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Welcome to Goodell Week
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio is our guest columnist and he kicks off The MMQB’s five-day look at the commissioner by examining 10 things that should worry the NFL most. Plus thoughts on Tom, Von, Mo, Kirk and more
By Mike Florio
Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
With Peter King on vacation until July 25, this week’s Monday Morning QB guest columnist is Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio. Peter and Mike work together on NBC’s Football Night in America on Sunday nights during the season, and Mike also hosts PFT Live weekdays on NBC Sports Radio. Mike previously practiced law for 18 years and is active on social media. Follow Mike here.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and even heavier is the wallet of the man who makes more than $30 million per year. But Roger Goodell has a thick neck and a strong core and bank accounts big enough to absorb the money he makes as he presides over the greatest sport on the planet.
Whether the boss is getting paid like a boss because of: 1) his managerial skills; 2) the $13 billion in annual revenue the league generates; 3) the fact he’s the one who absorbs the scrutiny that otherwise would be directed at owners pulling levers and pressing buttons while Goodell exclaims, “Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain!”; 4) some combination of the first three, he’ll be earning all (or at least part) of a salary that puts him millions of dollars ahead of the sport’s highest paid player.
It’s Roger Goodell Week at The MMQB, with the next five days featuring several articles and discussion centered around the NFL’s leader 10 years into his commissionership. I’ll get things started by looking at the things Goodell could be (or should be) concerned about at this point in his tenure.
So here’s everything I could think of based on 43 years of being a fan of the NFL, 16 years of being in the business of covering the NFL, 10 years of doing it on a full-time basis, and seven years of reading, talking, writing, and thinking about the NFL as the only thing I do, pretty much during every waking moment from late July through early May and much of the time during the few slow weeks in between.
1. Quarterback play
Most regular-season and postseason games produce a handful of memorable moments. Even the exciting games have long stretches of back-and-forth nothing. For some teams, the offense simply lacks the ability to take full advantage of rules aimed at generating yardage and points and, ultimately, excitement.
For the teams that can’t gain ground on the field or pump up the numbers on the scoreboard, the reason often is subpar quarterback play. Whether college coaches aren’t using pro-style offenses or NFL coaches are trying to force a quarterback into their “system” instead of figuring out what he does well and doing that or owner impatience with coaches becoming coaching impatience with the quarterback, the supply of competent quarterbacks in the NFL doesn’t match the demand. This makes it hard to have true competitive balance, which is ultimately what the NFL craves.
Goodell and the NFL need to be actively searching for ways to find NFL-caliber quarterbacks and to help them improve, from using Virtual Reality training on a constant basis to increasing the time coaches and quarterbacks may directly work together in the offseason to instituting a minor league system that would give young quarterbacks live reps in a game setting.
NFL teams also need more coaches who are willing to choose what works over what they want to do. Too many insist that players conform to the playbook; not enough make the playbook fit their players. By the time a quarterback gets to the NFL, it’s too late to change him—and it’s asinine to not embrace the style of play that got him to the NFL in the first place.
So maybe the problem isn’t only that there aren’t enough good quarterbacks to go around. Maybe there aren’t enough good coaches to get the most out of the quarterbacks. Or maybe there aren’t enough good scouts to discover the quarterbacks with the highest ceilings. Or maybe there aren’t enough owners who know how to find the coaches and scouts needed to best do the job.
Whatever the problem and however it gets solved, that’s the top competitive concern for the league moving forward. And it’s the first point that should be raised if anyone ever suggests expanding the NFL beyond 32 teams.
2. Safety issues
Before October 2009, player health and safety didn’t occupy a central spot on the NFL’s radar screen. Then came a House Judiciary Committee meeting, with California representative Linda T. Sanchez saying this: “The NFL sort of has this blanket denial or minimizing of the fact that there may be this link [between football and future cognitive impairment]. And it sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-’90s when they kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s no link between smoking and damage to your health.’”
The NFL got the message; if the league didn’t address the issue, Congress would. And so, virtually overnight, the league beefed up its concussion protocols, with the goal of getting concussed players off the field and keeping them there until cleared. Likewise, efforts were made to reduce the number of blows to the head, with the term “defenseless receiver” entering the media and fan lexicon.
Less than a year later came restrictions on offseason programs and training-camp practices, with two-a-days going the way of the dodo bird. The owners, intent on getting a great financial deal from the union to end the lockout, gladly agreed to these concessions. Some like Lions guard Geoff Schwartz in this space a week agowould say that it has cost the game plenty, with players less prepared to master fundamentals like blocking and tackling once the regular season starts. Regardless, the game necessarily became, on a broad level, safer.
And now some players are walking away from the game before the game walks away from them, sparking concerns that eventually there may not be enough capable players to fill out 32 NFL rosters. The league needs to be concerned about the supply of players being choked off from below, with more and more kids opting for other sports and never becoming football players.
The funnel nevertheless remains steep and narrow, and major colleges will be handing out scholarships to athletes who are deemed good enough to play football at a high level even if they previously never have. For young adults who otherwise can’t afford to go to college, the prospect of a full ride in exchange for giving football a whirl will be too hard to pass up.
Still, the NFL will have to find a way to make the game as safe as possible without fundamentally changing it. Currently the kickoff sits in the crosshairs of that effort, but the lack of a clear solution shows how delicate the process of striking the right balance on an ongoing basis will be.
At some point the right balance could be impossible to strike. If a test for detecting Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in living patients ever is developed and if it reveals widespread CTE among NFL players and those at lower levels of the sport, tackle football could go the way of two-a-days, with two-hand-touch becoming the new norm.
3. Legal concerns
The NFL has escaped the thousands of concussion lawsuits brought by former players with a settlement that, on one hand, pales in comparison to the potential verdicts that could have been entered against the league. On the other hand, the NFL had a long list of legal roadblocks that could have been used in defending the cases, any one of which could have delivered an outright victory against arguments that the league deliberately concealed the real risks of concussions and failed to do enough to protect them from harm.
Although it’s now impossible for any player to claim that anything about the risks of concussions isn't known, players could contend that the league and/or the union have failed to take proper steps to protect them from harm (for example, by not getting rid of “the most dangerous play in the game”) or by failing to get them off the field when concussed (e.g., Case Keenum) or by otherwise not eradicating a culture that results in plenty of coaches pressuring players to play.
A nationwide class action targeting all 32 NFL teams regarding the use of painkillers could put that play-or-else culture in the spotlight, with allegations that coaches like Don Shula and Mike Tice threatened to cut players who didn’t use potent drugs to mask pain and play.
