Ruining a $9 bil brand in war for pennies
oger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, didn’t end up in Stupidville overnight. Neither did his owners. They just look stupid now, as if they all just showed up from throwing flags in the old Lingerie League, as if they are all as bad as their own replacement referees.
And the longer they go with replacement officials working NFL games — games for which they are spectacularly unqualified — the worse they look, the more they make a mockery of a $9 billion-a-year sport, continuing to lock out their regular officials over what amounts to tipping money.
Always in the past, every big dispute between management and labor in sports, you would see fans lining up on both sides of the debate, yelling about players or owners. Not this time. They all love the same refs — that means real refs — they once hated.
You know what passes for good news these days in the National Football League? That there hasn’t been a riot yet, something out of European soccer, because of one of these blown calls. Sunday night in Baltimore, a questionable field goal in the last seconds is called good, so that ending went against the road team, the Patriots.
Then came Monday night in Seattle, mall-cop refs stealing a game from the Packers because of an obvious blown call at the end, the mall cops clearly afraid, being in Seattle, to overturn that call.
One of these days, and soon if Goodell and the NFL owners don’t bring back their regular officials, one of these endings will go against the home team. Then it won’t just be a breakdown in civility in the NFL, it will be a breakdown of law and order.
This is no longer about saving face, for a commissioner who has done plenty of good for his league, or for owners who look no better than greedy headbangers in a dispute that is about, what, $3 million and change per year? No, this is about saving the integrity of this season, because there was no integrity in Seattle when “Monday Night Football” became “Monday Night Raw.”
Here is what an English friend of mine had to say about all that the day after:
“From London to Lahore, whether it’s soccer or cricket, most professional sports administrators I know hold up the NFL as the absolute pinnacle of sporting excellence,” he said. “Training, marketing, ownership rights, TV rights and media relationships, they believe the organization is best-in-class. Every major sports franchise has its problems and fallouts. But this has seriously damaged the NFL brand and shattered their image of invincibility. And proven that, despite their zillion-dollar business, they’re human after all — and make bad decisions.”
The commissioner and his owners have made a terrible decision about these scabs — what else do you call them? — they have brought in to call these games, the ones who have made themselves more of the story in the first three weeks of this season than Eli Manning’s arm or Darrelle Revis’ knee.
We have watched this all play out in real time, watched as a league that is so smart about so many things, starting with making money, has allowed itself to look pigheaded and shortsighted and tone-deaf, all at the same time.
You would call this just bad reality TV, except that there has been an air of unreality about this from the beginning, this bad joke of allowing former Lingerie League refs and former junior college refs and what look sometimes just like scared old men essentially given control of a $9 billion industry. The Romney campaign has been run better than the NFL.
Now it is the job of the commissioner, Goodell, the son of a brave former United States senator from New York named Charles Goodell, a Republican in the ’60s fearless enough to stand up against the war in Vietnam, to get his owners out of this, to admit they made a mistake and correct that mistake, stop allowing these refs to do as much damage to NFL games as the league has done to itself so far this season.
The Packers were robbed Monday night. But as bad as that call was, teams have been robbed by regular officials, too, plenty of times. What is worse now, what is shameful, in a dispute over what amounts to nickels and dimes in the NFL, is that the fans are being cheated, even as they continue going to the games and watching them on television. You want to know when legitimate sports become something less? When the fans watching them, especially the ones paying to watch, walk away thinking the result wasn’t on the level. That’s what happened in Seattle. The winner lost. The loser won. That’s the real problem for
the National Football League.