It's Only Business

Beware the fist in the velvet glove.

Channeling Hyman Roth, Browns general manager Phil Savage essentially positioned Wednesday’s release of center LeCharles Bentley as purely business, nothing personal. Bentley said pretty much the same thing. But just as Michael Corleone’s business move of snuffing out Moe Greene had its repercussions don’t be surprised if there isn’t some attendant fallout from the Bentley situation.

To many fans, the news that Bentley supposedly asked for and received his release probably came as a surprise. Bentley had just passed his team physical and looked poised to finally pay some sort of dividend on the Browns’ heavy investment in him two years ago. On the surface, Bentley’s request looks to be motivated by the numbers, as in there are too many incumbents that currently block his desire to resume his career as a starting center. Just below the surface and promising to rise soon enough are Bentley’s lingering feelings that Savage hasn’t quite treated him fairly. It’s a complicated set of emotions with no right answer.

Bentley, of course, was Savage’s first legitimate big name free agent signee. Bentley was the marquee free agent of the 2006 class and his six year $36 million contract, with $12 million guaranteed, cemented that status. In Bentley as well as Kevin Schaffer, who was signed at the same time, Savage saw an opportunity to finally improve the offensive line. Bentley was a perfect signing, really, because it involved a highly skilled lineman with a desire to return triumphantly to his home town.

It didn’t work out that way because Bentley got hurt during his very first drill in his first Brown’s training camp. Amazingly in a non-contact drill he suffered a torn patella that morphed into a staph infection that morphed into even more surgery. Bentley’s career wasn’t just in jeopardy, so too was his life.

The injury was devastating to Bentley personally and to the entire Browns organization. It set in motion a pall that hung over the 2006 training camp and started a confluence of bizarre events that ultimately resulted in Savage making a trade for Hank Fraley, who today occupies the spot that Bentley coveted upon his return.

When Bentley went down, there was no way to know at that moment how serious the injury ultimately would become let alone whether it would truly imperil Bentley’s career. But as the season progressed, it became clear that Bentley was not going to be ready for the following season either. This put the Browns in a difficult spot.

Under the collective bargaining agreement, if a player is injured during the season and cannot play in the team’s final game, he can be waived the next season if he is unable to pass the pre-season physical. If he’s waived, he’s entitled to an injury protection settlement of $250,000 but otherwise the team has no further salary obligations unless his individual contract provides otherwise. But player contracts in the NFL are never guaranteed so in Bentley’s case, the Browns had an opportunity to avoid paying off the remainder of Bentley’s rather large salary over the next five years by simply waiving him prior to last season.

Making a move like that on a marquee player is rare and not just because of the public relations hit. Generally, a team will put a player like Bentley who can’t pass the pre-season physical on the physically unable to perform or PUP list in order to keep that player in the fold. When that occurs, the player receives his salary for that year as if he were actively playing. The reason a team puts a player on the PUP list is because they believe he will eventually recover and become a valuable player again.

As Bentley’s situation progressed and the extent of his injury became clear, it’s pretty obvious that Savage played a bit of poker with Bentley and his agent before last season. Knowing that Bentley couldn’t pass the pre-season physical, Savage used that fact as leverage to get Bentley to re-work his contract. Bentley chose not to call Savage’s bluff and instead agreed to a shortened contract, three years instead of the original six, and a salary at the league minimum of $605,000, more than double the $250,000 injury protection payment he would have received had he been waived. The Browns got out from under a large contract at a cost of an extra $350,000. Plus Savage got a bit of upside protection for the Browns if Bentley could actually return in 2008. The re-worked contract was loaded with incentives that could have pushed this year’s salary to more than $4 million.

But this wasn’t quite a win-win situation. Savage proved to be a shrewd and clever general manager, leaving the team with cap room by reworking a contract that would otherwise have been a burden. And while Savage arguably did Bentley a favor, it was of far lesser magnitude. Bentley got that extra $350,000 over the injury protection payment last season by agreeing to the new contract and he also got an extra year of retirement benefit credits when he sat on the PUP list last year rather than being cut. He also got the chance to further rehabilitate his knee knowing that he still had a salary coming from the Browns.