With the case surviving an initial effort to throw it out of court, the league will have to provide information, documents, and testimony regarding whether and to what extent players were informed of the risks of using these medications and/or threatened to take a shot of Toradol or hit the road, Jack — which could make settlement even more prudent than it was in the concussion lawsuits, which were resolved before they ever got to the “discovery” phase, when evidence potentially supporting allegations of wrongdoing is harvested.
4. Officiating flaws
The NFL started nearly 100 years ago, before TV and long before the advanced technologies that are both prevalent and cheap in 2016. Players were smaller, slower, and not nearly as strong. They wore pads that were closer to padding than armor. Sprinkled among them were men charged with applying the rules and keeping order.
Over time, everything about the game has gotten bigger, faster, more intense. And yet the league still adheres to the same approach to officiating as always: Put several folks in black and white stripes, throw them into the fray, and hope that while honoring their self-preservation instinct they’re also able to notice with precision the things flashing by in front of them.
Mistakes are inevitable. Really, it’s amazing more aren’t made considering the speed of the game and the complexity of the rule book. But the mistakes have now become more obvious, given the battalion of cameras blanketing the field and broadcasting images on high-definition flat screens to millions of homes, followed instantaneously by the dissection of every blunder on social media.
The league has begun to bridge the gap between what the officials see with the naked eye once and what the rest of us see in magnified super slow motion, repeatedly. With a pipeline in place from 345 Park Avenue to ensure consistency in the application of the replay review process, V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino can play the role of Cyrano on a wide variety of issues and ambiguities and flat-out errors that would otherwise be uncorrected.
Earlier this year, the NFL embraced use of that communication device for administrative matters. The rule was written vaguely, which potentially allows Blandino to buzz a referee and tell him that it’s obvious based on the images being currently projected to the world that a mistake was made.
Some will object to the ability of the league office to overrule game officials beyond the boundaries of the formal replay process, but I’ve got no problem with it. The goal should be to get as many calls right as possible.
Ideally, the league should scrap the entire officiating function as it was first conceived and as it has evolved and ask itself this question: How should we best monitor the action and decide what actually has happened during a given play?
If that ever happened, a far different, and potentially far better, procedure potentially would emerge.
Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
5. Labor problems
In the blink of an eye, that 10-year labor deal resolving the 2011 lockout has reached the halfway point of its existence. Five years from now, another lockout (or a strike) could happen.
The relationship between the NFL and the NFL Players Association seems to be rockier than ever. Players don’t trust the league office, thanks to controversies like the Saints bounty scandal and Deflategate. The union likewise doesn’t trust the league, believing management makes promises it can’t or won’t keep.
Perhaps the biggest threat to the relationship happened earlier this year. The NFLPA caught the league with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar, diverting revenues that should have been shared under the salary cap into made-up exceptions so clearly inappropriate that a neutral arbitrator ruled in the union’s favor at the conclusion of the hearing, without even taking the matter under advisement for further study. The players believe that an attempt was made to steal their money, which could make it very hard to restore the level of trust necessary to hammer out another long-term contract.
Come 2021, the league will want the players to agree to tactics for growing the pie (such as more regular-season games and an expanded postseason), and the players will want to increase the size of their piece of it. Other issues like Commissioner powers and marijuana could creep into the talks. When a labor contract expires anything and everything about the relationship becomes fair game for discussion and negotiation.
During the lockout, the players ultimately decided not to give up game checks, accepting the last, best offer that was on the table before real money would be lost. The next time, could the players feel differently about taking all or part of a year off?
6. Team and player discipline
Not long after Roger Goodell succeeded Paul Tagalibue as commissioner, agents began to grumble about the hard line the league office suddenly was taking regarding alleged violations of the substance-abuse and PED polices. Reasonable compromises no longer were available as the NFL took full advantage of its final say to impose its will on players.
Somehow, Goodell was persuaded in 2014 by the union to relinquish his power over these matters to neutral arbitration. But he still retains judge/jury/executioner status on matters relevant to the integrity of the game, the principle that fueled the Deflategate controversy. Over the 32 teams, Goodell’s power remains absolute. He imposes the discipline and handles the appeal, giving the member clubs no real recourse.
The disciplinary power over players and teams in a non-drug/PED setting has been used several times in recent years, creating results that seemed to some (especially the team and players involved, and their fans) objectively unfair. Some of these cases include the salary cap penalties against Dallas and Washington in 2012, the Saints bounty scandal, Deflategate and more.
All too often, the league office ignores evidence that a violation may be cultural, opting to single out one team, make an example of the alleged culprits, and scare straight every other team that is doing the same thing. In scrapping the player suspensions imposed for the bounty scandal, Tagliabue (appointed by Goodell as the arbitrator under pressure from lawsuits challenging Goodall’s neutrality) made an eloquent but pointed case for properly addressing rule breaking that isn’t isolated to one team.
Tagliabue’s case for making cultural changes reflects a much a better way to do business when it comes to discipline and rules violations. It’s far more fair and just to all players and teams. But the league office stubbornly insists on retaining the ability to do what it wants, when it wants, how it wants, disregarding reasonable and persuasive arguments for a more balanced and neutral approach. Unfortunately for the league, this approach has alienated the union, many players, and entire fan bases that will forever believe their favorite team got screwed.
If the league office ever chooses to opt for self-awareness on these issues, here’s the only question that needs to be asked: Is having and using (and potentially abusing) that kind of power over teams and players really worth the damage that has been done to the underlying relationships?
7. Broadcasting strategies
The NFL’s current TV deals last until 2022. After that, no one knows how live game footage will be distributed. The league ultimately will need a plan that sustains, and maximizes, the billions of dollars it receives by selling those rights on the open market, while also minimizing any collateral damage.
Plenty of options exist. With Yahoo, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix and other digital options either at the table or inching closer to it, the league will use the power of Big Shield to squeeze multiple companies into once again paying absurd premiums for the ability to use NFL games as a tool both for making back a large portion of the rights fees via advertising and/or subscription fees while also heavily promoting other content available through the platform.
No one knows what it will look like. The cord-cutting phenomenon will make it very difficult for ESPN to once again increase its $2 billion per year ante; if that money won’t be coming from ESPN for Monday Night Football, who will replace it?
And what if the steaming services offer millions more than NBC, CBS, FOX, or ABC for Sunday afternoon or other prime-time packages? If the NFL dramatically reduces its presence on over-the-air, free TV (which is still used by millions of Americans as their sole gateway to TV content), Congress could remove the broadcast antitrust exemption, a legislative vestige of the ‘60s that allows the league to sell its games as a package—preventing, for example, the Cowboys or Patriots from doing a Notre Dame/NBC package and far less popular teams from fighting for scraps on fringe networks.
