The NFL Owner Liberation Army

I don’t know if you’ve heard (sarcasm), but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the owners a full stay of Judge Nelson’s enjoinder of the lockout.

I started out completely neutral in this whole mess; as many have since said, I declared myself “on the side of the fans.”  But as I dug deeper and deeper into the issues, I discovered that the league’s behavior has been, frankly, despicable. Unable to resolve their own differences on revenue sharing, the owners have spent the last four years trying to bring about this day: a judicially-enforced lockout that could last into the season, so they can exert maximum leverage on players. Their goals: to build more ridiculous billion-dollar stadiums, to play more games unnecessarily, to put franchises on other continents, and to bleed every single person on Earth for every cent they’ve got, everything else be damned. That’s what they mean when they say “grow the game,” people.

More interested, intelligent, initially neutral observers have been coming around to my way of thinking. Here's an excellent piece by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post:

Should you find yourself drifting to the side of the players in the NFL labor dispute, it doesn’t mean you’ve gone all communist. Some fans may feel that to support the players is anti-capitalist, a little too May Day. But there is the spirit of free enterprise, and then there is the spirit with which NFL owners tend to do business. They aren’t at all the same thing.

What’s so American about gouging, price-fixing, and frankly, sucking the life out of fans?

It's an honest question to ask--and Jenkins' investigation into the answer is intelligent, well-informed, and balanced. At least half jokingly (though partly seriously) Tony Kornhieser called her piece "shrew-like" and "hysterical" during a radio show. But if Kornheiser couldn’t have made that crack with a straight face if he’d read Drew Magary of Deadspin fame setting “The Bizarre Cult of Pro-Owner Fanboys” of Pro Football Talk’s readership on blast:

It's like a group of people went directly to their computers after walking out of a screening of Atlas Shrugged. You can find retarded commenters at virtually any Internet forum (why, just scroll down!), but the idea that there are people out there who would like to see the owners succeed in PREVENTING THE PLAYING OF ACTUAL NFL GAMES to spite NFL players strikes me as … what's the word? Oh, right. F***ING INSANE.

[. . .] There's a distinctly political turn to much of these lockout arguments among fans. I guess if you think the players are right (and I do), that makes you a dirty liberal and there can't possibly be a decent case to be made. All unions are bad, which means the NFL players are ungrateful and lazy and deserve to be booted out on their ass because the owners are the beginning and end of why the NFL is successful.

It’s not just the ridiculous comments that are being made over there, or the sheer volume by which pro-owner comments outweigh pro-player ones. PFT has an upvote/downvote system, and they REALLY tell the tale. Check the comments (and votes) on these PFT posts. My favorite, though, is a post called “More Misplaced Rhetoric From De Smith,” which is Florio ripping DeMaurice Smith for his characterization of the state of affairs as the NFL “suing not to play.” The NFL commentariat almost unanimously hailed this post as Florio’s first fair and balanced article on the issue:

theangryrob says:May 18, 2011 9:08 AM

I’m having a hard time rationalizing it, but I kind of thought this was a great, even handed post. I’m strangely pleased and confused at the same time.

So, uh, nice work :D

232 upvotes, 5 downvotes    [Ed.--as of the time of this post]

Look, in a vacuum, there’s no question whose side the fans’ interests align with. The players are the ones we pay to see. The players are the ones whose jerseys we buy. The players are the ones who we see on TV, endorsing products we buy ‘cuz we love them. The players are the ones who are putting their bodies on the line, sacrificing their joints, their backs, their necks, and maybe even their long-term mental health for our entertainment. The players are the ones who come from the same places we come from—neighborhoods, high schools, colleges—and who, within a few years, either come back to those places, or put down roots in whichever city they played.

What is it that makes so many fans root so hard for the owners, then? Men or women, who typically inherited either the team itself, a business empire, a personal fortune, or any combination of the above? Why is it that working fans with mortgage payments and credit card debt are gleefully cheering for the players to be crushed by those same bills as their bosses withhold paychecks? What kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome is at work, here?

