Mystery of Just How the Green Bay Franchise is run as a Publicly Owned Franchise
The Shareholders have no power other than to elect a 43 person Board of Directors who serve a three year term in staggered elections. The Board of Directors then elects a 7 person executive committee. The executive committee then elects a CEO who must be one of the members of the executive committee. The CEO then appoints the GM who then appoints the Coach who then appoints the assistant coaches. In practice no one really has total power to do much of anything. The coach must appoint assistant coaches which meet the approval of the GM who functions under the approval of the CEO who reports to the Executive Committee which serves at the pleasure of the Board of Directors.
It doesn’t seem to be a ‘good ole boys club’ in the sense that a few guys control everything and protect each other. But this system does explain why it is difficult for anyone outside the 43 persons who run the show to get hired to be a CEO or GM. These people know each other, and each one of them would like to move up into an important administrative position. After all, this is how it has worked since first formed back in the 1920’s. It is sort of a ‘State pride’ thing in that ‘we here in Wisconsin will run the show, we don’t need a lot of people from out of state running the show. There have been exceptions. Vince Lombardi was an outsider and put the team on the map. What really saved the Packers, and I mean really saved it was Bart Starr, Brett Favre, and Aaron Rodgers. Bart Star grew up in Alabama, Brett Favre grew up in Mississippi and Aaron Rodgers grew up in California. So home grown players were not the source of Green Bay Success. The last great coach Green Bay had was probably Vince Lombardi. Bart Star was no Brett Favre or Aaron Rodgers but Bart Star was a very good quarterback with a very good coach who fielded a team that was good in all aspects of the game. With Lombardi and Star they won 5 league championships and 2 Super Bowls in 6 years. After Lombardi Green Bay never again brought in a proven NFL championship calibre coach. After mediocre coaches, including Bart Star himself, the Packers began to have trouble interesting players to come to Green Bay because of the cold weather and isolated location. They were saved by Brett Favre and Reggie White. While having one of the best quarterbacks in the league enables a team to do well win/loss wise, it seldom can, by itself, bring any Super Bowls to the team. This is clear enough since during the span of Favre and Rodgers, a span of 16 years, they have only won the Super Bowl twice, once with Favre and once with Rodgers. Luckily, both Favre and Rodgers are exciting quarterbacks capable of winning the game at the last minute so watching either one is always exciting—period.
While one can argue that coaches like Holgren and McCarthy were instrumental in the Packer’s getting to the playoffs year after year, and that the Packer’s general Manager was picking good players it was rather deceptive. When Holgren decided he wanted more control over who the players were and didn’t get it, he then went to Seattle and then the Browns where he had little success and then nobody would hire him after that. The same thing happened to many wide receivers who left for various reasons and were never great on any other teams. Favre and Rodgers can make good receivers look great. Neither Holgren or McCarthy had any experience as head coach in the NFL. For whatever the reason, the Packer’s never pick an experienced head coach in the NFL for their coach. They always pick the candidate they like the most in the interview process much like the Dating Game on TV.
It seems common sense that if you have a quarterback like Rodgers you do everything you can to get a decent defensive unit. A good defense, not a great defense, is all Rodgers needs and he will win most every game. So the Packers hired Don Capers. Now what were his Credentials? He went 2-7 as Coach of Houston then was fired after one year with the the Dolphins, then fired after one year with the Patriots, upon which he was hired by the Packers and has been there for 9 years. His ranking his entire stay with Green Bay in yards per game in the league was: 2nd, 5th, 32nd, 11th, 25th, 15th, 15th, and 22nd in 2016. and it was really even worse because his ranking when the game was on the line in passing yards was out of sight. Other teams dismiss disaster in a year or two while the Packers let it go on for 9 years. He is being replaced now by Mike Pettine, former Head Coach of the Browns. McCarthy picked Capers and is the one who kept him on for 9 years. Now he, the one supposedly where the buck stops, gets to pick another head defensive coach. This new coach is not hopeless since back in 2009 to 20012 with the jets his defense was 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 8th. His one year with the Bills his defenses were ranked 10th. from 2014 to 2016 he was the Head Coach of the Cleveland Browns. So the Packers finally hire a former head coach of an NFL team and they pick the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. Could he work out? I suppose he might be a tad better than Capers. But with all the interest in coaches to coach at Green Bay, this is the most successful previous coach they could find? Wow.
As GM the Packers elevated an in house candidate that has been with the Packers as a scout and then for two years as Director of Player Personnel. If a team is cleaning house because they were weak in almost every category except quarterback why would the team then elevate someone who had been part of the problem for 17 years? It seems likely that the main factor in the decisions is the comfort level—they know the guy very well, like him, and would like to reward him and give him a shot. But haven’t they been giving him a shot for 17 years? It just smells like this is a way to make sure both Thompson and McCarthy have firm control over the show, when the objective should have been to shove them aside—9 years is enough for this dog and pony show.
All this raises several questions:
Is having the team controlled by a 43 member Board of Directors a good thing?
What is wrong, if anything, with winning most games and making the playoffs most years?
Teams like the Chicago Cubs, the Packers, the Dallas Cowboys, for examples, can draw enthusiastic loyal fans whether they win or lose. The Chicago Cubs never won a World Series for almost a hundred years and packed their ballpark every year. The fans loved them whether they won or not.
The Packer fans are the same way. The Yankees won a lot, as do the Patriots and yet the Packer, Cub, and Dallas fans seem far more loyal and intense than the Patriot or Yankee fans. Some team fans insist their teams win or else they lose interest. Other team fans will love their team and coaches irregardless if the team wins or loses consistently.