Like the consumer, which now has many more choices than the three-network 1970s, the NFL has many more options. The league will need to do the right deals to replace the current ones, finding the best balance between making the most money, generating the biggest audiences, and keeping Congress out of the league’s backyard.
8. Revenue sharing
Prior to the 2006 and 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreements, revenue sharing occupied a spot high on the list of the league’s problems. Some revenues that the franchises weren’t splitting among themselves nevertheless were included in the broader pot that determines the salary cap, artificially increasing the labor costs of the teams that making less money in their local markets.
The 2006 CBA created a convoluted system of supplemental revenue sharing, which allowed certain teams based on need to get even more of the shared revenues in order to make up for the cap disparities created by unshared revenues. After the 2011 CBA, the issue disappeared so quickly it was like it never even existed. The union doesn’t know where these nuances of revenue sharing stand, the media doesn’t know where they stand. No one beyond the walls of the NFL knows where they stand.
Is it a problem? Is it not a problem? If the broadcast antitrust exemption ever goes away, it will become a major problem, since a small handful of teams with national following instantly will be making the vast majority of the broadcasting money. If those teams can’t be persuaded to continue to operate as socialists in a capitalistic country, it could be hard to keep all 32 teams on the same page and, over time, in the same league.
Even with the broadcast antitrust exemption still in place, differences remain between what some teams make and what other teams make. As the cap keeps spiking, those differences eventually will emerge as a hot spot for the league at large.
9. Stadiums
Most teams use their stadiums 10 times per year. And yet many stadiums become obsolete within 20 years after they had a bottle of champagne busted against the hull. The problem isn’t that the stadiums have become dilapidated (however, FedEx Field seems to be getting close after only 19 years) but that the newer, swankier stadiums put pressure on teams with older stadiums to modernize.
When Jerry Jones opened the Cowboys’ current home in 2009 (yes, it’s already been that long), other teams became inspired to follow suit with impressive, space-age venues. This year, the Vikings will launch a new, futuristic venue that is both enclosed and flooded with natural light. The Falcons in 2017 will play inside a complex structure with a roof that opens and closes like a giant steel change purse. Two years later, the ribbon will be cut on Kroenkeworld, the $2.5 billion structure that will house the Rams (and maybe one more team) and increase the pressure on the other NFL franchises with older structures to finagle something nearly as good, or maybe even better.
For the cycle to continue, it will have to happen at least for now without much if any public money. Sure, the folks in Las Vegas will be willing to kick in a large chunk of taxpayer change, primarily as a tax on legitimizing Sin City. Beyond that, the league will have a hard time finding communities willing to subsidize billionaires.
After 20 years of franchise stability, relocations could happen more frequently. If, after all, a team will be required to pay for its own stadium, why wouldn’t that stadium be built in a larger market, featuring more money and more people to give up that money? Also, the fact that St. Louis tried, and failed, to keep the Rams despite a large public contribution will make elected officials in other cities more reluctant to expend political capital for a potentially losing effort.
Apart from building stadiums, the league will have to figure out how to keep all stadiums full on a consistent basis. The in-stadium experience needs to be sufficiently better than watching the game at home, which is becoming for many the best way to take in a full day of football. With the blackout rule likely off the table for good, all teams will need to find ways to fill the stands, and only so many will be able to use winning as the primary attraction.
10. Competitors
After the draft and with no lingering stories or controversies or other reason to obsess over the NFL in the slow months, the nation’s attention turned to other sporting events. The NBA became the primary beneficiary, with the spike lasting beyond the NBA Finals and into the launch of free agency.
There’s no match in America for the NFL from August to February, and there likely won’t be. Other football leagues have tried from time to time to steal a portion of the NFL’s thunder, but they always fail. Still, if the NFL ever makes the game “too safe,” an opening could emerge for an old-school football league that embraces rules the NFL has ditched and markets it to the same folks who gladly lap up UFC-style brutality.
As it sits atop the American mountain, the NFL covets an even higher summit: Development of the same popularity in other countries. England and the rest of Europe provided the natural starting point toward eventual global domination; China is the white whale, where 1.3 billion potential football fans reside.
So the league’s true competitors aren’t other sports leagues or other football leagues. The NFL’s current competitors are those things currently attracting the money and attention of people in these other countries. Over the next 50 to 100 years, the league fully intends to overcome international sports like soccer in the same way it surpassed baseball domestically.
It may not succeed in that objective, but it will get even richer trying. Eventually, those international gains could help make a billion-dollar operation into a trillion-dollar global enterprise.
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Tom Brady isn’t giving up, yet
When Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announced on Facebook that he “made the difficult decision to no longer proceed with the legal process,” the logical conclusion was that he had opted not to file an appeal of his Deflategate suspension with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Then came this caveat from the NFL Players Association: “We will continue to review all of our options and we reserve our rights to petition for [appeal] to the Supreme Court.”
The appeal can’t go forward without Brady; if Brady truly wants it to be over, there will be no further appeal. The reality is that Brady has (per a source with knowledge of the situation) authorized the NFLPA to proceed with the appeal on his behalf. It won’t keep him from missing the first four games of the season, but it could ultimately restore his lost pay of more than $253,000, reduce the Commissioner’s power in player disciplinary cases, and provide Brady with genuine vindication.
There’s also a pretty good chance he’ll return after Week 4 with a chip on his shoulder the size of a car battery and a primal scream or two powerful enough to start the car where the battery was removed. Regardless, the idea that Brady has pulled the plug completely isn’t accurate. The suspension will be served, but the fight most likely will continue.
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Stat of the Week
Since entering the NFL as a rookie first-round pick in 2011, Broncos linebacker Von Miller has 60 sacks. Since entering the NFL as a rookie first-round pick that same year, Texans defensive end J.J. Watt has 74.5 sacks.
Watt has played in all 80 career regular-season games, giving him 0.93 sacks per game. Miller has missed eight, so his average sits at 0.83 sacks per game. Watt’s career postseason average is even better, with five sacks in five postseason games.
Miller racked up a total of five sacks when it mattered most, with 2.5 against the Patriots in the AFC title game and another 2.5 in Super Bowl 50 against the Panthers. Those back-to-back performances helped Miller cash in, but it’s hard not to think that Watt is underpaid in relation to Miller, making $16.67 million per year in comparison to Miller, who is at $19 million annually.
Here’s the real difference between their contracts. The Texans gave Watt his current deal before the 2014 season, allowing him to trade in the back end of his rookie contract and shift the injury risk for 2014 and 2015 to the Texans. If Miller had gotten the same offer from the Broncos in 2014, he surely would have taken it.