That’s what’s really happening here: fans are sympathizing with their captors. We’re paying $20 to park, $70 or so a head to get in the door, $7 for hot dogs, $8 for beer, $4 for water we’re not given a cap to so our kids can spill it, and uncountable dollars in jerseys, shirts, pennants, stickers, garden gnomes and other ridiculous merch, and at the end of the day these fans sneer at the players on the field and say “YOU MAKE ENOUGH MONEY! CAVE INTO THE POOR OWNERS! THEIR PROFITS AREN’T GROWING AS FAST AS THEY’D LIKE ANYMORE!” No doubt, when the lockout ends, all these fans will be happily thanking the benevolent owners—and lantern-jawed protector of the game, Commissioner Goodell—for ending they started to begin with.

Let me post-script all this with a few caveats. I do see the last deal as being player-friendly, and I do believe there’s room for fair concessions on both sides. TLiW (and elsewhere) commenter LineBusy has an interesting take exploring just that; you should read it. I do think both sides have grossly disrespected the fans by not resolving this before the expiry of the old CBA; both sides have been planning for THIS day for so long they’ve failed to stop it. However, one side is working men speaking plainly and truthfully about protecting their current and future interests, and the other side is a bunch of fabulously wealthy people in control of one of the most monstrously profitable industries in the world, strangling the golden goose while smiling and saying “We want football, too!”

Technorati Tags: nfl,nflpa,roger goodell,demaurice smith,nfl lockout,nfl lawsuit,deadspin,washington post,pro football talk

Read more...

On Losing Interest in the NFL

While the battle of Courtroom Football rages on, something’s happening: fans are losing interest in the NFL. NFL bloggers are figuring this out by their dwindling traffic, and their quiet commentariats—that includes little ol’ single-team fan blogs like this one, all the way up to the Grandaddy of Us All, Pro Football Talk.

Here's a graphical demonstration:

This is the worldwide Google search interest level for the NFL, from 2004 to today. It’s a nice snapshot of How Interested The Internet Is In Something. I’m sorry I couldn’t make this look any nicer, the Javascript embedding tool didn’t play nicely with Blogger. Anyway, you see an immediate, definite pattern: traffic builds to a peak the first week of the season, dips for a few weeks, then, starts building towards the playoffs. The peak week is always the last week of the regular season, or thereabouts; as most teams’ seasons end then, traffic starts a precipitous decline to a mid-March trough. Then, interest builds back up to a second, lower peak come Draft time, before hitting the long doldrums of summer.

The last cycle on the graph (2010) is remarkable for a number of reasons. The April peak was much, much higher—about twice as high as the usual draft spike. The regular season interest started building earlier, climbed to 20% above usual levels, and stayed there. However, there’s a problem: after the Super Bowl, interest dipped lower than it’s ever been before the draft, and it’s not building back up to a second peak right now.

The four weeks before, and week of, the 2010 draft pulled search interest levels of 17, 18, 19, 23, and 78 last year. This year’s predraft month, it’s been 14, 14, 17, and 24—meaning, unless interest goes from 24 to 100 this week (unlikely), the draft simply isn’t moving the needle like it always does. Coming off of a record-smashing year for interest in the NFL, this looks scary—especially to bloggers like me.

My traffic for April so far has been just a quarter of it was for last April, and comments have all but disappeared. This is partly due to the Lions’ pick being later in the draft (and therefore less sexy). However, even national blogs like Pro Football Talk are feeling the pinch, too:

That said, we think it’s fair and appropriate at this point to disclose our stake in the situation.  Because our overall interests are driven by site traffic (Charlie Sheen says, “duh”), we want our traffic to be higher.  Right now, our traffic is lower than it would be if a lockout hadn’t happened . . .

. . . Thus, we acknowledge our bias in this regard — we want the lockout to end, quickly. Since we’d feel the same way if we were merely fans and not financially invested in the process, it won’t be affecting our opinions or our coverage in any way.

The day of the schedule release saw a flicker of interest, though, which Florio discussed with Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com. Tellingly, Florio Tweeted out: 

Even with no end in sight for the lockout, the release of the schedule has made me very happy, at least for one night.

Throughout this labor negotiation, lockout, and litigation process, I’ve been warning both sides that they’re doing real, permanent damage to the NFL’s fandom. They’ve presumed not only that the NFL will maintain their unheard-of dominance over the American sports landscape, but that their stratospheric growth rate will continue unchecked—accelerate, even. Like King Midas, though, the NFL’s ability to turn everything it touches into gold may be threatening to starve it.

The lockout has taken away everything fun about the offseason, and replaced it with endless legal wrangling and PR spin. So far, most fans have responded by tuning out. Will they tune back in for the second primetime draft? Or, will the NFL not get its groove back until there is a new collective bargaining agreement? Or, will the NFL finally wane, settling back into its position as the nation’s number one sport—instead of the nation’s only sport that matters?

