as some footage from one of the tapes was shortly after the story broke.
"We wanted to take and destroy that information," Goodell said. "They may have collected it within the rules, but we couldn't determine that. So we felt that it should be destroyed."
Patriots coach Bill Belichick had little to add on the subject.
"It's a league matter," he said Friday during his news conference. "I don't know anything about it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Report: Source claimed Patriots taped Rams before Super Bowl
ESPN.com news services
An unnamed source has claimed a New England Patriots employee secretly videotaped the St. Louis Rams' pre-game walkthrough the day before Super Bowl XXXVI, the Boston Herald reported Saturday.
According to the report, an unnamed source close to the team during the 2001 season said that following the Patriots' walkthrough at the Louisiana Superdome, a member of the team's video staff stayed behind and taped the Rams' walkthrough -- a non-contact, no-pads practice at reduced speed in which a team goes through its plays.
The cameraman was not asked to identify himself or produce a press pass and rode the media shuttle back to the Patriots' hotel after it was over, a source told the Herald. It is not known what became of the tape afterwards, or whether the cameraman made the tape on his own initiative or at someone else's instruction, according to the report.
Asked about the report, Patriots media relations Stacey James said "The coaches have no knowledge of it," according to the Herald.
The next day, the Patriots upset the favored Rams 20-17 for their first Super Bowl championship. New England will play the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII on Sunday, in a bid to become the first NFL team to finish a season 19-0.
Former St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, currently with the Arizona Cardinals, told ESPN.com investigative reporter Mike Fish that if the league has heard those claims, he's surprised the NFL has not spoken to former Patriots video department employee Matt Walsh. He said if Walsh or any other source has information, it should be investigated.
Walsh, a former Patriots video assistant, has suggested to ESPN.com that he has information that could have exposed the Patriots prior to the NFL catching New England taping the New York Jets' defensive signals during the 2007 season opener. The Patriots were fined $750,000 and lost a first-round draft pick as punishment.
"If I had a reason to want to go public, or tell a story, I could have done it before it even broke," Walsh told ESPN.com. "I could have said everything rather than having [Jets head coach Eric] Mangini be the one to bring it out."
"If they're doing a thorough investigation -- they didn't contact me," Walsh told ESPN.com. "So draw your own conclusions. Maybe they felt they didn't need to. Maybe the league feels they got satisfactory answers from everything the Patriots sent them."
Walsh, 31, now an assistant golf pro at the Ka'anapli Golf Resort in Lahaina, Hawaii, worked for the Patriots from 1996 until the winter of 2002-03 when he was fired. He has hinted to ESPN.com that he has information that could be damaging to both the league and the Patriots, but declined to make it available, saying that it could possibly be seen as stolen property.
Walsh said he is fearful of potential legal action against him by either the league or Patriots if he details what he knows. He has refused to provide evidence of potential wrongdoing unless ESPN agreed to pay his legal fees related to his involvement in the story, as well as an indemnification agreement that would cover any damages found against him in court. ESPN denied his requests.
Friday, Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he had written NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, seeking an explanation as to why evidence in the NFL's investigation of the Patriots videotaping was destroyed.
"I am very concerned about the underlying facts on the taping, the reasons for the judgment on the limited penalties and, most of all, on the inexplicable destruction of the tapes," Specter said in the letter to Goodell.
Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the matter could put the league's antitrust exemption at risk. In a phone interview with The New York Times, which first reported Specter's interest in Spygate, he said the committee at some point will call on Goodell to address the antitrust exemption as well as the destruction of the tapes.
Goodell, in his previously scheduled news conference Friday from Phoenix, said, "I am more than willing to speak with the senator. There are very good explanations why the tapes were destroyed by our staff -- there was no purpose for them."
There were six tapes, according to Goodell -- some from the 2007 preseason, and the rest from 2006. He said he had them destroyed because he was confident that the Patriots had turned over all of the tapes and notes the NFL had requested in its investigation. He also said they were destroyed in order to prevent leaks to the media -- as some footage from one of the tapes was shortly after the story broke.
"We wanted to take and destroy that information," Goodell said. "They may have collected it within the rules, but we couldn't determine that. So we felt that it should be destroyed."
Patriots coach Bill Belichick had little to add on the subject.
"It's a league matter," he said Friday during his news conference. "I don't know anything about it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Beast of the Month - September 2007
Beast of the Month - September 2007
Michael Vick, NFL Quarterback
"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."