And if Watt had never been given a long-term deal, he would have gotten something along the lines of $19 million per year after his rookie contract expired.
Meanwhile, the player taken five spots after Miller and four before Watt at one point seemed on track to be the best of the three. Former 49ers linebacker Aldon Smith had 33.5 sacks in his first 32 games, an average of 1.04 per game. After his third season, which featured 8.5 sacks in 11 games, the average was still at 0.976 per game.
But for an inability to stay out of trouble, Smith currently could be making as much or more than Miller or Watt. Smith, now with the Raiders, remains suspended by the league, with the ability to apply for reinstatement in November.
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Nine Things I Think I Think
1. I think officials privately have been told to call a catch a catch if they think it’s a catch, and not to worry about the convoluted language of the rule regarding players who are going to the ground, which has gotten even more complex this year. I think this year’s changes to the rules are intended to make it even harder to overturn via replay review a ruling on the field of a catch, given the very high standard of indisputable visual evidence.
And I think the NFL won’t be admitting any of this because it will make the Dez Bryant non-catch from the 2014 playoffs even more glaring. Ultimately, I think this is an acceptable way to ensure that future calls mesh with the expectations of players, coaches, owners, fans, and media regarding what is and isn’t a catch.
2. I think I don’t know what to think about whether the excellent NFL Films series “All or Nothing,” featuring the Arizona Cardinals, is or isn’t a hit. An Amazon spokesperson told me the company doesn’t release streaming figures, so it’s impossible to know how many people have watched any, some or all of it. I think I also don’t know the whole story about the 2015 Cardinals, because only eight of 1,000 hours of footage made it to the final cut. The team and the league showed us only what they wanted us to see, which makes me really want to see the stuff they didn’t want us to see.
3. I think the NFL would get rid of the kickoff today if it could come up with a comparable procedure for transferring possession while also giving the kicking team a slim chance of retaining possession. In a 2012 Time magazine profile, Commissioner Roger Goodell floated the idea of giving the kicking team the ball at its own 30, facing fourth down and 15. The “kicking” team could then punt the ball (the new kickoff), go for it from a normal offensive set (the new expected onside kick), or run a fake punt (the new surprise onside kick). The idea never got any real traction.
The latest effort to reduce kickoffs entails moving the touchback (as a one-year experiment) to the 25, which invites the possibility that more kickoff returns will happen if teams deliberately kill the ball short in an effort to pin the opponent inside its 25. If this approach doesn’t work, don’t be surprised if fourth-and-15-from-the-30 or some other idea for replacing the kickoff in a meaningful way emerges.
4. I think it’s smart for the Giants, as receiver Dwayne Harris told the team’s website, to work on throwing more deep passes. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis previously told first-year Bucs coach Dirk Koetter that offenses don’t throw deep enough, and first-year Giants coach Ben McAdoo has apparently gotten the message. Throwing deep amounts to a reduced-risk, enhanced-reward move, carrying the added benefit of forcing the defense to account for the long ball and, in turn, opening up the short and intermediate passing game.
5. I think quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who said this week on HBO’s “Any Given Wednesday” that he hopes to retire with the Packers, probably will do so only if the team wants it to happen. If Rodgers intends to play beyond the point where the Packers still want him, Rodgers would have to follow in the footsteps of Brett Favre and go elsewhere. Free agency and the salary cap, which were created to give veteran players mobility, routinely have forced teams to move on from key players years before that would have happened in the days before free agency, when the expiration of a player’s current contract meant that he either signed a new one with the same team or found something else to do for a living.
6. I think I’m a little excited to see U.S. Bank Stadium, the soon-to-be-opened home of the Vikings. I’ll be broadcasting PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio from there on Thursday and maybe Friday, the day they officially open the replacement for the Metrodome. As tight end Kyle Rudolph recently told SiriusXM NFL Radio, all that matters is whether the team wins there. Based on quarterback Teddy Bridgewater’s strong performances when playing road games in domed stadiums during his first two NFL seasons (the Vikings played their 2014 and 2015 games outdoors at the University of Minnesota), the Vikings are optimistic that Bridgewater will play better at home.
And I think the clearest test regarding whether Bridgewater will thrive will come from what extent the Vikings use offensive coordinator Norv Turner's “Bang 8” route with rookie receiver Laquon Treadwell. Matt Vensel of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune explained over the weekend how the staple of Turner’s offense more than 20 years ago with the Cowboys could resurface in Minnesota.
Michael Irvin, the Bang 8 target in Dallas who routinely ran the skinny post and took some thick hits in the process, believes Treadwell can fulfill his part of it. But it won’t work unless Bridgewater can consistently put the ball in a spot that keeps Treadwell from becoming too much of a sitting duck for safeties who will be waiting to greet the rookie when he angles inside to make the catch.
7. I think with all the violent and awful things going on throughout the world, high-profile NFL players should be a little more careful when traveling abroad. The sounds and images of Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. climbing onto a carto selfie-capture an “O-B-J”-chanting crowd in Germany were as entertaining as they were frightening.
At a time when Americans are natural targets when they cross either of the oceans that border the country, high-profile American athletes become even more attractive for those who want to disrupt our way of life by creating as much havoc and mayhem as possible.
8. I think the NFL should commit to disclosing the compensation given to the commissioner and other highly-paid executives despite the change in league-office tax structure that eliminates the legal obligation to do so. Player salaries are known; the commissioner’s should be, too. The information can now be hidden because foes of the NFL continuously tried to paint the league as a tax evader by pointing to the non-profit status of the league office.
It was a dumb argument; the league passed revenue through to the individual teams, which paid their own taxes separately. The league finally reacted to the disingenuous attacks by giving up the broader tax-exempt status and, in turn, slamming the door on public availability of how much the commissioner makes.
9. I think the Jets have sent a clear message to every agent regarding the team approach to negotiating contracts. Identify the deadline, do nothing until the eve of it, and then fire up the midnight oil. The Jets showed no interest in signing franchise-tagged defensive lineman Muhammad Wilkerson to a long-term deal until roughly a week before the window was due to close. An impasse over length quickly derailed the discussions until literally the night before the clock struck 4 p.m. ET.
The Jets then applied pedal to metal until Wilkerson was ready to apply pen to paper. So now the agent community knows how the Jets do business. More specifically, now agent Jimmy Sexton will know to leave his phone on when he goes to bed the night before the Jets open training camp, because that's the practical deadline for getting quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick back in the fold.