Packer fans enjoy their football team regardless. Period. It may seem strange but then again it also seems admirable. It is not like if the team loses that it changes any fan lives one way or the other. So these fans stay all worked up year after year whether any Super Bowls are won or not. I used to live in Wisconsin during the days of Lombardi and Star. During the game, the roads were barren of cars. Everybody was either at the game or watching the game on TV. I am told it is still that way.
The real question is what happens when the Packers no longer have one of the best, if not the best, quarterbacks in the NFL? When that happens the Packers are going to have a hard time getting players to come and play in Green Bay. Most of these football players are not products of small communities out in the middle of nowhere. Will the Packers end up like Cleveland or like the Cubs? My guess it will be more like the Cubs and the fans will just come anyway. What other social activities are there to replace going out to Lambau Field, or to football TV watching social gatherings? Will the allure of media gadgets as a source for our social life finally doom football as an attraction? It already has a lot of other activities. Will the injury situation, politics, cultural differences between the fans and players, further economic deterioration of the lower middle class and poor who hold less and less percentage of the wealth, more frequent and higher casualties with terrorist acts, and continued loss of community spirit affect football as it has affected many other sports? Hard to say.
Football is probably, for the most people, the most interesting game to watch. But it is also the most unpredictable in that many uncontrollable factors by the players and coaches can determine the outcome of any particular game. And in football it can’t be a series of best of 7 games. Those who win contests in predicting which team will win the games, win the contest usually with a win percentage in the low 60%. At any point in a football game, most anything can happen and often does. I avoid this by rooting for particular players, not a team. Aaron Rodgers is always interesting to watch. After all, he almost always has to score more than 35 points to win the game. There is consistency to the play of the really good players. But most fans want a team to root for. Majority rules.
The role of Rodgers in picking who coaches is a mystery. It is possible that it is Rodgers who does not want McCarthy ousted. It is possible, but guesswork, that Rodgers really pretty much runs the offense to his liking and McCarthy is no threat to that. Rodgers may fear a coach who is dead set on a particular complicated system. Rodgers extreme talent is fast precision passing and he relishes where everyone is running all over the place and he simply finds a needle to thread and threads it. He almost wishes for broken plays where chaos rules. Hard to argue with that.
Why do we even get so excited about who wins a sport contest anyway? The reality is that the result of the game doesn’t change our lives one way or the other.
For a long time I could not find out what part of the public has any say in running the team. The corporation currently has 360,760 stockholders, who collectively own 5,011,558 shares of stock. These stockholders vote for the 43 Board of Directors. Therein is the public input. But anyone who owns stock knows that in practice an individual stock owner seldom has any role to play at all unless they own a high percentage of the stocks. You get a ballot, there are names on it and you pick names without any knowledge of what the different people on the ballot wish to have the company do about anything.
At any rate, the Green Bay Packers are as public as other public companies minus the ability to vote on any Green Bay operational matters. The stock holders can’t force a vote on anything. I don’t believe they can even sell their shares. They are wall ornaments, costing a few hundred dollars.
So is it better to have a team be publicly owned or owned by a single multimillionaire owner?
The fans can lose big either way. Some owners care a lot about winning and other owners are satisfied with the income or the publicity or the power they have over the players, etc. The original owners probably knew quite a bit about football and were avid fans themselves. But they simply can pass the team on to their offspring and eventually it can end being owned by Virginia Halas McCaskey,(Chicago Bears) whose real knowledge or interest in football is anyone’s guess. My guess is that the Bear fans would probably prefer a publicly owned team.
My own opinion, for the moment, is that whether publicly owned or not, those who buy a ticket should be allowed a vote for each ticket purchased on a non-binding referendum regarding retention of the General Manager, the Head Coach, the Offensive Co-ordinator, and the Defensive Coordinator. This would put pressure on the owner, whether private or public, to not stick with these team positions ad nausea. In the case of Green Bay it would be a way for the public to tell the 43 member executive committee that the public wants some change.
But more importantly Congress, who has the ultimate charge with setting guidelines on monopolies such as this, ought to put in meaningful regulations so as to protect the players, the public, and the cities which house the stadiums. There should be limits as to how much profit the owners can make in a year, all owner/player contract negotiations should include the fans and the cities at the bargaining table. Just as there should be limits on how much more a corporate CEO can make compared to his employees, there should be generous but reasonable limits on individual player salaries and once this is established the salaries go up only with the cost of living. For one thing, football is a very rugged, skilled, and dangerous sport for all players with maybe the exception of the kickers, and a star quarterback, for example, should not be able to make 20 or 30 times more money than others on the team. Salary caps, once realistically set, should also only go up with the cost of living. All off the field behaviors should be settled in public courts like any other citizens. The League has no business being the police, the judge, and the jury on player misconduct off the field. Only drugs which enhance player performance could be banned. It is scientifically insane to have the NFL decide which recreational drugs of abuse can be used; for example alcohol or marijuana, or nicotine. Whatever the law is it should not be different from the laws which affect every other citizen and let the regular court system handle it. Contracts should be binding to both parties, not just the athletes. I am less sure as to how best to handle this, but no beginning player should be stuck with a long term contract which relegates a rookie player to minimum wage for years. There is no reason why Congress should allow millionaire owners to run roughshod over players, cities, or fans. Stadiums should have to be built with non public monies and no team allowed to move their franchise elsewhere, as an endless form of blackmail. The idea that the wealthy should be allowed to police themselves regarding employees or the public or the cities where they play is oxymoronic. That is the reason 2-5% of citizens own 90 percent of the wealth in the U.S.
In the end, justice and fairness is elusive when it comes to who owns national sport teams, and like on so many issues, nothing much is changing. Something will sooner rather than later have to give.