"Mrs. Robinson,” Simon & Garfunkel (from the film The Graduate)
All you sports fans out there who have a problem with Barry Bonds, you might as well get over it. It's time to accept the fact that the most cherished sports record in the USA, career Major League home runs, is now owned by a blatant cheater. Live with it, and just be glad that someone as dishonest as Bonds isn't, say, President of the United States.
Besides, as the era of 756* begins, its clear that more is amuck with professional athletics than Bonds roiding up. Consider the following:
* In the MLB, Bonds isn't the only dude that's on the juice all by his lone gunmen self. Jason Giambi (2000 AL MVP) and Rafael Palmeiro (he of the 500 HR and 3000 hit club) are two of the more noted players whose careers have been tainted by evidence of steroid use. (Former slugger Jose Canseco has claimed, perhaps with some hyperbole, that 85 percent of all major leaguers are on the stuff.) As for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, while there is no "proof" that they cheated as well, their unconvincing testimony before Congress in 2005 on the issue has led to Mac being shut out of the Hall of Fame after becoming eligible this year - something which will likely happen to both Sosa and Bonds as well.
* In cycling, the Tour de France has had evidence and allegations of doping that far exceed those of baseball. In 2006, the four runner-ups in 2005 to retiring seven-time champ Lance Armstrong (Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, Francisco Mancebo and Alexandre Vinokourov) all did not compete in the race due to evidence of doping. (Though Vinokourov himself was not charged in 2006, five of his teammates were, forcing him to withdraw. In 2007, he was personally busted during the race.) The eventual "winner" of the race, American Floyd Landis, was caught with banned substances in his urine samples and will likely lose his title after appeals. The 2007 contest was rife with arguably even more doping controversy, culminating with race leader Michael Rasmussen being removed for lying about his reasons he missed three drug tests. The eventual winner, Alberto Contador, was a prime suspect in the 2006 doping scandal. Meanwhile, though there is no firm evidence linking Armstrong to doping, widespread allegations cloud his storied career.
* In the NBA, a league already with an increasingly bad public image due to thuggish behavior of the post-Jordan playing crop, a gambling scandal involving referee Tim Donaghy threatens the basic integrity of the game. Though the scandal only involves Donaghy at this point (as petty tyrant David Stern repeatedly insists in his "bad apple" defense) the idea that other NBA refs may have been compromised by mobsters is not implausible, especially considering the league's lackadaisical response to evidence that something was fishy. Anyone who saw Game Six of the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff series (where the Lakers "won" following officiating that looked like a Florida election involving a member of the Bush family) should have little trouble believing a conspiracy of refs involved in the rigging of important games.
* The good news for the NHL is that they're even deemed worthy of mention, after commissioner Gary Bettman's self-destructive reign has removed ice hockey from the quartet of American major league sports. (Memo to Mr. Bettman: real sports leagues have cable TV contracts with ESPN, not the Outdoor Life Network.) Still, if missing an entire season due to an owner lockout wasn't enough to discredit the NHL, an illegal gambling ring which may have included the Great One Wayne Gretzky himself should do the trick.
True, the history-making runs of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer in golf and tennis are inspiring tales, but all in all, the pickings for sport heroics are pretty slim right now. Indeed, the only sports of late to have any good news are lacrosse (where the Duke team members were proven to merely be drunken racist preppies, instead of drunken racist preppies who rape strippers) and soccer (although The Konformist doubts a preening overrated metrosexual with a self-absorbed diva wife will popularize a boring sport in America if Pele couldn't.)
Still, with all due respect to all the other scandals, the sports league with the biggest PR disaster of late would have to be, hands down, the National Football League. Some would say it's a long time coming. After all, for all the outrage that has followed the revelations and allegations of steroid abuse in baseball, few would argue that steroid use in the MLB is even comparable to that in the NFL. Likewise, while the hip-hop gangsta style of new NBA stars has given rise to a korporate unfriendly "thug life" image, pro football, with it's inherently more violent style of play, clearly attracts more dangerous and borderline personalities.