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Welcome to Goodell Week
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio is our guest columnist and he kicks off The MMQB’s five-day look at the commissioner by examining 10 things that should worry the NFL most. Plus thoughts on Tom, Von, Mo, Kirk and more
By Mike Florio
Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
With Peter King on vacation until July 25, this week’s Monday Morning QB guest columnist is Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio. Peter and Mike work together on NBC’s Football Night in America on Sunday nights during the season, and Mike also hosts PFT Live weekdays on NBC Sports Radio. Mike previously practiced law for 18 years and is active on social media. Follow Mike here.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and even heavier is the wallet of the man who makes more than $30 million per year. But Roger Goodell has a thick neck and a strong core and bank accounts big enough to absorb the money he makes as he presides over the greatest sport on the planet.
Whether the boss is getting paid like a boss because of: 1) his managerial skills; 2) the $13 billion in annual revenue the league generates; 3) the fact he’s the one who absorbs the scrutiny that otherwise would be directed at owners pulling levers and pressing buttons while Goodell exclaims, “Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain!”; 4) some combination of the first three, he’ll be earning all (or at least part) of a salary that puts him millions of dollars ahead of the sport’s highest paid player.
It’s Roger Goodell Week at The MMQB, with the next five days featuring several articles and discussion centered around the NFL’s leader 10 years into his commissionership. I’ll get things started by looking at the things Goodell could be (or should be) concerned about at this point in his tenure.
So here’s everything I could think of based on 43 years of being a fan of the NFL, 16 years of being in the business of covering the NFL, 10 years of doing it on a full-time basis, and seven years of reading, talking, writing, and thinking about the NFL as the only thing I do, pretty much during every waking moment from late July through early May and much of the time during the few slow weeks in between.
1. Quarterback play
Most regular-season and postseason games produce a handful of memorable moments. Even the exciting games have long stretches of back-and-forth nothing. For some teams, the offense simply lacks the ability to take full advantage of rules aimed at generating yardage and points and, ultimately, excitement.
For the teams that can’t gain ground on the field or pump up the numbers on the scoreboard, the reason often is subpar quarterback play. Whether college coaches aren’t using pro-style offenses or NFL coaches are trying to force a quarterback into their “system” instead of figuring out what he does well and doing that or owner impatience with coaches becoming coaching impatience with the quarterback, the supply of competent quarterbacks in the NFL doesn’t match the demand. This makes it hard to have true competitive balance, which is ultimately what the NFL craves.
Goodell and the NFL need to be actively searching for ways to find NFL-caliber quarterbacks and to help them improve, from using Virtual Reality training on a constant basis to increasing the time coaches and quarterbacks may directly work together in the offseason to instituting a minor league system that would give young quarterbacks live reps in a game setting.
NFL teams also need more coaches who are willing to choose what works over what they want to do. Too many insist that players conform to the playbook; not enough make the playbook fit their players. By the time a quarterback gets to the NFL, it’s too late to change him—and it’s asinine to not embrace the style of play that got him to the NFL in the first place.
So maybe the problem isn’t only that there aren’t enough good quarterbacks to go around. Maybe there aren’t enough good coaches to get the most out of the quarterbacks. Or maybe there aren’t enough good scouts to discover the quarterbacks with the highest ceilings. Or maybe there aren’t enough owners who know how to find the coaches and scouts needed to best do the job.
Whatever the problem and however it gets solved, that’s the top competitive concern for the league moving forward. And it’s the first point that should be raised if anyone ever suggests expanding the NFL beyond 32 teams.
2. Safety issues
Before October 2009, player health and safety didn’t occupy a central spot on the NFL’s radar screen. Then came a House Judiciary Committee meeting, with California representative Linda T. Sanchez saying this: “The NFL sort of has this blanket denial or minimizing of the fact that there may be this link [between football and future cognitive impairment]. And it sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-’90s when they kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s no link between smoking and damage to your health.’”
The NFL got the message; if the league didn’t address the issue, Congress would. And so, virtually overnight, the league beefed up its concussion protocols, with the goal of getting concussed players off the field and keeping them there until cleared. Likewise, efforts were made to reduce the number of blows to the head, with the term “defenseless receiver” entering the media and fan lexicon.
Less than a year later came restrictions on offseason programs and training-camp practices, with two-a-days going the way of the dodo bird. The owners, intent on getting a great financial deal from the union to end the lockout, gladly agreed to these concessions. Some like Lions guard Geoff Schwartz in this space a week agowould say that it has cost the game plenty, with players less prepared to master fundamentals like blocking and tackling once the regular season starts. Regardless, the game necessarily became, on a broad level, safer.
And now some players are walking away from the game before the game walks away from them, sparking concerns that eventually there may not be enough capable players to fill out 32 NFL rosters. The league needs to be concerned about the supply of players being choked off from below, with more and more kids opting for other sports and never becoming football players.
The funnel nevertheless remains steep and narrow, and major colleges will be handing out scholarships to athletes who are deemed good enough to play football at a high level even if they previously never have. For young adults who otherwise can’t afford to go to college, the prospect of a full ride in exchange for giving football a whirl will be too hard to pass up.
Still, the NFL will have to find a way to make the game as safe as possible without fundamentally changing it. Currently the kickoff sits in the crosshairs of that effort, but the lack of a clear solution shows how delicate the process of striking the right balance on an ongoing basis will be.
At some point the right balance could be impossible to strike. If a test for detecting Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in living patients ever is developed and if it reveals widespread CTE among NFL players and those at lower levels of the sport, tackle football could go the way of two-a-days, with two-hand-touch becoming the new norm.
3. Legal concerns
The NFL has escaped the thousands of concussion lawsuits brought by former players with a settlement that, on one hand, pales in comparison to the potential verdicts that could have been entered against the league. On the other hand, the NFL had a long list of legal roadblocks that could have been used in defending the cases, any one of which could have delivered an outright victory against arguments that the league deliberately concealed the real risks of concussions and failed to do enough to protect them from harm.
Although it’s now impossible for any player to claim that anything about the risks of concussions isn't known, players could contend that the league and/or the union have failed to take proper steps to protect them from harm (for example, by not getting rid of “the most dangerous play in the game”) or by failing to get them off the field when concussed (e.g., Case Keenum) or by otherwise not eradicating a culture that results in plenty of coaches pressuring players to play.
A nationwide class action targeting all 32 NFL teams regarding the use of painkillers could put that play-or-else culture in the spotlight, with allegations that coaches like Don Shula and Mike Tice threatened to cut players who didn’t use potent drugs to mask pain and play.
