For one thing, there’d be no more of these keep-your-hands-off-the-receiver, high-octane-offense, no-lead-is-safe mockeries of a football game. Oh, and fewer talking-baby ads.
By Matt Taibbi
Three years into the reign of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, here is what we can say about the record of America’s second most important chief executive: nothing. Goodell is so boring that ESPN has to use special cameras just to capture the light he faintly displaces in space; in his press conferences he looks like a little piece of blond fuzz hovering tumbleweed-like above the lectern. There is not a single person alive who can remember anything Goodell has ever said, except maybe Pacman Jones, and even he only remembered that thing about trying not to get arrested anymore for a few weeks.
Goodell’s major contribution to the nation’s most popular sport has been to expand the league’s personal conduct policy, using the pulpit of the commissioner’s office to hand out slightly longer suspensions than we’re used to for players committing serious crimes. While his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, was only willing to suspend a player (Leonard Little) eight games for killing an actual human being, Goodell showed guts by suspending Jones for a whole year after his involvement in a shooting that merely left a man paralyzed. That’s basically the major policy change in the NFL over the past 10 years.
The game otherwise is essentially unchanged, which is too bad, because it could use a wrinkle or two; the pleasure we get from the league has started to feel mechanical and insincere, like a weekly front-seat hummer from a rest-stop prostitute. While it’s true that the NFL’s popularity is at an all-time high, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Americans have no lives and will watch pretty much anything, even Howie Do It or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. If the NFL weren’t a bastion of extreme reactionary conservatism even more violently change averse than, say, the John Birch Society or the pharaonic dynasties, it would recognize that there are problems with the game that could use fixing. Here are some simple changes it should make but almost certainly never will:
ADD A SECOND LEAGUE. Football should build a two-tiered system like the British soccer leagues, and in this case bounce the crappiest first-league team every five or 10 years and replace it with the best second-league team. This system would quickly ferret out plainly incompetent owners like the Bengals’ Mike Brown and give any market with a 50,000-seat stadium and a decent set of investors a chance to earn its way into the NFL, instead of relying on the hideously unfair, secretive, subterranean expansion system that gives overgrown bus stations like Jacksonville and Charlotte new teams while the nation’s second largest market, Los Angeles, suffers through UCLA games. Unfortunately the current owners would never agree to this system, as it would make it much harder for assholes like Brown to ransom desperate fan bases for public stadium money by threatening to move — and also puncture the socialist paradise of antitrust protection and guaranteed TV revenue, forcing the league to operate like a genuine meritocracy instead of a very expensive welfare program for Detroit Lions executives.
IMPOSE A WEIGHT LIMIT. It would be one thing if watching all these 320-pound guys run into each other at full speed were nature meeting nature, a sports wonder of the world. But it’s not: It’s a whole bunch of 260- and 270-pound guys who spend their off-seasons mainlining chocolate pudding, cheeseburgers, and Stanozolol because their position coaches told them they had to make weight or hit the waiver wire. While fans can’t be expected to care about all these lab-fattened players getting sleep apnea, high blood pressure, musculoskeletal problems, and enlarged hearts (that was what killed former Charger lineman Chris Mims, who was 38 and 456 pounds when he died shortly after retiring), they should at least theoretically care about all the time lost to on-field injuries thanks to the extra weight. In whose interest is it, really, to stack 50 or 60 unnecessary pounds on some poor dumb kid from Nebraska or Alabama just so that he can fall on Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, break the starting quarterback’s kneecap, and torpedo the league’s ratings for the year? Not that the genuinely fearsome ass size of players like Grady Jackson isn’t itself a worthwhile attraction, but the NFL wouldn’t lose much with a 300-pound weight limit. And while it wouldn’t end steroid use, it would give us a game that was faster, more athletic, and less likely to feature clashes of limping third-stringers by week 11.
SUSPEND THE RIGHT GUYS. Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison hit his girlfriend in the face because she refused to baptize their child, but he wasn’t suspended. (“He was doing something that was good,” said the Steelers owner, referring to Harrison’s motive.) Meanwhile Jets safety Eric Smith had to sit out a game for accidentally breaking star receiver Anquan Boldin’s jaw in an end-zone collision. It’s great that the league has started to market pink, glittery, tapered Reebok jerseys, but if it wants more female fans, it might want to, you know, actually ban wife beating. Just a thought.