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,nfl draft,2011 offseason,nfl lockout

Read more...

Matt Millen is Not Still In The House.

By now, I’m sure you heard about the Lions erroneously sending out their list of pre-draft rookie visits not just to the league offices, but to the entire league. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reported this, then ended his article with a little jab:

Why do we have a funny feeling that, in some way, this is Matt Millen’s fault?

Har har. Sean Yuille over at Pride of Detroit did an awesome job debunking the notion, noting that Killer reported the list only contained visits to date, not future invites—and Dave Birkett spotted a known visit that wasn’t on the publicized list. The best thing Sean did though, was point out how little the list really matters:

The disclaimer I have presented when tracking these visits is that you shouldn't try to read into them too much. Like Schwartz said, it is fun for us fans to track, but it's not like they are a great indicator of who might be picked in the draft. That is why I don't see this email thing as being a huge "blunder" at all. Hell, with the way Martin Mayhew and company are so secretive with some information, perhaps they meant to send it to the rest of the league. You never can be too sure, but even if this was a mistake I don't see it as being a very big one. It's not like the Vikings or some other team picking ahead of the Lions is going to alter their draft strategy over some names in an email about pre-draft visits. That would be almost as ridiculous as how PFT framed this story in the first place.

I’ll defend Florio, though he doesn’t need my help (and will likely never know I offered it!). He tries to keep things funny; one of the easiest fish to shoot in the barrel is poking fun at a perennial loser. I don’t ascribe this to anti-Lions malice, just Florio trying to punch up a relatively harmless story with a funny angle. We may not find it all that funny—but believe me, if the headline were “Vikings Expose Something Other Than Visanthe Shiancoe” we’d be chortling along with everyone else.

Florio says right in the piece he assumed Schwartz’s quote about “everyone already knowing” referred to agents disclosing what other teams their client has visited. It’s common knowledge in league circles; they just ask around. Yes, it’s embarrassing the Lions made it so easy on everyone else—but it won’t change anyone’s draft strategy. A team brings a guy in for a visit to learn more about him . . . they don’t bring in the guys they’re already sure about—and definitely not the ones they trying to keep their interest in secret. As far as I know, Mike Shanahan didn’t even say Jay Cutler’s name out loud before trading up in the first to build the Broncos around him.

Matt Millen made a lot of mistakes when he was here. He flapped his gums a lot about what the Lions were going to do. He approached the front office like he was the coach of a football team, and not like he was the President and CEO of a billion-dollar company—literally, his job title. He put in 40 and flew home for the weekend, every weekend, for eight years—in an industry where the best leaders sleep at their desk. The results were terrible, but Matt Millen isn’t an idiot. He isn’t a blundering meathead who can’t do anything right. He’s just a well-spoken, likable football guy who was in way, way, way over his skis. His biggest mistake was refusing to quit.

No, Matt Millen wasn’t a human curse upon this franchise. He wasn’t a fell demon whose pestilent shadows still lurk in the corners of Allen Park, making fax machines jam and administrative assistants hit “Reply to All.” To the contrary, the new, infallible leadership that everyone has so much faith in? The executives we’re so sure are awesome that we’re tempted to call this email leak deliberate? They were Millen’s right- and left-hand men. Yet, in just their second season, the Lions won more than they did in all but Millen’s best year. Their track record already speaks for itself: Matt Millen doesn’t live here anymore, and this little oopsy doesn’t reveal any cracks in the Lions’ foundation.

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,matt millen,martin mayhew,tom lewand,mike florio,profootballtalk.com,pride of detroit

Read more...

“Touch Down”: Lions Should Be 1-0

Chris Spielman once scored a touchdown for the Lions.  When he got into the end zone, he got both knees on the ground, and touched the ball to the turf—just as, many years ago, was required for a “touch down” to be scored.  He did it to pay his respects to the men who played the game sixty, seventy, eighty years ago—before multiple referees and a panoply of high-speed HD digital cameras continuously observed every square inch of the field.  Apparently, this is the standard we need to return to.

It's been beat to death by now.  The fires of my rage—not easily stoked—have cooled down.  Injustice has been done; the Lions had their game-winning touchdown against the Bears wiped off the books by a bad call.  As infuriating as it is, it is—and we either have to deal with it, process it, and move on, or seriously question our faith in the entity that rules the sport, and team, we love.