Why has the NFL gotten such a free ride for so long? Primarily, it's about money. Since the NFL-AFL merger and the rise of the Super Bowl in the 70s, football, not baseball, has really been America's pastime. The korporate media has avoided tarnishing the reputation of the largest multi-billion dollar sports-entertainment empire known to man (not to mention the most successful "Reality TV" series ever, culminating in the four major TV network conglomerates having current contracts with the league.) The obfuscation of NFL scandal was aided by Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue, two sharp businessmen and charming salesmen during their historic reigns as commissioner.
There's a new sheriff in town now, however, and at the very least, Roger Goodell believes the writing is on the wall. If the NFL didn't clean itself up, even worse scandal would soon follow. Before this summer, Goodell had already delivered the following suspensions for bad behavior:
* Chris Henry of the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended for eight games after numerous incidents involving law enforcement, with allegations of crimes ranging from drunk driving, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault of a minor.
* Tank Johnson of the Chicago Bears was also suspended for eight games for his misdeeds, with alleged crimes ranging from drunk driving, assault and various weapon charges. His best friend and bodyguard, William Posey, was shot to death following a bar fight last December.
* In perhaps the most notorious case, Pacman Jones of the Tennessee Titans was suspended for the entire 2007 season for his troubles with the law, which has led to five arrests and questioning by police eleven times. Due to his penchant for troublemaking at nightclubs and strip clubs, he has been charged with assault, battery, felony vandalism and obstruction of justice. In his most infamous altercation, a strip club argument (during which he allegedly grabbed a stripper by her hair and slammed her head) in Las Vegas during All-Star weekend ended when one man in Pacman's entourage allegedly returned to the club and fired shots into the crowd. One bullet paralyzed former pro wrestler Tommy Urbanski, and two hit a security guard whose life Pacman had coincidentally threatened earlier that evening.
All of this bad behavior makes one long for the start of the 2006 season, when the biggest bogeyman in the NFL was Terrell Owens, whose disgraceful acts were wanting more money and dissing his quarterbacks.
This summer, however, even Pacman's troubles were eclipsed by Michael Vick, The Konformist Beast of the Month. Vick's problems received more airplay than the others, in part, because Vick, unlike the others, was no mere role player. As quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, he was a three-time Pro Bowler in football's most high profile position, who was given the prestigious honor of being the cover athlete for Madden Football 2004. Vick came up only one game short in 2005 from playing the Super Bowl. And though 2006 had been a disappointing year for him in passing (he completed only 52.6 percent of his throws during the season) he became the first QB to rush for over 1000 yards in a year.
Of course, the other reason Vick's legal issues received more airplay was the grotesque nature of his activities. While drunk driving, assault and shootings that lead others to be crippled are hardly minor crimes, being involved in the cruel "sport" of dogfighting shows not a momentary lapse of reason, but a premeditated plan to participate in the torture and death of man's best friend. And as bad as forcing canines to participate in a battle to the death may be, perhaps even worse is personally killing Fido in a gruesome fashion, such as by drowning, hanging, electrocution, strangulation and gunshots. These were the charges that Vick faced, charges he plead guilty to after his co-conspirators did the same and began to provide more evidence against him. As it stands, he likely faces one year to eighteen month in federal prison over his crimes.
In retrospect, there were warning signs that Vick was a trouble case. In 2005, he was sued by a woman who claimed was given genital herpes by him. (According to her, he received treatments for the disease under the alias Ron Mexico, which led to the Vick-based character "Mike Mexico" in the videogame Blitz: The League.) Last November, he gave the finger to fans booing him in the Georgia Dome after a home loss. In January, he was caught in Miami with a water bottle with a hidden compartment that contained a "small amount of dark particulate" and an odor consistent with marijuana, according to a police report. (Dubiously, lab tests found no evidence of pot, which many suspect was not due to science but rather NFL pressure to silence the controversy.) Granted, none of these activities is in the same ballpark as training pit bulls to fight to the death, and far be it that The Konformist staff condemn a man for having STDs, giving people the finger or carrying pot. Still, it should have raised NFL eyebrows that Vick was no mere Organization Man.