With the case surviving an initial effort to throw it out of court, the league will have to provide information, documents, and testimony regarding whether and to what extent players were informed of the risks of using these medications and/or threatened to take a shot of Toradol or hit the road, Jack — which could make settlement even more prudent than it was in the concussion lawsuits, which were resolved before they ever got to the “discovery” phase, when evidence potentially supporting allegations of wrongdoing is harvested.
4. Officiating flaws
The NFL started nearly 100 years ago, before TV and long before the advanced technologies that are both prevalent and cheap in 2016. Players were smaller, slower, and not nearly as strong. They wore pads that were closer to padding than armor. Sprinkled among them were men charged with applying the rules and keeping order.
Over time, everything about the game has gotten bigger, faster, more intense. And yet the league still adheres to the same approach to officiating as always: Put several folks in black and white stripes, throw them into the fray, and hope that while honoring their self-preservation instinct they’re also able to notice with precision the things flashing by in front of them.
Mistakes are inevitable. Really, it’s amazing more aren’t made considering the speed of the game and the complexity of the rule book. But the mistakes have now become more obvious, given the battalion of cameras blanketing the field and broadcasting images on high-definition flat screens to millions of homes, followed instantaneously by the dissection of every blunder on social media.
The league has begun to bridge the gap between what the officials see with the naked eye once and what the rest of us see in magnified super slow motion, repeatedly. With a pipeline in place from 345 Park Avenue to ensure consistency in the application of the replay review process, V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino can play the role of Cyrano on a wide variety of issues and ambiguities and flat-out errors that would otherwise be uncorrected.
Earlier this year, the NFL embraced use of that communication device for administrative matters. The rule was written vaguely, which potentially allows Blandino to buzz a referee and tell him that it’s obvious based on the images being currently projected to the world that a mistake was made.
Some will object to the ability of the league office to overrule game officials beyond the boundaries of the formal replay process, but I’ve got no problem with it. The goal should be to get as many calls right as possible.
Ideally, the league should scrap the entire officiating function as it was first conceived and as it has evolved and ask itself this question: How should we best monitor the action and decide what actually has happened during a given play?
If that ever happened, a far different, and potentially far better, procedure potentially would emerge.
Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
5. Labor problems
In the blink of an eye, that 10-year labor deal resolving the 2011 lockout has reached the halfway point of its existence. Five years from now, another lockout (or a strike) could happen.
The relationship between the NFL and the NFL Players Association seems to be rockier than ever. Players don’t trust the league office, thanks to controversies like the Saints bounty scandal and Deflategate. The union likewise doesn’t trust the league, believing management makes promises it can’t or won’t keep.
Perhaps the biggest threat to the relationship happened earlier this year. The NFLPA caught the league with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar, diverting revenues that should have been shared under the salary cap into made-up exceptions so clearly inappropriate that a neutral arbitrator ruled in the union’s favor at the conclusion of the hearing, without even taking the matter under advisement for further study. The players believe that an attempt was made to steal their money, which could make it very hard to restore the level of trust necessary to hammer out another long-term contract.
Come 2021, the league will want the players to agree to tactics for growing the pie (such as more regular-season games and an expanded postseason), and the players will want to increase the size of their piece of it. Other issues like Commissioner powers and marijuana could creep into the talks. When a labor contract expires anything and everything about the relationship becomes fair game for discussion and negotiation.
During the lockout, the players ultimately decided not to give up game checks, accepting the last, best offer that was on the table before real money would be lost. The next time, could the players feel differently about taking all or part of a year off?
6. Team and player discipline
Not long after Roger Goodell succeeded Paul Tagalibue as commissioner, agents began to grumble about the hard line the league office suddenly was taking regarding alleged violations of the substance-abuse and PED polices. Reasonable compromises no longer were available as the NFL took full advantage of its final say to impose its will on players.
Somehow, Goodell was persuaded in 2014 by the union to relinquish his power over these matters to neutral arbitration. But he still retains judge/jury/executioner status on matters relevant to the integrity of the game, the principle that fueled the Deflategate controversy. Over the 32 teams, Goodell’s power remains absolute. He imposes the discipline and handles the appeal, giving the member clubs no real recourse.
The disciplinary power over players and teams in a non-drug/PED setting has been used several times in recent years, creating results that seemed to some (especially the team and players involved, and their fans) objectively unfair. Some of these cases include the salary cap penalties against Dallas and Washington in 2012, the Saints bounty scandal, Deflategate and more.
All too often, the league office ignores evidence that a violation may be cultural, opting to single out one team, make an example of the alleged culprits, and scare straight every other team that is doing the same thing. In scrapping the player suspensions imposed for the bounty scandal, Tagliabue (appointed by Goodell as the arbitrator under pressure from lawsuits challenging Goodall’s neutrality) made an eloquent but pointed case for properly addressing rule breaking that isn’t isolated to one team.
Tagliabue’s case for making cultural changes reflects a much a better way to do business when it comes to discipline and rules violations. It’s far more fair and just to all players and teams. But the league office stubbornly insists on retaining the ability to do what it wants, when it wants, how it wants, disregarding reasonable and persuasive arguments for a more balanced and neutral approach. Unfortunately for the league, this approach has alienated the union, many players, and entire fan bases that will forever believe their favorite team got screwed.
If the league office ever chooses to opt for self-awareness on these issues, here’s the only question that needs to be asked: Is having and using (and potentially abusing) that kind of power over teams and players really worth the damage that has been done to the underlying relationships?
7. Broadcasting strategies
The NFL’s current TV deals last until 2022. After that, no one knows how live game footage will be distributed. The league ultimately will need a plan that sustains, and maximizes, the billions of dollars it receives by selling those rights on the open market, while also minimizing any collateral damage.
Plenty of options exist. With Yahoo, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix and other digital options either at the table or inching closer to it, the league will use the power of Big Shield to squeeze multiple companies into once again paying absurd premiums for the ability to use NFL games as a tool both for making back a large portion of the rights fees via advertising and/or subscription fees while also heavily promoting other content available through the platform.
No one knows what it will look like. The cord-cutting phenomenon will make it very difficult for ESPN to once again increase its $2 billion per year ante; if that money won’t be coming from ESPN for Monday Night Football, who will replace it?
And what if the steaming services offer millions more than NBC, CBS, FOX, or ABC for Sunday afternoon or other prime-time packages? If the NFL dramatically reduces its presence on over-the-air, free TV (which is still used by millions of Americans as their sole gateway to TV content), Congress could remove the broadcast antitrust exemption, a legislative vestige of the ‘60s that allows the league to sell its games as a package—preventing, for example, the Cowboys or Patriots from doing a Notre Dame/NBC package and far less popular teams from fighting for scraps on fringe networks.
