Lingering Items--Laboring Edition

For those who hate the business side of professional sports, the news that the NBA owners are spoiling for a lockout as much as the NFL owners did probably isn’t all that welcome.

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of this month and for now the players and the owners are getting nowhere fast. There are plenty of similarities between the NBA’s labor issues and those in the NFL, but central to it is the straw that always stirs the drink: money. Would you expect it to be about anything else?

According to a recent article about the negotiations from the Associated Press, the NBA owners are claiming losses for this season at $300 million and an anticipation of 22 of its 30 teams losing money. That’s pretty dramatic if true.

The players don’t necessarily agree with that assessment because they say that television ratings have increased along with ticket prices and merchandise sales. They don’t have any more access to the owners’ books than the NFL players and thus can only speculate on how much the league might be losing. As an aside, why isn’t anyone complaining that NBA owners won’t open their books?

In any event, like their brethren in the NFL, NBA players seem to understand that the economy has changed, at least for their fans, and are willing to make some compromises but it’s the scope of those compromises that are the sticking point. Again, would you expect it to be anything different?

The lynchpin to these negotiations is likewise similar to that in the NFL: the owners’ desire to get better cost certainty. In the NBA the chosen vehicle is the revision of their currently byzantine salary cap into a more straightforward version. But since it’s the NBA where exceptions dwarf nearly every rule, don’t be misled into thinking that it’s a hard cap the owners want in the same way that the NFL has a hard cap. That would be too radical of a change and, frankly, would make too much sense.

If you listen to the players, who claim they’re united just like any labor group claims unity among its troops, they’re willing to give some money back presumably in the hope of having a larger pie to divide down the road. The owners have scoffed, yes scoffed, at what they call the modest moves of the players to this point, but so much of that is just posturing anyway.

Still there is less than a week before the contract expires and while much can happen between now and then, in all likelihood not much will happen. This is the owners’ first real chance since the economy cratered to address their issues and they won’t let go of that opportunity lightly.

In other words, don’t be surprised when the NBA owners do lock out the players, possibly as early as July 1. Like the NFL’s lockout, it probably doesn’t mean much with the season months away but it means enough to label the situation serious, assuming you care whether there is another NBA season ever.

What’s far less certain is whether the NBA players will pursue a litigation strategy. It’s mostly been a failure for the NFL players in that it hasn’t given them the perceived leverage they thought they would have, but that doesn’t mean the NBA players are any brighter than their counterparts in the NFL.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if DeMaurice Smith is the worst head of a professional sports union then Billy Hunter, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, is a close second.

What makes Smith inept is his abject lack of experience. He’s a litigator by training and brought that mentality to the NFL players, hence the massive amount of litigation taking place that has bogged down negotiations. What makes Hunter inept is just a general lack of competence and gravitas.

But in fairness to Hunter, he probably understands that David Stern controls the NBA with an iron fist to the point that Hunter would never be willing or able to effectively challenge that authority anyway. Stern is more Kenesaw Mountain Landis and less Roger Goodell and as long as Stern’s in place the players are only going to get as far in these negotiations as he’ll let them.

Whatever union president Derek Fisher’s claims of unity among the players may be, they’ll never effectively challenge Stern’s control or break his will to shape the game as he sees fit.

You don’t have to be fully versed in tea leaf reading to conclude that unless the players knuckle under between now and June 30th, Stern will lock out the players. The only question is whether the players will be as pig-headed as their counterparts in the NHL and let a full season pass until they figure out that for however popular their sport might be in China, in the United States whatever fan uprising might occur will be drowned out by the otherwise massive fan indifference.

**

As for a sport the fans really do care about, football, the good news is that the owners and the players are finally negotiating in earnest. For the most part the posturing that inevitably arises at contract expiration time has given way to the realities that whatever else the courts could do for either of them, the one thing they can’t do is the one thing they need the most: a new labor contract.

The lack of real substantive news coming out of these negotiations is actually a very positive sign. The less the principals talk publicly the more likely it is that they are getting things done behind the scenes.

The average fan, even the average fan who’s in a labor union, probably doesn’t fully appreciate the complexity that is the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement. Much of that complication comes from the provisions dealing with the division of revenue, but the contract is also so much more than that.