As is sometimes the case when pro athletes get into legal trouble, the question of race is part of the mix, as Vick is an African-American. It's hard to completely dismiss the possibility that if, say, Peyton Manning or Brett Favre (not to unfairly link either man to such criminal conduct) had been involved in illegal dogfighting, the whole thing would've been covered up. (Then again, many suspect that Vick had already used his "Get Out of Jail" card at Miami International.) On the other hand, some of the defenses for Vick seem like embarrassing apologetics. The worst example came from the lips of actor Jamie Foxx (who admittedly was great as a black QB in the Oliver Stone football flick Any Given Sunday.) As Foxx put it, "It's a cultural thing, I think. Most brothers didn't know that, you know. I used to see dogs fighting in the neighborhood all the time. I didn't know that was Fed time. So, Mike probably just didn't read his handbook on what not to do as a black star." Of course, the idea that Africa-Americans can't be expected to understand that training dogs to kill each other (and then viciously executing underperformers) is barbaric behavior, well, that's a sentiment we'd more expect to be uttered by Bill O'Reilly than an Oscar-winning actor. (A tip to Jamie: stick to your Ray Charles impersonations.)
Of course, not all African-Americans leaders reflexively jumped to Vick's defense. Hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, an animal rights supporter, quickly urged Nike to pull its sponsorship of Vick after the allegations surfaced. Joining him in condemning dogfighting was Revered Al Sharpton, hardly a guy who critics would allege is above playing the race card. And though the Atlanta chapter NAACP leader R.L. White sounded a bit like Foxx over the controversy, NAACP president Dennis Courtland Hayes bluntly declared that Vick "is not a victim... He absolutely must account for what he has done."
Indeed, looking at the evidence in the Vick case, it could be compellingly argued that rather than act improperly or show a rush to judgment, the feds went by the book and fairly targeted the man who deserved it, the guy who financed the whole dogfighting operation. Bad Newz Kennels started in 2001, not-so-coincidentally when Vick had just signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Falcons and entered the NFL. All of the participants in the dogfighting scheme, including Vick, concede he almost exclusively bank-rolled the entire operation.
The NFL, at this point, knows all this. They also know that part of Vick's confession (and the other participants' guilty pleas) was that Vick provided most of the money for gambling on the dogfights. As any sports fan will tell you, illegal gambling is the cardinal sin of pro sports, as it opens the door for mobsters to control compromised participants and fix games. It is perhaps just as much for the gambling aspects as the repulsive cruelty to animals that Goodell has suspended Vick from the NFL indefinitely.
In the end, Vick is a symbol of the coarsening of American culture during the zeroes. You don't have to be Bill O'Reilly to concede hip hop is no longer exposing injustice with the gangsta style but rather glorifying violent nihilism because it sells millions. (Indeed, Russell Simmons aside, hip hop has been central in glorifying dogfighting, with rapper DMX using dogfight lingo and imagery in his album covers, videos and songs. Coincidentally, DMX's Arizona home was raided on August 24 in another investigation involving dogfighting.) And you don't have to romanticize the "good old days" to think there's something wrong when sports most popular athletes include guys like Michael Vick, Barry Bonds and Kobe Bryant. And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that there may be a link between such a grim culture and what is happening at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, indeed.
In any case, we salute Michael Vick as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Mikey!!!
Michael Vick, NFL Quarterback
"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."
"Mrs. Robinson,” Simon & Garfunkel (from the film The Graduate)
All you sports fans out there who have a problem with Barry Bonds, you might as well get over it. It's time to accept the fact that the most cherished sports record in the USA, career Major League home runs, is now owned by a blatant cheater. Live with it, and just be glad that someone as dishonest as Bonds isn't, say, President of the United States.
Besides, as the era of 756* begins, its clear that more is amuck with professional athletics than Bonds roiding up. Consider the following:
* In the MLB, Bonds isn't the only dude that's on the juice all by his lone gunmen self. Jason Giambi (2000 AL MVP) and Rafael Palmeiro (he of the 500 HR and 3000 hit club) are two of the more noted players whose careers have been tainted by evidence of steroid use. (Former slugger Jose Canseco has claimed, perhaps with some hyperbole, that 85 percent of all major leaguers are on the stuff.) As for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, while there is no "proof" that they cheated as well, their unconvincing testimony before Congress in 2005 on the issue has led to Mac being shut out of the Hall of Fame after becoming eligible this year - something which will likely happen to both Sosa and Bonds as well.