SOFTEN THE CHUCK RULE. Here is a haiku that succinctly explains the problem with the current rules:
Corners are helpless
Arena football is gay
Bring back pass defense
Thanks to the defensive holding rules, the league has made passing so easy that Sage Rosenfels looks like Dan Marino. I get that league ratings took off in the late ’70s after the NFL legislated the end of the Steelers dynasty with the so-called “Mel Blount rule,” which prevented corners from touching the apparently brittle wideout ballerinas after five yards. I get that scoring soared each time the league overreacted to successful defensive teams and tightened the five-yard chuck rule, first in the early ’90s (after the Giants’ Super Bowl upset of sexy, high-powered Buffalo) and then again in 2004 (after the Patriots mugged Marvin Harrison and the Colts). But it’s reached the level of absurdity. No lead is safe. The 1985 Bears and their meanest-ever defense would have been 11-5 last year. Add in the fact that offensive tackles are allowed to hold on virtually every play, and you have a game that’s more and more like basketball every year. Football should be like watching a slow, painful death, and not in the “I’ve had to watch 500 Subway five-dollar footlong commercials in three hours” sense of slow, painful death, but real, terrifying, on-field death.
ESTABLISH NEW RULES FOR SPONSORS. The Soviets used to chain political prisoners to big logs and then roll the logs down long flights of marble steps. Likewise, the guy who created the E*Trade baby ads should be lashed to a knotty redwood and rolled down the steps of the Chichén Itzá pyramid. No more talking-animal or talking-infant commercials during NFL broadcasts. It has to stop.
INTRODUCE NCAA END-ZONE RULES. If a guy can catch a ball, hold on to it while getting hit, and get one foot down in the end zone, it should be a touchdown. In fact, one foot in should be good enough anywhere on the field. On the flip side, the league has to change the defensive pass-interference penalty from a spot-of-the-foul infraction to 15 yards. There are way too many offensively challenged teams whose coaches openly beg for long PI penalties, the worst being the Vikings’ Brad Childress and his “Please, my job is at stake here!” three-down strategy: Adrian Peterson left, Adrian Peterson right, have Tarvaris Jackson overthrow a bomb to a stone-handed receiver who falls into the cornerback. Teams should be rewarded for catching the ball and penalized for flopping, not the other way around. On a related topic, has anyone ever seen Childress and former Simon & Simon costar Gerald McRaney in the same room?
LET PLAYERS SMOKE WEED. The league suspended Patriot running back Kevin Faulk a game for getting baked at a Lil Wayne concert and sent peaceful treehead Ricky Williams into a full-year exile. If the NFL really wants to see fewer off-field violence arrests, it should be a little more liberal in its pot policy: Players who drink alcohol tend to punch police horses and drive Escalades into retirement homes; players who smoke stay home, watch old Star Trek episodes, and drool on their shag carpets. The math isn’t too tough here.
DO SOMETHING ABOUT PETER KING. It’s not really the commissioner’s job, but someone needs to break the news to this poor fucker that nobody wants to hear what he thinks about the relative merits of the different types of lattes on the Starbucks menu, or what bland-as-fuck PG-rated movie he watched on his laptop the last time he rode on the Acela. It’s time for an intervention.
BEEF UP THE FACE-MASK PENALTY. Ever since Dennis Miller (may Allah strike him dead) left the booth of Monday Night Football, the worst thing about the NFL is the about-once-per-game paralysis lottery ritual: The crowd sits hushed after a big hit while the cameras zoom in on the leveled player’s hands, waiting for signs of movement in the extremities. Minutes pass and you start having terrible thoughts like, “He’ll never be able to wield his own unregistered handgun again!” And yet…while all face-mask infractions are 15-yard penalties now, players still gun for the head way too often. The best way to stiffen the deterrent is to add a loss of either a time-out or a replay challenge, because I guarantee if you make the coach suffer, the player will suffer 10 times as much later on.
CHAIN BRETT FAVRE TO A ROCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN, WHERE HE CAN SPEND THE NEXT 30 YEARS GETTING HIS LIVER SLOWLY PECKED AWAY BY HUNGRY SEA BIRDS. Self-explanatory.
IMPOSE A ROOKIE PAY SCALE. Matthew Stafford makes more than Tom Brady. Nobody on the Lions should make more than Tom Brady, least of all a rookie. The league is already desperate to rein in rookie salaries, but the union is balking, and the owners will likely fold on this in order to get the next collective bargaining agreement passed — a major mistake, since rookie contracts are killing the NFL. Virtually every single one of the league’s struggling franchises owes its failures to an eight-figure bonus paid to a top-five draft bust sometime in the past 10 years, usually a quarterback. There hasn’t been real football in the Bay Area for half a decade because of two of those guys, Alex Smith and JaMarcus Russell. The system basically eliminates free agency for bad teams, since they need to reserve 60 to 70 percent of their cap room for some overmatched 20-year-old campus rapist whose pro career will generally be considered a success if he isn’t insane from the pressure or wrapping Porsches around telephone poles by his third season. Watch and see if Mark Sanchez isn’t sobbing on Oprah and writing memoirs about his struggles with glue addiction and autoerotic asphyxiation five years from now. Not that it isn’t funny for the rest of us, but it sucks for the league.