But he also got the situation that played out on Wednesday. Rolling around in his head had to be the thought that the Browns might cut him anyway and perhaps too late to really catch on with another team. That kind of move would cost him his salary of $605,000 and possibly the chance of continuing his career with another team until at least 2009. Frankly, it was a situation he couldn’t risk and didn’t. It’s why he asked for his release.

Anyone watching Savage operate in this case shouldn’t be surprised by this turn of events. When Kellen Winslow, Jr. had his motorcycle mishap that almost ended his career, Savage threatened to void Winslow’s contract in order to wrangle out a more club-friendly deal. Fans may have understood that better, but the impact of that move still lingers like a rain cloud over Berea as Winslow subtly threatens to sit out if he doesn’t get a new deal or at least get the benefit of his old deal.

In each case, Savage acted properly and ethically. But it won’t go unnoticed, particularly by the players and that could very well sway a future free agent. Fans, egged on by team owners and general managers, get all sanctimonious when a player under contract seeks to re-negotiate forgetting what it looks like when the team basically does the same thing.

What this situation really did was provide resonance to the prophetic words that John Matuszak’s character O.W. in the movie North Dallas Forty said to his coach after his North Dallas Bulls lost the conference championship because of a fumbled snap on an extra point “every time I call it a game you say it’s a business. Every time I say it’s a business, you call it a game.”

The BCS Mess

Those complaining for the 10th straight year about the mess that is the BCS have long since missed the point. Calling out its faults as if it will lead to some greater truth is roughly akin to pointing out Willie McGinest’s age and hoping it makes him younger.

Once the January 7, 2008 match-up of Ohio State and LSU for the national championship was announced, you would have thought that no greater crime against humanity had been committed. But for all those coaches out there complaining (yea, we’re pointing directly at you Mike Richt of Georgia) and the fans they’re firing up over the slights, perceived or real, it may be best to remember the words of Hyman Roth as he dressed down Michael Corleone, “this is the business we’ve chosen.”

The BCS isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s a joke, but not for the reasons most think. Its existence, plain and simple, is a fraud. It’s a jerry-rigged system whose sole purpose is to try and work around the majority of college presidents who like the way things have always been and have no real appetite to change it. Put it this way, if the majority of college presidents wanted a playoff system, they’d get one. They get everything else they want and the gleaming new buildings that dot most major campuses are a testament to that. But they like these traditional, antiquated bowls and the conference affiliations and the pageantry. They like being courted by men in plaid sport coats who take fact-finding missions in October and November to their campuses to see if the team is worthy of playing in their bowl game. In other words, they like things just the way they are.

If you’re still unconvinced, consider this: according to the BCS website, the NCAA hasn’t even considered a proposal to create a national championship in Division I-A since 1988 when a proposal presented at the Division I conference went down in flames, 98-13. The last time there was even any official discussion about a playoff, again according to the BCS website, was 1994 when a panel presented information about the viability of establishing a playoff system to the NCAA Presidents Commission which, not surprising, tabled it indefinitely.

Thus, if you want to shave a few points off your blood pressure reading, just move on past the notion that a playoff system is anywhere close to becoming a reality. Browns head coach Romeo Crennel has a better chance of winning three straight Super Bowls as a head coach than college football fans have of seeing the kind of playoff system that exists at every level of college football except Division I. In fact, even the NCAA tacitly accepts this fact. This past season, it renamed Division I-A and I-AA, with the former referred to as the Football Bowl Subdivision (Bowl, get it?) and the latter referred to as the Championship Subdivision (that’s Championship, meaning playoff champion, get it?).

The inevitable rub in all of this debate is the abject desire of the colleges to preserve their bowl system and the perceived wants, disguised as needs, of the fans who want to see a “national champion” crowned. But if the underlying thought is that this would somehow settle matters, as if matters actually needed settling in the first place, it won’t. No matter who is crowned champion in any given year hardly eliminates the arguments from the other two or three teams who feel they were screwed out of playing in the game in the first place.