* In cycling, the Tour de France has had evidence and allegations of doping that far exceed those of baseball. In 2006, the four runner-ups in 2005 to retiring seven-time champ Lance Armstrong (Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, Francisco Mancebo and Alexandre Vinokourov) all did not compete in the race due to evidence of doping. (Though Vinokourov himself was not charged in 2006, five of his teammates were, forcing him to withdraw. In 2007, he was personally busted during the race.) The eventual "winner" of the race, American Floyd Landis, was caught with banned substances in his urine samples and will likely lose his title after appeals. The 2007 contest was rife with arguably even more doping controversy, culminating with race leader Michael Rasmussen being removed for lying about his reasons he missed three drug tests. The eventual winner, Alberto Contador, was a prime suspect in the 2006 doping scandal. Meanwhile, though there is no firm evidence linking Armstrong to doping, widespread allegations cloud his storied career.
* In the NBA, a league already with an increasingly bad public image due to thuggish behavior of the post-Jordan playing crop, a gambling scandal involving referee Tim Donaghy threatens the basic integrity of the game. Though the scandal only involves Donaghy at this point (as petty tyrant David Stern repeatedly insists in his "bad apple" defense) the idea that other NBA refs may have been compromised by mobsters is not implausible, especially considering the league's lackadaisical response to evidence that something was fishy. Anyone who saw Game Six of the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff series (where the Lakers "won" following officiating that looked like a Florida election involving a member of the Bush family) should have little trouble believing a conspiracy of refs involved in the rigging of important games.
* The good news for the NHL is that they're even deemed worthy of mention, after commissioner Gary Bettman's self-destructive reign has removed ice hockey from the quartet of American major league sports. (Memo to Mr. Bettman: real sports leagues have cable TV contracts with ESPN, not the Outdoor Life Network.) Still, if missing an entire season due to an owner lockout wasn't enough to discredit the NHL, an illegal gambling ring which may have included the Great One Wayne Gretzky himself should do the trick.
True, the history-making runs of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer in golf and tennis are inspiring tales, but all in all, the pickings for sport heroics are pretty slim right now. Indeed, the only sports of late to have any good news are lacrosse (where the Duke team members were proven to merely be drunken racist preppies, instead of drunken racist preppies who rape strippers) and soccer (although The Konformist doubts a preening overrated metrosexual with a self-absorbed diva wife will popularize a boring sport in America if Pele couldn't.)
Still, with all due respect to all the other scandals, the sports league with the biggest PR disaster of late would have to be, hands down, the National Football League. Some would say it's a long time coming. After all, for all the outrage that has followed the revelations and allegations of steroid abuse in baseball, few would argue that steroid use in the MLB is even comparable to that in the NFL. Likewise, while the hip-hop gangsta style of new NBA stars has given rise to a korporate unfriendly "thug life" image, pro football, with it's inherently more violent style of play, clearly attracts more dangerous and borderline personalities.
Why has the NFL gotten such a free ride for so long? Primarily, it's about money. Since the NFL-AFL merger and the rise of the Super Bowl in the 70s, football, not baseball, has really been America's pastime. The korporate media has avoided tarnishing the reputation of the largest multi-billion dollar sports-entertainment empire known to man (not to mention the most successful "Reality TV" series ever, culminating in the four major TV network conglomerates having current contracts with the league.) The obfuscation of NFL scandal was aided by Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue, two sharp businessmen and charming salesmen during their historic reigns as commissioner.
There's a new sheriff in town now, however, and at the very least, Roger Goodell believes the writing is on the wall. If the NFL didn't clean itself up, even worse scandal would soon follow. Before this summer, Goodell had already delivered the following suspensions for bad behavior:
* Chris Henry of the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended for eight games after numerous incidents involving law enforcement, with allegations of crimes ranging from drunk driving, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault of a minor.
* Tank Johnson of the Chicago Bears was also suspended for eight games for his misdeeds, with alleged crimes ranging from drunk driving, assault and various weapon charges. His best friend and bodyguard, William Posey, was shot to death following a bar fight last December.
* In perhaps the most notorious case, Pacman Jones of the Tennessee Titans was suspended for the entire 2007 season for his troubles with the law, which has led to five arrests and questioning by police eleven times. Due to his penchant for troublemaking at nightclubs and strip clubs, he has been charged with assault, battery, felony vandalism and obstruction of justice. In his most infamous altercation, a strip club argument (during which he allegedly grabbed a stripper by her hair and slammed her head) in Las Vegas during All-Star weekend ended when one man in Pacman's entourage allegedly returned to the club and fired shots into the crowd. One bullet paralyzed former pro wrestler Tommy Urbanski, and two hit a security guard whose life Pacman had coincidentally threatened earlier that evening.