The other thing the average fan may not realize is that although the re-slicing of the financial pie is a major issue, there is a laundry list of other items the parties are working their way through, including retiree health care, injury pay and the like. These take time as well.

But the real complication stems from the nuclear approach the union took to these negotiations. It’s not just about reaching a new labor contract. It’s also about resolving the pending lawsuits, particularly the underlying class action lawsuit that was filed.

Without going into the rather mundane details of class action law, the resolution of that lawsuit is subject to both the approval of the court and the prospective class members. Then there is the not so small matter of the union re-certifying as the collective bargaining representative for the players. Although the NFLPA is calling itself a trade union and its attempt at decertification has been disputed by the owners, ultimately this issue needs to get resolved and the union needs to re-form as part of what will surely be a global settlement. Without the re-certification, the negotiated collective bargaining agreement cannot technically be approved by the players.

In short, the parties could reach a deal on the new contract but the process of approving it and living by it could take months to work through. That doesn’t mean that the lockout would need to remain in effect until that happens. But rest assured that unless the owners have very good assurances that everything will get resolved they will be reluctant to open the doors.

It seems like a very good chance that a tentative agreement will be in place in the next few weeks. Whether that means football will ultimately start on time is hard to say. But if it forces a delay in the season, the NFL probably won’t complain anyway. With the way they run the league, nothing would please them more than to play up until the day that baseball’s spring training starts in mid February.

**
A few quick words about Travis Hafner and the Indians.

As frustrating as the Indians recent slump has been, what’s more frustrating is that their highest paid player literally cannot play a position other than designated hitter. For a team that has trouble generating offense, the fact that Hafner is irrelevant for the 9 games in National League cities is a cause for real concern.

Basically the Indians go into this stretch fielding a team with 7 legitimate bats, given that the pitcher will have to hit as well. Everyone saw how moribund the Indians’ offense looked when Hafner was on the DL. The likelihood now is that it will be worse for this stretch in large part because it’s as if Hafner is back on the DL.

It’s nice to see that Hafner has regained most of his batting eye after walking through the desert the last few years. But it’s not so nice that the Indians are paying the kind of money they are paying Hafner and have to endure similar stretches of their schedule when he simply can’t play.

Nine games may not seem like a lot given a 162 game schedule, but going 2-7 instead of 5-4 against the National League could very easily be the difference between making and not making the playoffs.

**

With all the frenzy surrounding the Cavaliers’ just completed draft, this week’s question to ponder arises: How many of those fans either praising or bitching about the Cavs’ picks can honestly say they’ve seen Kyrie Irving or Tristan Thompson play enough to have an informed opinion?

Lingering Items--All LeBrand All The Time Edition

There's nothing about the LeBron James story that looks any better 24 hours later. Maybe some of the anger has dissipated, but the hurt will linger for a long time for a lot of people.

So much was wrapped up in LeBetrayal that it's hard at times to corral all the thoughts into a coherent narrative. There is the history of all the various sports teams in this town and the generations they've gone without a championship. There is the history of the two cities—Cleveland and Akron—that just screams that their better days are long gone. There are the people in these towns forced to endure the sharpest edges of everything bad, be it the weather, the economy, or just the scorn for well, being who they are.

And yet through it all I wondered what this town's reaction would have been if the situation were slightly different. What if James had been playing for some other former doormat town through the magic of the NBA's ping pong balls these last 7 years and then still gone to Miami even with the Cavaliers making their best pitch for him to come to Cleveland? What if it had been the Cavs, like the Heat and the Bulls, clearing cap space these last few years to sign James and another max free agent, only to find themselves abandoned at the alter? Would the reaction still be the same?

It's an interesting hypothetical. Sure James would have been turning his back on Cleveland and this area, but it would have only been in the same way he turned his back on far bigger media markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Cleveland fans would be disappointed certainly, but likely not to this level.

It's one thing to ask the prettiest girl out and get turned down. It's another thing to be married to the prettiest girl for 7 years and have two or three kids with her only to see her walk away emotionless abandoning everything the two of you've built because she likes the beach better.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I don't think it's ever going to be too harsh to call James' decision to abandon this town a betrayal. It feels that way because that's in fact what he did. He positioned himself as one of us, a guy who understood everything this town stood for and everything it had been through and he acted as if he was the one chosen to turn it all around.