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This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Men’s Journal
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August 12th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Matt,
I’m not that “into” sports–but I’ll read anything you write. After weeks of reading and listening to news about “birthers” and “death panels” and “Bring Your Gun to Church Day” and Goldman Sachs and unhinged citizens screaming at town hall meetings…I certainly appreciated your take on ways to improve the NFL.
BTW, one might also consider dumping Brett in the Australian outback and letting the dingoes have their way with him.
Thanks for the laughs!
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August 12th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
rookies should be able to negotiate any pay they can get, given that football players have the worst contracts out of the big 4 sports. yes, there will be discrepancies, but that’s going to be true with any system.
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August 17th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
For the most part I agree with your suggestions, except I see a contradiction. After you talk about the chuck rule, which I interpret as saying offenses have it too easy, you suggest easing up the offensive rules by allowing one foot, not two, to be in bounds on sideline / endzone catches.
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August 24th, 2009 at 8:14 am
I haven’t seen a fresh journalistic perspective like this since Hunter Thompson, keep it up. The first article I read of yours was about Al Davis and Isaiah Thomas and it made me laugh out loud for several days, not too mention it was 100% accurate. Sports journalism and broadcasting is a dead art form right now because it is dominated by jock sniffers and former jocks. The former are just pitiful and the latter aren’t even literate. Can’t wait to see your next article!
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September 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 am
The only issue I have with your piece is what you said about Los Angeles having no choice but to “endure” UCLA games due to a lack of a pro franchise. For starters, LA is also home to USC, a school that is essentially the New York Yankees of college football, so there’s certainly no lack of quality football action in the City of Angels. Not to mention, LA couldn’t fill its stadiums when the city actually had pro franchises (that’s why the Rams are in St. Louis and the Raiders are back in Oakland).
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September 2nd, 2009 at 8:07 am
Matt Taibbi: clueless
Men’s Journal readers are gay
Don’t bite the hand, chum
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September 2nd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
I agree with a lot of this. If I ran the NFL I’d make a lot more of those ‘lighter side of training camp’ videos that’s for sure haha.. http://mogreet.com.reebok
Great stuff,
Brett with reebok
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September 3rd, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Hey Matt –
Excellent ideas. When they give you the commissioner’s job, I have another request: do something about running out the clock. It just seems wrong that a team leading by a measly FG should automatically win the game if they get possession at the 2 min warning, and the charade of the weak running plays not designed to go anywhere, and then taking a knee is just offensive to the fans. If there’s just a one score difference between the two teams, the last 2 minutes of the game should be a battle to the death - right down to the buzzer. Maybe the Canadian rules go too far (a 3 minute warning instead of 2, after which the clock stops on every play, only 20 seconds after each play instead of 40, and only 3 downs instead of 4) so I propose some sort of compromise.
Another great article.
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September 16th, 2009 at 12:28 am
What about the extra point rule? It is the single most non dramatic rule in all of sports. I think last year had a .003 of 1% chance for error. (1 out of 300 kicks misses, 4 out of 1200 or so) That’s not well designed sports. Sport means sporting chance which means it could this way it could go that way. It is way to automatic in favor of the offense. The current rule is ridiculous and an embarassment to the league proving they don’t know what sports are supposed to be about, at least that part of the game.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Posada’s chest protector has a Swoosh on it as I write…
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July 15th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Thanks, Taibbi. Your two-tier league system was something I’ve publicly advocated for years now for all pro sports leagues. I’ve become a complete nerd about it, plotting how to demote professional teams down to the bottom tier, forcing owners to competitively function instead of soaking in public dollars. These are my three somewhat flawed factors: attendance over the last five years, titles won ratio to years of the franchise’s existence and overall franchise winning percentage.
I demoted six teams to the lower-tier league. Here’s my out-of-print blog I posted at the daily newspaper that laid me off. It was written on May 17, 2008 (before the Saints won the Super Bowl):
The NFL is bulletproof in countless ways. Among the big four sports, no other league can match up to the spectacle that comes with each football season. With only 16 regular season games, each week is treated with the utmost scrutiny among fans, fantasy football players and gamblers. Television offers non-stop programming throughout the offseason with the draft, free agency, training camp and preseason. The profits keep rolling in with the league getting even more and judicious with how its product is distributed and handled.