All of this bad behavior makes one long for the start of the 2006 season, when the biggest bogeyman in the NFL was Terrell Owens, whose disgraceful acts were wanting more money and dissing his quarterbacks.
This summer, however, even Pacman's troubles were eclipsed by Michael Vick, The Konformist Beast of the Month. Vick's problems received more airplay than the others, in part, because Vick, unlike the others, was no mere role player. As quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, he was a three-time Pro Bowler in football's most high profile position, who was given the prestigious honor of being the cover athlete for Madden Football 2004. Vick came up only one game short in 2005 from playing the Super Bowl. And though 2006 had been a disappointing year for him in passing (he completed only 52.6 percent of his throws during the season) he became the first QB to rush for over 1000 yards in a year.
Of course, the other reason Vick's legal issues received more airplay was the grotesque nature of his activities. While drunk driving, assault and shootings that lead others to be crippled are hardly minor crimes, being involved in the cruel "sport" of dogfighting shows not a momentary lapse of reason, but a premeditated plan to participate in the torture and death of man's best friend. And as bad as forcing canines to participate in a battle to the death may be, perhaps even worse is personally killing Fido in a gruesome fashion, such as by drowning, hanging, electrocution, strangulation and gunshots. These were the charges that Vick faced, charges he plead guilty to after his co-conspirators did the same and began to provide more evidence against him. As it stands, he likely faces one year to eighteen month in federal prison over his crimes.
In retrospect, there were warning signs that Vick was a trouble case. In 2005, he was sued by a woman who claimed was given genital herpes by him. (According to her, he received treatments for the disease under the alias Ron Mexico, which led to the Vick-based character "Mike Mexico" in the videogame Blitz: The League.) Last November, he gave the finger to fans booing him in the Georgia Dome after a home loss. In January, he was caught in Miami with a water bottle with a hidden compartment that contained a "small amount of dark particulate" and an odor consistent with marijuana, according to a police report. (Dubiously, lab tests found no evidence of pot, which many suspect was not due to science but rather NFL pressure to silence the controversy.) Granted, none of these activities is in the same ballpark as training pit bulls to fight to the death, and far be it that The Konformist staff condemn a man for having STDs, giving people the finger or carrying pot. Still, it should have raised NFL eyebrows that Vick was no mere Organization Man.
As is sometimes the case when pro athletes get into legal trouble, the question of race is part of the mix, as Vick is an African-American. It's hard to completely dismiss the possibility that if, say, Peyton Manning or Brett Favre (not to unfairly link either man to such criminal conduct) had been involved in illegal dogfighting, the whole thing would've been covered up. (Then again, many suspect that Vick had already used his "Get Out of Jail" card at Miami International.) On the other hand, some of the defenses for Vick seem like embarrassing apologetics. The worst example came from the lips of actor Jamie Foxx (who admittedly was great as a black QB in the Oliver Stone football flick Any Given Sunday.) As Foxx put it, "It's a cultural thing, I think. Most brothers didn't know that, you know. I used to see dogs fighting in the neighborhood all the time. I didn't know that was Fed time. So, Mike probably just didn't read his handbook on what not to do as a black star." Of course, the idea that Africa-Americans can't be expected to understand that training dogs to kill each other (and then viciously executing underperformers) is barbaric behavior, well, that's a sentiment we'd more expect to be uttered by Bill O'Reilly than an Oscar-winning actor. (A tip to Jamie: stick to your Ray Charles impersonations.)
Of course, not all African-Americans leaders reflexively jumped to Vick's defense. Hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, an animal rights supporter, quickly urged Nike to pull its sponsorship of Vick after the allegations surfaced. Joining him in condemning dogfighting was Revered Al Sharpton, hardly a guy who critics would allege is above playing the race card. And though the Atlanta chapter NAACP leader R.L. White sounded a bit like Foxx over the controversy, NAACP president Dennis Courtland Hayes bluntly declared that Vick "is not a victim... He absolutely must account for what he has done."
Indeed, looking at the evidence in the Vick case, it could be compellingly argued that rather than act improperly or show a rush to judgment, the feds went by the book and fairly targeted the man who deserved it, the guy who financed the whole dogfighting operation. Bad Newz Kennels started in 2001, not-so-coincidentally when Vick had just signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Falcons and entered the NFL. All of the participants in the dogfighting scheme, including Vick, concede he almost exclusively bank-rolled the entire operation.