That's maybe too big of a burden to put on anyone, especially a 25-year-old multimillionaire with a lousy upbringing, but gee it never felt that way until Thursday at around 9:19 p.m.

It was James who led Clevelanders down that path in the first place. He may have been playing it cool and close to the vest but in those rare unguarded moments when LeBron wasn't just building LeBrand he'd occasionally let it slip that this was his destiny all along.

Maybe it was all wishful thinking. Most of it probably was. But when you're only given tea leaves to read then all you'll read are tea leaves. And almost every one of them, even to this day, seemed to lead to but one conclusion for everyone around here but James himself.

**

Some of the national writers, those with a vested interest in defending LeBrand in order to maintain their limited access to his idiot ramblings, have come to the conclusion that James owed this town nothing, that he held up his end of the bargain. Really?

James played mostly hard throughout his time in Cleveland and for that he was richly rewarded with millions in salary and even more in endorsements. But that is only part of the bargain.

What those writers fail to appreciate is that two towns, Akron and Cleveland, literally raised James and put him in a position to do exactly what he just did. James may have put in the work on the court, but if it weren't for the people of these two towns, James may not have ever made it to the court. What did James do to repay that? Hold a bike rally in Akron? Have a 3-on-3 tournament? Pass out turkeys at Christmas?

That's all nice, solid stuff but pick a carpetbagging superstar in any town and you'll find them doing likewise. It's all part of building their brand as well. No, what I'm talking about here is the fact that at some point James became the King of the World on the backs of a town that literally raised him from the time he was a a mere king-in-waiting.

There are many individual heroes in the James story, the people who without recognition took in James as he was kicking around from apartment to apartment while his young mother was trying to straighten out her own life. There are the other heroes that showed him every little courtesy along the way, from those who maybe helped him get a good grade in history class to those who grabbed him by the shoulder from time to time and told him to straighten up and keep out of trouble.

There are also the hundreds and thousands and millions around the region that respected his privacy and literally let him be the superstar that lived next door.

That kind of love, that kind of respect demands a response in kind. Instead James became Tiger Woods, the spoiled brat with the otherworldly talent who Big Timed everyone else. My guess is that even now he can't imagine what all the fuss is over in this town.

It's laughable to read the quotes from the other athletes coming to his defense as well. The clueless are always the last to realize they're clueless.

James may not have owed it to this town to stay here forever, that's a debatable point. But he certainly owed it a far more gracious exit than he gave it. You may only get one chance to make a first impression, but it's equally true that you only get one chance to make a last impression. In this case, and no matter what comes afterward, nothing is going to change the way people feel about having a knife stuck in their backs on national television.

**
Establishing his own Twitter account, James used it on Friday to announce, as he headed to Miami and the only adoring fans he currently has left, that the road to history starts now. In a sense he's right. Just not for the reasons he thinks.

The chutzpah it took to send that Twitter message is almost a textbook reaction from someone who so rightly is taking it on the chin. Rather than acknowledge the missteps, the classless execution of a decision he didn't have to make, James instead seems emboldened by the backlash.

It won't always be that way.

There will come a point when James realize that of all the words used to describe him over his career the the most pertinent and the one that stings the most will turn out to be “coward.”

Some suggest that the issue isn't the fact that James decided to leave Cleveland. Baloney. On the most basic level, James is a coward because he chose Miami. He branded himself as the Chosen One and the King but he ended up someone who needed the reflected glory of someone else in order to make the history he now seeks.

What kind of Chosen One, what kind of King, what kind of superstar thinks like that? It's one thing to surround yourself with talent in order to make yourself better, but it's another thing to instead run away from the pressure of being “the Man” and instead become, essentially Dwyane Wade's Scottie Pippen. Anything for a ring, I guess.

Paint it anyway you want, and soon I expect the apologists to come out in force and try to write a different narrative, but none of that will change the fact that James simply doesn't have the guts to effectively lead a team to a championship. And it will be that way in Miami. James will never be seen as the one leading Miami and you can literally see the relief in his face at that fact. Seeking the shelter of a cocoon of a different making, James is now Wade's wing man and will never again be seen as someone that you'd ever want to fully trust with the last shot.

