NFL Scales of Justice---The Ultimate Public Hoax:
There is no Kingdom quite as wonderful as the Society of Professional Sport Owners. It would be quite a remarkable search to find any instance when any owner or the whole cabal of owners were ever disciplined in any way by a court of law. I suppose one might argue we are so lucky to have such an angelic group guarding the best interests of the public in regards to our professional sport teams. You might think with the cost of tickets, outlandish player salaries, blackmail of cities right and left, and rampant criminal behavior among players, that the owners might have to answer to someone about something. Of course they do: they elect a Commissioner to watch over, in this case, the NFL. I wish myself and some of my friends could elect someone to be the police, judge, and jury regarding our conduct. There must, I am sure, be a theoretical limit to the power of a Commissioner. If a particular owner were to kill someone in public I think the Commissioner would lose control over that situation. How comforting.
If you don't see much of a turnover in the private ownership of Professional Football there is a reason. The average team is worth $975 million and the value grows at well above the inflation rate. In 2006 the operating expenses were $17.8 million on $204 million in revenue. Oh my, some profit. And we thought corporate CEO's were ripping us off. But certainly our investigative reporters would be all over this public rape for monetary gain. Hardly. The only squabble is between the owners and the players about how to divvy up the money. The owners grab hundreds of millions, the players grab mostly a few million but some tens of millions, and the fans---as the saying goes----the owners and players get the gold mine and the fans get the shaft. Why isn't the media all over this, demanding professional sports be accountable to some oversight other than a Commissioner elected by the owners? Well, CBS has a $3.7 billion deal with the NFL, Fox a $4.3 billion, and NBC $3.6 million. These contracts, good until 2011, award the NFL an average of $2 billion a year. If one listens ever so carefully, no where are you going to hear any employee of the networks bad mouth or bite the hand that feeds them.
Last week a Coach, one who has had phenomenal success in recent years, was caught cheating to win a game---taping signals from the other team. Wow. That, it would seem, is a little bit more damaging to the integrity of the sport than whether Ricky Williams smokes pot, or Terrell fought for pay parity with other top receivers, or some assistant coach in Dallas takes some sort of illegal drug (I think it might have been a steroid for his diabetic state, I kind of have forgotten), etc. Fortunately these Commissioners don't fool around. Tough as nails. Ricky is out of football for good, Terrell managed a rare victory, and the assistant coach was suspended for 5 games. But this coach who cheated and knew the plays the other team was going to run during the game, well---this was kind of touchy for the Commissioner. Like who knows who else knew and approved this, or what other franchises might be up to in this department. Interestingly, to the extent I am aware, all the screaming and anger about this came from everywhere except the owners themselves. Well the Wise and All Powerful Commissioner came down hard, at least the media portrayed it thusly----the Coach was fined $500, 000 dollars, the Owner $250,000 dollars and a top draft pick for next year was taken away. Tough? The Coach will likely never pay a penny (the owner will dip into his bag of millions) and pay the coach a miniscule amount of this bag of money---$500,000--- as a bonus to the coach (this is my guess, not fact). There is no suspension at all, no forfeiting the game in question----and does nothing to investigate what kind of cheating might really be going on across the league. Cheating is obviously not pot smoking or individual player misconduct on or off the field---and a Commissioner is smart enough to know from whence his own salary comes. And to the public?------wow, that's a lot a money, a really big fine. This is the same public who elected George Bush----not once----but twice. The communicative expertise to hoodwink the public is fine tuned down to a science.
I have a brilliant solution. Make Terrell Owens the Commissioner. Some sort of 'Fair is Fair' guy seems a perfect fit. Okay, that is my little funny Funny. But there ought to be some better way to get a Commissioner of Professional Football besides letting the owners choose one. Can't the fans have representation somewhere in this operation?