The NFL, at this point, knows all this. They also know that part of Vick's confession (and the other participants' guilty pleas) was that Vick provided most of the money for gambling on the dogfights. As any sports fan will tell you, illegal gambling is the cardinal sin of pro sports, as it opens the door for mobsters to control compromised participants and fix games. It is perhaps just as much for the gambling aspects as the repulsive cruelty to animals that Goodell has suspended Vick from the NFL indefinitely.
In the end, Vick is a symbol of the coarsening of American culture during the zeroes. You don't have to be Bill O'Reilly to concede hip hop is no longer exposing injustice with the gangsta style but rather glorifying violent nihilism because it sells millions. (Indeed, Russell Simmons aside, hip hop has been central in glorifying dogfighting, with rapper DMX using dogfight lingo and imagery in his album covers, videos and songs. Coincidentally, DMX's Arizona home was raided on August 24 in another investigation involving dogfighting.) And you don't have to romanticize the "good old days" to think there's something wrong when sports most popular athletes include guys like Michael Vick, Barry Bonds and Kobe Bryant. And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that there may be a link between such a grim culture and what is happening at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, indeed.
In any case, we salute Michael Vick as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Mikey!!!
Friday, October 19, 2007
Super Bowl may someday be held in London
http://www.sportsline.com/nfl/story/10410478
Goodell: Super Bowl may someday be held in London
Oct. 15, 2007
CBSSports.com wire reports
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona -- A future NFL champion may someday be crowned overseas in a game witnessed predominantly by a foreign audience, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said.
"There's a great deal of interest in holding a Super Bowl in London," Goodell told reporters Monday. "So we'll be looking at that."
The commissioner said London's Wembley Stadium would make a great candidate for American pro football's biggest matchup, given the opening of the stadium's lastest incarnation and enthusiasm overseas for the game.
The NFL has been expanding its overseas presence for years by televising games around the world. It's held preseason games in numerous countries in Europe, Asia, Mexico and Canada, and in 2005, the Arizona Cardinals and San Francisco 49ers played the first regular-season match outside the U.S.
The game at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City drew the league's largest crowd to date, 103,467.
On Oct. 28, Wembley will host the first regular-season NFL game outside North America. It took just 90 minutes to sell the first 40,000 tickets for the game between the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants. Goodell said event organizers have sold 95,000 tickets in all.
Goodell spoke about the possibility of a British Super Bowl after a luncheon Monday in Scottsdale sponsored by the host committee for the 2008 Super Bowl in Arizona.
Goodell: Super Bowl may someday be held in London
Oct. 15, 2007
CBSSports.com wire reports
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona -- A future NFL champion may someday be crowned overseas in a game witnessed predominantly by a foreign audience, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said.
"There's a great deal of interest in holding a Super Bowl in London," Goodell told reporters Monday. "So we'll be looking at that."
The commissioner said London's Wembley Stadium would make a great candidate for American pro football's biggest matchup, given the opening of the stadium's lastest incarnation and enthusiasm overseas for the game.
The NFL has been expanding its overseas presence for years by televising games around the world. It's held preseason games in numerous countries in Europe, Asia, Mexico and Canada, and in 2005, the Arizona Cardinals and San Francisco 49ers played the first regular-season match outside the U.S.
The game at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City drew the league's largest crowd to date, 103,467.
On Oct. 28, Wembley will host the first regular-season NFL game outside North America. It took just 90 minutes to sell the first 40,000 tickets for the game between the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants. Goodell said event organizers have sold 95,000 tickets in all.
Goodell spoke about the possibility of a British Super Bowl after a luncheon Monday in Scottsdale sponsored by the host committee for the 2008 Super Bowl in Arizona.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
DMX's Arizona Home Raided
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1567865/20070824/dmx.jhtml
Aug 24 2007
DMX's Arizona Home Raided; A Dozen Pit Bulls Removed From Residence
Police also discovered weapons cache; no charges have been filed against rapper.
By Chris Harris, with additional reporting by James Montgomery and Stephen Totilo
Deputies with the Maricopa County sheriff's office raided the Cave Creek, Arizona, home of rapper DMX on Friday morning (August 24), and according to a police spokesperson, 12 pit bulls were removed from the residence, all in bad condition. Police would not get into specifics but did say the animals are being tended to by veterinarians.