As The Big Lead and Pro Football Talk both explained very well, NFL officials incorrectly—or at best, zealously—applied one clause in the rule book, while steadfastly ignoring another.  The result is that the Lions lost what would have been a tremendous season-opening road win, and started back down the path to an 0-and-who-knows-how-many losing streak.

First, let's talk about what a catch is.  Per the NFL rule book:

Article 3. Completed or Intercepted Pass. A player who makes a catch may advance the ball. A forward pass is complete (by the offense) or intercepted (by the defense) if a player, who is inbounds:

(a) secures control of the ball in his hands or arms prior to the ball touching the ground; and (b) touches the ground inbounds with both feet or with any part of his body other than his hands.

If the player loses the ball while simultaneously touching both feet or any part of his body other than his hands to the ground, or if there is any doubt that the acts were simultaneous, it is not a catch.

The clause that was applied was the “going to the ground” clause:

Item 1: Player Going to the Ground.  If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.

It’s long been the rule that if a player catches the ball in midair, and lands on the ground, and the ball popped out, then it’s not a catch.  Picture a receiver with the ball cradled loosely in his arms, and then it popping out when he hits the turf—clearly, he never had possession.  If he didn’t have it secured enough to withstand hitting the ground, then he didn’t really have it at all.

But Calvin Johnson DID “maintain control of the ball after he touche[d] the ground.”  He caught the ball with his hands, landed with two feet, his knee hit, his butt hit, his other hand hit (possibly out of bounds, ending the play there if it already wasn’t over), and then Johnson touched the ball to the ground, and it popped out.  If that play occurs outside the endzone, he’s down by contact before the ball pops out.  But it wasn’t outside the end zone, he was in it.  That rule goes like this:

Item 3: End Zone Catches. If a player catches the ball while in the end zone, both feet must be completely on the ground before losing possession, or the pass is incomplete.

So we have several competing, conflicting standards in the rule book.  What we don’t have is any of the nonsense being spouted by Mike Pereira, former NFL Director of Officiating, and VP  of Officiating, and current FOX Sports analyst.  All the stuff we heard during the game, about “completing the process” isn’t in the rule rook.  Here’s his article on it for Fox:

Here's why: Rule 8, Section 1, Article 4.

A play from start to finish is a process. When you go to the ground, even after you've caught the ball, you have to maintain possession.

The rule states: If a player goes to the ground . . .

See what he did there?  He cited Rule 8, Section 1, Article 4, and then slipped in his own analysis.  The standards of a “complete process,” or of needing to complete a “second football act,” are not in the rule book, and should not be applied.  Calvin Johnson needed to maintain possession after he touched the ground, and he did that.  By rule, the play was a touchdown—and it was correctly signalled so by the side judge.

Mike Florio conducted a thought experiment that’s sure to illuminate (and infuriate):

Let's look at it this way. If Johnson's catch had occurred at the one, and if while swinging his arm to the ground he would have broken the plane of the goal line, the proper call under the "second act" exception would have been touchdown. And that's the heart of the problem. In an effort to take some of the perceived and/or actual unfairness out of a rule that takes away a catch that viscerally looks like a catch, the league has crafted an exception that isn't in the rule book, and that therefore doesn't -- and can't -- be applied with any consistency.

Tom Kowalski brought this up on 1130 AM this morning.  If everything happens the exact same way on the one-yard line, it would have been ruled a touchdown when he swung his arm down and broke the plane—OR, he would have been ruled down by contact at the one.  Yet, it occurred inside the end zone, where all he has to do is establish possession in bounds, and it ruled incomplete.

Of course, the fact that the Lions really needed this win can’t enter into the discussion.  That Matthew Stafford, and—how is no one talking about this?—Cliff Avril were lost in the effort doesn’t matter. That Shaun Hill’s outstanding job of leading the Lions down the field in the closing minute, and perfect rainbow thrown while being hit, were the kind of last-minute game-winning heroics we’re always the victims, and never beneficiaries of . . . none of it matters.  The refs couldn’t give the Lions the win because they wanted it, because they fought so hard for it, because they desperately needed it, or because they deserved it.

But they should have given the Lions the win, because the Lions won.

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,chicago bears,calvin johnson,referees,mike pereira,matthew stafford,cliff avril

Read more...