In an economic collapse, I would assume the NFL to remain the strongest of all four pro sports with people still shelling out big bucks for bad seats just to say they ‘were there’ for their team. So why even cut teams from a league where cities live and die by the four to five months their NFL team enthrones their existence? How ruthless can I be? As ruthless as the depth chart.
The one enduring irony about the NFL and its familiarity with team fans is in relation to players. Once you stare past the exceptions–a Brett Favre for Green Bay, a Barry Sanders for Detroit–you have a revolving door for NFL players powered by fluke injuries, inexplicable peaks/lows and an overutilized free agency that keeps loyalty strictly conditional. Although it’s true these same conditions affect players in the other three leagues, the NFL presents a mirage like none other.
Numerous superlatives described Jevon Kearse’s play four years ago as his youthful presence and incredible speed were assumed to have changed, even ‘revolutionized’ our perception of what a defensive end can become. But now Kearse’s descent to mediocrity has made him just another expendable player.
More so than the other leagues, the NFL is a machine that coldly stares forward in the face of a three-year sensation who nosedives without warning or explanation, the undrafted who becomes integral to his team, the starting-worthy quarterback who can’t find a team to play for or the concussion-plagued veteran persisting through stubborn pride.
The NFL will always look through these players and the simple reason for this is emphasis on the game’s strategic aspect. A well-constructed offensive system will turn a bored Randy Moss in Oakland into a record-breaking, resuming-my-path-to-Canton Moss in New England. A clever defensive system will prolong a strong safety’s career if he can get consistent support from the rest of the backfield. And because of this, the NFL doesn’t need 32 teams.
This isn’t to say the talent pool of the NFL is diluted. More like the smooth-ticking clock has a few too many gears. When Jim Zorn goes from Seahawks quarterback coach to a head coach in the span of a few months, you have to reconsider if the NFL has gotten a little too spoiled in the depth 32 franchises provide. Since players are basically expendable, what difference does it make if the NFL cuts down from 32 to 26 teams?
Also, since there truly is no competitor to the NFL, it would be useful for the league to develop some type of farm system the six-team second-tier league could provide. With the same considerations applied and explained in part one, I applied more leniency with the NFL since the U.S. is so football crazy.
The six teams cut are the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Cincinnati Bengals, New Orleans Saints, New York Jets and San Diego Chargers. There, that was painless, wasn’t it?
Attendance-wise, Green Bay, Washington, Philadelphia, Tennessee and Baltimore are the best. In title ratios, the Packers, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco and New York Giants got the go-ahead. Franchises included because of their overall winning percentage were Miami, Denver, the Bears, the Cowboys and Oakland.
That left 20 franchises remaining with plenty of reasons to include at least 11 of them. Seattle, for instance, has an excellent attendance rate even though the franchise has never won a title and is a cut below the average team winning percentage.
The division realignment (and renaming in some cases) would be a great relief for many franchises/players fed up with maintaining “historical rivalries” as 10 teams switch conferences and ease pricey air travel.
AFC West: Denver, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle; AFC Central: Baltimore, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Washington; AFC South: Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, Tennessee.
NFC East: Buffalo, New England, New York Giants, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh; NFC South: Carolina, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa Bay; NFC North: Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, Minnesota
Toughest omissions: 1. The Cincinnati Bengals. When it came down to cutting one more team, the Bengals and Buffalo remained from the best of the worst and I did everything but flip a coin; I even looked back at their history against each other. I let Google Maps decide their fate by seeing which city was closest to another franchise. Since Cincy was so close to Indianapolis, they got cut. But it must be noted that Bengals fans have filled up their stadium in the last five seasons at an average of 98.6 percent despite a history of incompetent ownership.
2. The Jets. Goodbye, re-tread Joe Namath stories. Goodbye to all the weirdo Jets fans overreacting in New York on draft day. Simply put, one stadium (The Meadowlands) has no business hosting two franchises. Too excessive. It’s impressive that Jets fans came to 98.4 percent of their games these last five seasons but let’s keep the limit at one franchise per city as much as possible.
3. The Falcons. Atlanta hosted an impressive 98.4 percent these last five seasons but the franchise has consistently played poorly enough to warrant getting demoted. In fact, for all three of these franchises, you want to hope fans secretly wanted this to happen. After all, year after year, they keep coming to games in support, begging for a Super Bowl. Maybe the drop down to a second-tier league would be the swift kick in the rear ownership needed to rethink their benign approach.
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