FOR KRAFT, IT MUST BE CANTON OR BUST
Kraft merits a place in Canton for more than wins by his Pats
CANTON, Ohio — Last night the Pro Football Hall of Fame belonged to Jerry Jones. Before long the same should be true for Bob Kraft.
Generally, I’m not a strong believer in putting owners into halls of fame. While they serve a central role, as any paymaster does, generally their overall contribution was once best described by Hall of Fame lineman and longtime executive director of the NFL Players Association, Gene Upshaw.
“Owners?” Upshaw said. “Without the players all they own is a bunch of tight pants and jocks!”
That is true but not in the case of the pioneers who built the NFL like Bert Bell, George Halas, Art Rooney and the Mara family or Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams, who created the American Football League out of dreams and deep pockets.
It is also not true for Jones and Kraft, two guys who changed the economics of pro football through shrewd merchandising, creative negotiating with broadcast networks and, in Kraft’s case, at considerable personal sacrifice to spearhead the negotiated settlement of the 2011 lockout.
An NFL owner must do more than simply be associated with winning to earn a bust in Canton. This is true even if you turn a franchise around from a perennial loser and financial failure, as Kraft did after buying the struggling Patriots in 1994.
Although some have begun to equate Super Bowl trophies with an owner’s value, the fact is the players win those trophies with some assistance from their coaches. So for an owner to reach Canton he must make a contribution to the game far larger than financing a winning team. To be frank, building a team that has won five Lombardi Trophies and played in eight Super Bowls in 23 years is difficult to ignore, but winning cannot be all there is to your legacy, as I would argue is the case with Broncos owner Pat Bowlen.
The story is different with Kraft. He has won like few owners in the game’s history, but it’s the rest of his résumé that makes his case for joining Jones in Canton.
First, Kraft saved professional football for New England when he rejected a $75 million buyout to allow then-owner James B. Orthwein out of the stadium lease Kraft held so he could move the franchise to St. Louis. That decision, coupled with a subsequent one in 1994 to pay a thenNFL record $172 million for a team his financial advisers told him was worth no more than $115 million, kept the Patriots in New England six years after he’d bought rickety Foxboro Stadium out of bankruptcy for $22 million to gain control of its ironclad lease with the Patriots through 2001.
When then-owners Billy Sullivan and Victor Kiam tried to move the team to Jacksonville, Kraft used the lease to block them. When Orthwein made his $75 million ransom offer, Kraft said “nyet!”
Had he not, the AFC would have been left with only one major television market — New York — while the NFC would have had New York, Dallas, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco. Had that become the case, a push would have been made to either significantly reduce the cost of the TV package for AFC games or force realignment. One can only imagine the fractious nature of those negotiations.
At the time of Kraft’s purchase, the Patriots had the lowest season-ticket base in the league and the highest debt. Three years later they appeared in Super Bowl XXXI, winning the first of eight conference championships. That is the most in the Super Bowl era and the team’s five Super Bowl championships tie Kraft with another Hall of Fame owner, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., as the most by a single owner.
As Kraft’s dynasty was dawning in 2002, he was finishing construction of a $350 million privately funded stadium, the first of its kind. Gillette Stadium became the anchor store for surrounding mall development, an idea most new stadiums now follow.
Kraft cannot claim to be a founding father of the game, but he can claim more than saving pro football for New England and creating one of the NFL’s greatest dynasties. He also played a key role in negotiating the lengthiest and most lucrative TV contracts in league history, thus financially solidifying all 32 NFL teams, and in settling the longest lockout in the sport’s history at a time of personal crisis.
“Without him this deal does not get done.” NFLPA executive board member Jeff Saturday said after Kraft’s intervention ended the 135-day lockout and led to a 10-year labor deal.
That day, Kraft stood on a podium with Saturday, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, commissioner Roger Goodell and others at the request of both sides in the midst of sitting shiva, the sevenday mourning period of the Jewish faith following the death of his wife of 48 years, Myra. He was unshaven, deeply saddened and wearing a torn black tie under his suit, a traditional sign of mourning. Even in his grief, Bob Kraft was there for pro football.
“Without him, someone else would have needed to step up, and I don’t know who that someone would have been,” then NFLPA vice president Domonique Foxworth said.
One example of Kraft’s negotiating skill came after the two sides agreed to a new rookie salary system and reduced length of rookie contracts, one of several major stumbling blocks to a deal. He then returned to his wife’s side, but when the owners and players reconvened, representatives of the owners balked. After a failed phone conversation with his fellow owners, Kraft flew back the next morning and swayed his side to a more reasonable position.
“I don’t know what he did or said or how he explained it to them, but he made it so it made sense,” Foxworth recalled.
Making sense is not always easy, however. In 2007, after his team was heavily penalized during the Spygate episode, Kraft did not threaten the commissioner’s authority nor challenge it in court. Instead he apologized to fellow owners for his team’s involvement in what he found to be an embarrassing episode. End of story . . . but not the end of his Hall of Fame résumé.
Kraft made clear his distrust of the league office’s Deflategate investigation that led to a four-game suspension of Tom Brady last season but again refused legal action. Patriot fans were enraged but despite deep reservations he insisted he would not challenge the commissioner’s authority even though he felt it unjust, putting long-term league concerns ahead of his own short-term ones. Then he assembled a team that won Super Bowl LI with the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.
To fully grasp how Kraft earned his way into the Hall one must understand both his contributions to the betterment of the league and the sad state of affairs in New England prior to his arrival. From its inception in 1960 through 1993, the Patriots had a winning percentage of .450 (225-276-9) and made the playoffs only six times. Between 1989 and 1993, they were at an alltime low, with a winning percentage of .238 (19-61). That offseason Kraft purchased the team. Since then, their winning percentage is .691 and they are one Super Bowl victory from tying the Steelers for the most Lombardi Trophies.
If you do all that you belong in Canton . . . sooner rather than later.