With the NFL expanding its invasion of European soccer territory, scheduling more and more games there into the future, it’s time for the league to bring a significant European idea to this side of the pond:
Relegation.
For those not familiar, it’s the procedure by which teams that finish near the bottom of the standings are dropped down — relegated — to a lower division the following year.
The NFL doesn’t have a lower division, of course, unless you count the AFC South, so it should just send four teams to, say, the Southeastern Conference in exchange for Alabama, LSU and two others. That would certainly give the worst NFL teams a powerful incentive to improve.
Of course, owners could always establish an incentive by changing the rules regarding sharing gate and television receipts, dangling a financial carrot that would get the attention of owners, but that’s not about to happen. It’s clear, particularly under the leadership of the current commissioner, that the owners would do all they could to hang on to every last penny they can.
Of course, there’s another way to incentivize owners, too.
Teams should be permitted to fire owners, the same way coaches and general managers are fired and players are released. Maybe the players could make the decisions, or the season ticket holders, or fans in general, or a vote in a city, just like the vote for mayor.
If that were the case, how much longer do you think the Ford family would be in charge of the Detroit Lions?
Or Jimmy Haslam running the Cleveland Browns?
Do you think the Miami fans approve of Stephen Ross’ stewardship of the Dolphins? Do you believe the Washington Redskins’ fans like Daniel Snyder’s leadership?
Commissioners have suspended and otherwise disciplined owners in the past for misdeeds. This is really just a logical next step to remove crummy owners entirely. They can throw players out of the league, why not get rid of the people who are responsible for these miscreants in the first place?
Anyway, you get the idea, and before you dismiss it as some sort of nut case, there are a couple of interesting parallels that have occurred just within recent times.
In the NBA, do you believe that Donald Stirling would have given up ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers if his players hadn’t revolted because of their revulsion at his racist comments? If the players had let that slide, would the league have stepped in and forced Stirling to sell the team? Kinda doubt that.
And, more recently, all it took was a 36-hour strike by football players as the University of Missouri to get rid of the university’s chancellor and president. No way they could have expected their actions to lead to such forceful change so quickly, but it did.
So why don’t we have owner firings in the NFL?
Change at the top would bring about a team makeover a lot faster than firing a coach or drafting a quarterback, making a trade or signing a free agent. It is a cliche, but it is also true, that everything starts at the top, and there are enough examples in the NFL that make it clear.
The most obvious, of course, is what happened when Robert Kraft moved from season ticket holder to owner by buying the New England Patriots in the mid-’90s. Under Kraft, the Patriots have become the NFL’s model franchise while playing in seven Super Bowls in the last 20 years.
More recently, and going in the other direction, Eddie DeBartolo, the wildly successful former owner of the San Francisco 49ers in their Super Bowl reign, had a brief spell of advising his nephew, current team CEO Jed York. With his uncle whispering in York’s ear, the 49ers had their only stretch of success in the last decade.
Word is the two men have become more recently estranged, and all you have to do is look to the bottom of the NFC West standings to see the result.
We hear words like accountability and production thrown around a lot when discussing coaches and players. How about the accountability for the people who are really in charge?
Wouldn’t it be fun, just once, to hear a TV announcer talk about an owner placed on waivers? Why shouldn’t the guys who are really in charge have a standard for success other than the ability to count their money?
–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.