Like the consumer, which now has many more choices than the three-network 1970s, the NFL has many more options. The league will need to do the right deals to replace the current ones, finding the best balance between making the most money, generating the biggest audiences, and keeping Congress out of the league’s backyard.
8. Revenue sharing
Prior to the 2006 and 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreements, revenue sharing occupied a spot high on the list of the league’s problems. Some revenues that the franchises weren’t splitting among themselves nevertheless were included in the broader pot that determines the salary cap, artificially increasing the labor costs of the teams that making less money in their local markets.
The 2006 CBA created a convoluted system of supplemental revenue sharing, which allowed certain teams based on need to get even more of the shared revenues in order to make up for the cap disparities created by unshared revenues. After the 2011 CBA, the issue disappeared so quickly it was like it never even existed. The union doesn’t know where these nuances of revenue sharing stand, the media doesn’t know where they stand. No one beyond the walls of the NFL knows where they stand.
Is it a problem? Is it not a problem? If the broadcast antitrust exemption ever goes away, it will become a major problem, since a small handful of teams with national following instantly will be making the vast majority of the broadcasting money. If those teams can’t be persuaded to continue to operate as socialists in a capitalistic country, it could be hard to keep all 32 teams on the same page and, over time, in the same league.
Even with the broadcast antitrust exemption still in place, differences remain between what some teams make and what other teams make. As the cap keeps spiking, those differences eventually will emerge as a hot spot for the league at large.
9. Stadiums
Most teams use their stadiums 10 times per year. And yet many stadiums become obsolete within 20 years after they had a bottle of champagne busted against the hull. The problem isn’t that the stadiums have become dilapidated (however, FedEx Field seems to be getting close after only 19 years) but that the newer, swankier stadiums put pressure on teams with older stadiums to modernize.
When Jerry Jones opened the Cowboys’ current home in 2009 (yes, it’s already been that long), other teams became inspired to follow suit with impressive, space-age venues. This year, the Vikings will launch a new, futuristic venue that is both enclosed and flooded with natural light. The Falcons in 2017 will play inside a complex structure with a roof that opens and closes like a giant steel change purse. Two years later, the ribbon will be cut on Kroenkeworld, the $2.5 billion structure that will house the Rams (and maybe one more team) and increase the pressure on the other NFL franchises with older structures to finagle something nearly as good, or maybe even better.
For the cycle to continue, it will have to happen at least for now without much if any public money. Sure, the folks in Las Vegas will be willing to kick in a large chunk of taxpayer change, primarily as a tax on legitimizing Sin City. Beyond that, the league will have a hard time finding communities willing to subsidize billionaires.
After 20 years of franchise stability, relocations could happen more frequently. If, after all, a team will be required to pay for its own stadium, why wouldn’t that stadium be built in a larger market, featuring more money and more people to give up that money? Also, the fact that St. Louis tried, and failed, to keep the Rams despite a large public contribution will make elected officials in other cities more reluctant to expend political capital for a potentially losing effort.
Apart from building stadiums, the league will have to figure out how to keep all stadiums full on a consistent basis. The in-stadium experience needs to be sufficiently better than watching the game at home, which is becoming for many the best way to take in a full day of football. With the blackout rule likely off the table for good, all teams will need to find ways to fill the stands, and only so many will be able to use winning as the primary attraction.
10. Competitors
After the draft and with no lingering stories or controversies or other reason to obsess over the NFL in the slow months, the nation’s attention turned to other sporting events. The NBA became the primary beneficiary, with the spike lasting beyond the NBA Finals and into the launch of free agency.
There’s no match in America for the NFL from August to February, and there likely won’t be. Other football leagues have tried from time to time to steal a portion of the NFL’s thunder, but they always fail. Still, if the NFL ever makes the game “too safe,” an opening could emerge for an old-school football league that embraces rules the NFL has ditched and markets it to the same folks who gladly lap up UFC-style brutality.
As it sits atop the American mountain, the NFL covets an even higher summit: Development of the same popularity in other countries. England and the rest of Europe provided the natural starting point toward eventual global domination; China is the white whale, where 1.3 billion potential football fans reside.
So the league’s true competitors aren’t other sports leagues or other football leagues. The NFL’s current competitors are those things currently attracting the money and attention of people in these other countries. Over the next 50 to 100 years, the league fully intends to overcome international sports like soccer in the same way it surpassed baseball domestically.
It may not succeed in that objective, but it will get even richer trying. Eventually, those international gains could help make a billion-dollar operation into a trillion-dollar global enterprise.
* * *
Tom Brady isn’t giving up, yet
When Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announced on Facebook that he “made the difficult decision to no longer proceed with the legal process,” the logical conclusion was that he had opted not to file an appeal of his Deflategate suspension with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Then came this caveat from the NFL Players Association: “We will continue to review all of our options and we reserve our rights to petition for [appeal] to the Supreme Court.”
The appeal can’t go forward without Brady; if Brady truly wants it to be over, there will be no further appeal. The reality is that Brady has (per a source with knowledge of the situation) authorized the NFLPA to proceed with the appeal on his behalf. It won’t keep him from missing the first four games of the season, but it could ultimately restore his lost pay of more than $253,000, reduce the Commissioner’s power in player disciplinary cases, and provide Brady with genuine vindication.
There’s also a pretty good chance he’ll return after Week 4 with a chip on his shoulder the size of a car battery and a primal scream or two powerful enough to start the car where the battery was removed. Regardless, the idea that Brady has pulled the plug completely isn’t accurate. The suspension will be served, but the fight most likely will continue.
* * *
Stat of the Week
Since entering the NFL as a rookie first-round pick in 2011, Broncos linebacker Von Miller has 60 sacks. Since entering the NFL as a rookie first-round pick that same year, Texans defensive end J.J. Watt has 74.5 sacks.
Watt has played in all 80 career regular-season games, giving him 0.93 sacks per game. Miller has missed eight, so his average sits at 0.83 sacks per game. Watt’s career postseason average is even better, with five sacks in five postseason games.
Miller racked up a total of five sacks when it mattered most, with 2.5 against the Patriots in the AFC title game and another 2.5 in Super Bowl 50 against the Panthers. Those back-to-back performances helped Miller cash in, but it’s hard not to think that Watt is underpaid in relation to Miller, making $16.67 million per year in comparison to Miller, who is at $19 million annually.