But that's hardly the only reason James is a coward. Mostly he's a coward because he didn't have the stomach to play it straight with anyone, including the owner who placated and catered to his every whim.

I don't buy it for a minute that this whole thing wasn't per-ordained months, if not years ago. James went through the public dog-and-pony show to make it all look legit but in the end it was all just a farce. He never was going to New York, New Jersey or Chicago. He wasn't ever going to stay in Cleveland. He wanted out and just didn't have the guts to publicly say it.

You can make the argument that by putting himself on national television to announce The Decision, James showed a special kind of guts. Hardly.

The camera is faceless. It doesn't blink and it doesn't respond. That's for real live human beings. When Gilbert detailed the classless way that James left town, it becomes all the more understandable why James went on television in the first place.

The same lack of courage that caused him to fold like a deck chair in the playoffs against Boston is the same lack of courage he displayed in running away, is the same lack of courage he displayed in not returning one call that Gilbert made to him throughout this process. See the pattern?

Think about that for a moment. Gilbert and the Cavs bent over backward to accommodate James' every wish. Sure they had a vested interest in doing so, but the fact remains that they did in fact make those gestures. Yet James couldn't even answer one of his 10 cell phones he probably keeps or respond to a simple text?

It may take a village to raise a child, but it turns out that Clevelanders all along were just raising the village idiot.

Consider that James didn't even have the courage to call Gilbert directly to say “thanks for all you've done. I know this will be difficult to hear but I'm heading to Miami because that's where I think I will have the best chance to win multiple championships.”

Instead James had one of his guys make that call, a classless move if ever there was one. Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it. When the Cavs were faced with a tougher than expected Boston team, James' lack of character actually came through. But that was just a prelude to the complete lack of character and integrity he demonstrated in dealing with Gilbert.

Debate all you want what team is a better fit for James in this phase of his career but there is no debate on how he should have handled this whole thing.

Then there is Gilbert. I'm not sure his own advisers probably thought it was a good idea to blast James as he did, but damn it sure felt good to finally hear an owner dispense with political correctness and just let his feelings fly.

Gilbert may come to regret his blast at James, but he shouldn't. And for those who disagree I say, point to anything Gilbert said that was objectively wrong and then maybe I'll listen to that point of view.

**

The other thing I keep hearing is that someone around James should have given James better counseling, should have pulled him aside and told him how poorly he was handling this all.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it assumes the people around him do in fact no better. What evidence is there of that?

James' inner circle is made up of close friends who have been drafting behind him since high school. He's an employee of Nike as well but Nike time and again has demonstrated that they are about the least likely to pull aside one of their own and get him grounded. His agent? Put it this way, an agent doesn't get rich arguing with his client.

Then there is ESPN.

In the pursuit of ratings they let one of their own, taking money directly from James, put the farcical show together and then sold it as “news.” I'd say that Jim Gray should be fired for his role in all of this but first you'd have to fire Jim Gray's boss.

After James' posse, his agent, Nike and ESPN, who exactly is left to tell James what he needs to hear and not what he wants to hear? There wasn't an adult in the room throughout this entire mess so it's really not much of a surprise that this was handled with all the intelligence of a group of second graders trying to stage a presidential debate.

This was always a car crash in the making so no one should be surprised when the car actually crashed.

**
I caught a glimpse on Friday night of some sort of celebration going on in Miami where the Heat was introducing it's new team. Not surprisingly there were only 3 players present, James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Pretty telling stuff, actually. But it also leads to this week's question to ponder: Why exactly was James wearing a head band?

Monetize This...

Here is one time being a Time Warner customer is a benefit. No access to the NFL Network.

Because of an on-going pissing match with the NFL over the value of its in-house network, Time Warner cable customers have been spared any temptation to lose valuable minutes and hours that they’ll never get back by watching the NFL Network instead of doing almost anything else.