At this point, DMX (real name: Earl Simmons) has not been officially charged with any crime, but police are still investigating. DMX was not at his home at the time of the raid, during which police also discovered a large cache of weapons. Police do not believe the rapper is in Arizona but would like to question him as part of their investigation.
A tipster notified police more than a week ago that dogs were being kept in inhumane conditions at the rapper's property, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told MTV News. "They weren't getting proper food, they weren't getting proper water, and they were tied outside in 115-degree heat," Arpaio said. "We are developing the investigation." He added that the department is seeking additional warrants to check the guns to determine if "they're legal, if he's allowed to have weapons."
According to Arpaio, the charred remains of at least one dog were recovered from DMX's backyard, and the sheriff's department will be investigating the rapper's possible involvement in illegal dogfighting. Police continue to explore the grounds around DMX's home for more dog remains.
The rapper's attorney, Stacey Richman, defended her client, saying, "He loves and lives for his animals" and "has caretakers for his homes and especially for his animals." According to Richman, "The caretaker [DMX had hired] was only coming in once a day. Of course, that was not the arrangement."
This isn't the first time police have taken an interest in DMX's dogs. Back in 2002, the rapper pleaded guilty in New Jersey to charges of animal cruelty, stemming from a 1998 raid of DMX's home. Police claimed he had neglected 13 pit bulls. He eventually plea-bargained down to fines, probation and community service, and even starred in a public-service announcement against animal abuse.
The DMX news comes the same day that NFL star Michael Vick admitted his own involvement with dogfighting. The Atlanta Falcons quarterback told the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Virginia, that he would plead guilty to "conspiracy to travel in interstate commerce in aid of unlawful activities and to sponsor a dog in an animal fighting venture." Vick faces a maximum term of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Later Friday evening, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced that Vick has been suspended from the league indefinitely.
Aug 24 2007
DMX's Arizona Home Raided; A Dozen Pit Bulls Removed From Residence
Police also discovered weapons cache; no charges have been filed against rapper.
By Chris Harris, with additional reporting by James Montgomery and Stephen Totilo
Deputies with the Maricopa County sheriff's office raided the Cave Creek, Arizona, home of rapper DMX on Friday morning (August 24), and according to a police spokesperson, 12 pit bulls were removed from the residence, all in bad condition. Police would not get into specifics but did say the animals are being tended to by veterinarians.
At this point, DMX (real name: Earl Simmons) has not been officially charged with any crime, but police are still investigating. DMX was not at his home at the time of the raid, during which police also discovered a large cache of weapons. Police do not believe the rapper is in Arizona but would like to question him as part of their investigation.
A tipster notified police more than a week ago that dogs were being kept in inhumane conditions at the rapper's property, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told MTV News. "They weren't getting proper food, they weren't getting proper water, and they were tied outside in 115-degree heat," Arpaio said. "We are developing the investigation." He added that the department is seeking additional warrants to check the guns to determine if "they're legal, if he's allowed to have weapons."
According to Arpaio, the charred remains of at least one dog were recovered from DMX's backyard, and the sheriff's department will be investigating the rapper's possible involvement in illegal dogfighting. Police continue to explore the grounds around DMX's home for more dog remains.
The rapper's attorney, Stacey Richman, defended her client, saying, "He loves and lives for his animals" and "has caretakers for his homes and especially for his animals." According to Richman, "The caretaker [DMX had hired] was only coming in once a day. Of course, that was not the arrangement."
This isn't the first time police have taken an interest in DMX's dogs. Back in 2002, the rapper pleaded guilty in New Jersey to charges of animal cruelty, stemming from a 1998 raid of DMX's home. Police claimed he had neglected 13 pit bulls. He eventually plea-bargained down to fines, probation and community service, and even starred in a public-service announcement against animal abuse.
The DMX news comes the same day that NFL star Michael Vick admitted his own involvement with dogfighting. The Atlanta Falcons quarterback told the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Virginia, that he would plead guilty to "conspiracy to travel in interstate commerce in aid of unlawful activities and to sponsor a dog in an animal fighting venture." Vick faces a maximum term of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Later Friday evening, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced that Vick has been suspended from the league indefinitely.
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