Here’s the real difference between their contracts. The Texans gave Watt his current deal before the 2014 season, allowing him to trade in the back end of his rookie contract and shift the injury risk for 2014 and 2015 to the Texans. If Miller had gotten the same offer from the Broncos in 2014, he surely would have taken it.
And if Watt had never been given a long-term deal, he would have gotten something along the lines of $19 million per year after his rookie contract expired.
Meanwhile, the player taken five spots after Miller and four before Watt at one point seemed on track to be the best of the three. Former 49ers linebacker Aldon Smith had 33.5 sacks in his first 32 games, an average of 1.04 per game. After his third season, which featured 8.5 sacks in 11 games, the average was still at 0.976 per game.
But for an inability to stay out of trouble, Smith currently could be making as much or more than Miller or Watt. Smith, now with the Raiders, remains suspended by the league, with the ability to apply for reinstatement in November.
* * *
Nine Things I Think I Think
1. I think officials privately have been told to call a catch a catch if they think it’s a catch, and not to worry about the convoluted language of the rule regarding players who are going to the ground, which has gotten even more complex this year. I think this year’s changes to the rules are intended to make it even harder to overturn via replay review a ruling on the field of a catch, given the very high standard of indisputable visual evidence.
And I think the NFL won’t be admitting any of this because it will make the Dez Bryant non-catch from the 2014 playoffs even more glaring. Ultimately, I think this is an acceptable way to ensure that future calls mesh with the expectations of players, coaches, owners, fans, and media regarding what is and isn’t a catch.
2. I think I don’t know what to think about whether the excellent NFL Films series “All or Nothing,” featuring the Arizona Cardinals, is or isn’t a hit. An Amazon spokesperson told me the company doesn’t release streaming figures, so it’s impossible to know how many people have watched any, some or all of it. I think I also don’t know the whole story about the 2015 Cardinals, because only eight of 1,000 hours of footage made it to the final cut. The team and the league showed us only what they wanted us to see, which makes me really want to see the stuff they didn’t want us to see.
3. I think the NFL would get rid of the kickoff today if it could come up with a comparable procedure for transferring possession while also giving the kicking team a slim chance of retaining possession. In a 2012 Time magazine profile, Commissioner Roger Goodell floated the idea of giving the kicking team the ball at its own 30, facing fourth down and 15. The “kicking” team could then punt the ball (the new kickoff), go for it from a normal offensive set (the new expected onside kick), or run a fake punt (the new surprise onside kick). The idea never got any real traction.
The latest effort to reduce kickoffs entails moving the touchback (as a one-year experiment) to the 25, which invites the possibility that more kickoff returns will happen if teams deliberately kill the ball short in an effort to pin the opponent inside its 25. If this approach doesn’t work, don’t be surprised if fourth-and-15-from-the-30 or some other idea for replacing the kickoff in a meaningful way emerges.
4. I think it’s smart for the Giants, as receiver Dwayne Harris told the team’s website, to work on throwing more deep passes. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis previously told first-year Bucs coach Dirk Koetter that offenses don’t throw deep enough, and first-year Giants coach Ben McAdoo has apparently gotten the message. Throwing deep amounts to a reduced-risk, enhanced-reward move, carrying the added benefit of forcing the defense to account for the long ball and, in turn, opening up the short and intermediate passing game.
5. I think quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who said this week on HBO’s “Any Given Wednesday” that he hopes to retire with the Packers, probably will do so only if the team wants it to happen. If Rodgers intends to play beyond the point where the Packers still want him, Rodgers would have to follow in the footsteps of Brett Favre and go elsewhere. Free agency and the salary cap, which were created to give veteran players mobility, routinely have forced teams to move on from key players years before that would have happened in the days before free agency, when the expiration of a player’s current contract meant that he either signed a new one with the same team or found something else to do for a living.
6. I think I’m a little excited to see U.S. Bank Stadium, the soon-to-be-opened home of the Vikings. I’ll be broadcasting PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio from there on Thursday and maybe Friday, the day they officially open the replacement for the Metrodome. As tight end Kyle Rudolph recently told SiriusXM NFL Radio, all that matters is whether the team wins there. Based on quarterback Teddy Bridgewater’s strong performances when playing road games in domed stadiums during his first two NFL seasons (the Vikings played their 2014 and 2015 games outdoors at the University of Minnesota), the Vikings are optimistic that Bridgewater will play better at home.
And I think the clearest test regarding whether Bridgewater will thrive will come from what extent the Vikings use offensive coordinator Norv Turner's “Bang 8” route with rookie receiver Laquon Treadwell. Matt Vensel of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune explained over the weekend how the staple of Turner’s offense more than 20 years ago with the Cowboys could resurface in Minnesota.
Michael Irvin, the Bang 8 target in Dallas who routinely ran the skinny post and took some thick hits in the process, believes Treadwell can fulfill his part of it. But it won’t work unless Bridgewater can consistently put the ball in a spot that keeps Treadwell from becoming too much of a sitting duck for safeties who will be waiting to greet the rookie when he angles inside to make the catch.
7. I think with all the violent and awful things going on throughout the world, high-profile NFL players should be a little more careful when traveling abroad. The sounds and images of Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. climbing onto a carto selfie-capture an “O-B-J”-chanting crowd in Germany were as entertaining as they were frightening.
At a time when Americans are natural targets when they cross either of the oceans that border the country, high-profile American athletes become even more attractive for those who want to disrupt our way of life by creating as much havoc and mayhem as possible.
8. I think the NFL should commit to disclosing the compensation given to the commissioner and other highly-paid executives despite the change in league-office tax structure that eliminates the legal obligation to do so. Player salaries are known; the commissioner’s should be, too. The information can now be hidden because foes of the NFL continuously tried to paint the league as a tax evader by pointing to the non-profit status of the league office.
It was a dumb argument; the league passed revenue through to the individual teams, which paid their own taxes separately. The league finally reacted to the disingenuous attacks by giving up the broader tax-exempt status and, in turn, slamming the door on public availability of how much the commissioner makes.
9. I think the Jets have sent a clear message to every agent regarding the team approach to negotiating contracts. Identify the deadline, do nothing until the eve of it, and then fire up the midnight oil. The Jets showed no interest in signing franchise-tagged defensive lineman Muhammad Wilkerson to a long-term deal until roughly a week before the window was due to close. An impasse over length quickly derailed the discussions until literally the night before the clock struck 4 p.m. ET.
The Jets then applied pedal to metal until Wilkerson was ready to apply pen to paper. So now the agent community knows how the Jets do business. More specifically, now agent Jimmy Sexton will know to leave his phone on when he goes to bed the night before the Jets open training camp, because that's the practical deadline for getting quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick back in the fold.