This isn’t to suggest, by the way, that all the arguing about which team is better doesn’t have its place. It does. That’s why God invented bars and internet chat rooms. But expecting that a consensus will ever emerge on this topic or any other for that matter is wishful thinking. There are still folks who deny the Holocaust.

But given that this is the business we’ve chosen, it probably is worth at least pondering whether this year’s brand of controversy, which is just different but no less intense than last year’s controversy when Florida got into the BCS title game, should bring forth any changes. It should.

The first suggestion, and one I modestly made in the past, is to simply disband the BCS and accept the rather scary notion that different polls may have different opinions about who is number one. My reasoning then and my reasoning now stems from the fact that it has effectively rendered every other bowl game, including the other BCS games, meaningless. There is nothing about any game short of the title game that holds much interest to the casual fan, which seems to run contrary to the intent of the BCS in the first place. But its mere existence has created, in fact, less overall interest, not more. The Rose Bowl may be the granddaddy of all bowl games, but it’s now a granddaddy that just kind of sits in a chair and mumbles to himself and the rest of the family ignores.

Given that blowing up the BCS isn’t any more likely than implementing a playoff system, the one change that ought to be legitimately considered in college football is a delay in any polling until at least halfway through the season. Any polls taken prior to that point simply lack context and are based more on reputation and bias than any consequence of what may have taken place in that season.

Much has been made about the supposedly crazy football season that just completed. But those who made those observations were also the same ones who were responsible for the placement of the teams in the polls in the first place. It may be interesting to note that five supposedly number one and number two teams lost this past season, but no one seems to ask whether those teams were rightly ranked in the first place.

LSU, which finds itself in the BCS title game by virtue of its status of champion of the greatest football league there ever was, just ask them, is a particularly interesting study in this regard. Twice they were ranked number one and couldn’t hold it because they lost, ultimately, to unranked teams.

The argument goes, of course, that those losses were in triple overtime. So what? They were still losses and to not very good teams, either. The other argument goes that when LSU lost to Kentucky, the Wildcats were highly ranked. True, but that’s the result of tremendous overrating of a team by an incompetent media panel and the lemming coaches that followed them, as the final results more than prove.

But this isn’t to just pick on LSU. The polls are literally laced with example after example. West Virginia almost got into the title game with a resume that was far worse than Ohio State’s. They lost early to South Florida, another early favorite of the pollsters that, in the end, turned into an unranked average team in an average conference, and the late loss to a lousy Pitt team only proves that the Mountaineers were mostly a good MAC team in the first place. On the opposite side of that coin is Ohio State. Their loss to Illinois, as it turns out, wasn’t nearly as bad as initially figured, given where the Illini ended up at season’s end. Heck, they made the Rose Bow which, the last time I looked, is a BCS game.

The overarching point to all of this is that time and again those voting in the polls were incompetent, unqualified or easily manipulated, but in any case consistently wrong. That was fine in the days when there was no BCS title game, but given the emphasis the arcane BCS formula places on these polls, it is more relevant than ever.

In fact, if there’s anything the BCS architects get right it is the fact that they don’t start publishing their poll until about six weeks into the season in recognition that anything prior to that point is essentially meaningless. The AP, the USA Today Coaches Poll, the Harris Interactive Poll and every other geek with a computer and a homegrown algorithm should sit back and let the season unfold in the same way before they even begin to think about publishing any sort of poll. It may not have completely avoided the perceived chaos that took place this year, but it would have come close.

But, too, just as there is no chance that the BCS will quietly disappear, there is no chance that the polls will fix their own procedures. In other words, you can forget about any sort of meaningful change. The desire just isn’t there. The numerous constituencies involved, be they fans, coaches, college presidents, network television executives, are not only absolutely convinced in the rightness of their views, they’re hell-bent on convincing everyone else of the wrongness of their views. And the reason, I guess, that we continue to argue about this still? Well, it’s kind of like the answer the person gives for continuing to bang his head against the wall: it feels good when we stop.