The problem isn’t the programming, per se. Rather the problem stems from the fact that the network’s very existence encourages the NFL to exploit any and every aspect of its operations. Meanwhile, the NFL’s other partners, like ESPN, feel the heat that an in-house network with a built-in advantage creates and respond accordingly. The outcome is a nearly incoherent yet endless bombardment of programming that provides plenty of analysis with little if any actual information.

Between ESPN and the NFL Network, more hours have been devoted to answering the question about Tim Tebow’s future than had been given to understanding the Apollo Moon Walk, the Nixon/Watergate scandal and the recent health care reform debate, combined.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but far less of one than half of those made by a growing phalanx of so-called analysts whose only qualification seems to have been their singular ability to retire from the NFL before suffering one too many concussions. As for Mel Kiper, Jr., about the only thing worth admiring is his singular ability to turn nerdism and bad hair into a full time, fairly lucrative vocation.

What these two networks, as well as their wannabe little brothers at networks like Sports Time Ohio, really have done is find a way to monetize conversations previously reserved for the local bars. And yet it’s almost the least offensive thing they do.

The most offensive would be, of course, the so-called NFL schedule show on ESPN Tuesday night. If it didn’t exist you’d think I was making it up. The NFL is too stately of an operation to merely release its schedule anymore like every other professional sports league. It needs a grand entrance complete with even more meaningless analysis.

Virtually any conclusion one might want to reach about their team’s schedule can’t be gleaned in late April. It is often less important who a team plays or where than it is when and when isn’t just a function of the time of year. Some teams are quick starters others take time to find their stride.

A few seasons ago the Cleveland Browns opened against the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys came out of training camp clicking and the Browns were absolutely no match for them. Yet several weeks later those same Cowboys were mostly a mess and much less formidable.

Then there’s always the difficulty in predicting the difficulty of next year’s schedule based on the previous season’s records of the teams you’ll be playing. Sure, you can pretty much conclude that the Browns will win maybe two of their 6 division games but that’s just an annoying constant. But will Kansas City again be the dregs of the league given the significant upgrades they’ve made in their personnel and coaching staff? Will New Orleans again play like they own the league?

Each season tends to take on its own personality and it often is far different from that of the previous season. All of this combines to tell me that irrespective of how much the NFL likes to exploit its product, the average fan would know just as much now if the league had simply released the schedule to the media like it used to do.

Falling somewhere between draft previews and schedule releases on the distraction schedule is the draft itself. In true NFL fashion, an event that was already more boring than a Browns preseason game against the Lions has been made even more so by dragging it out over three days instead of two.

You think there is dead time in the average hour of American Idol? Wait until the NFL draft is conducted over three days starting on Thursday. The first round, with the 15 minutes allotted to each team to make a decision they’ve been pondering for months, lasts twice as long as The English Patient, heretofore the benchmark of tedium.

It starts at 7:30 p.m. which means that somewhere around midnight the last of the first round will finish up. For those precious few that haven’t fallen asleep yet, both ESPN and the NFL Network promise to increase the dosage on their broadcast sleeping pills by spending all remaining moments until Friday evening analyzing the “winners” and “losers” of that first round, as if that were even possible.

Perhaps to garner more attention for the even less scintillating second and third rounds, ESPN is broadcasting them on Friday night. If you think watching your team draft a non-descript offensive tackle in the first round fails to quicken the pulse wait until your team spends the next two rounds finding hidden gems like Mohamad Massaquoi and Chaun Thompson.

Then, of course, its on to Saturday’s run-up to the real point of it all, finding Mr. Irrelevant a.k.a. the last player drafted. With just 7 rounds, Mr. Irrelevant isn’t nearly as Irrelevant as he used to be, yet his chances of sticking in the NFL are only slightly better than Jerry Rice’s chances of actually becoming a competitive professional golfer or, stated differently, exactly the same as Michael Jordan’s chances were of becoming a competitive professional baseball player.

What the NFL seems to have absolutely no concern over is the saturation of their product. There can never be too much of the NFL, according to commission Roger Goodell. That’s why we get made-for-TV events like the announcement of the schedule, not to mention “reality” shows like Hard Knocks on HBO, a really bizarre concept when you consider that professional sports has always been the ultimate reality show.

I’d like to think we’ve reached the outer limits of the NFL’s hubris and the public’s ability to fund it, but I know better. What I don’t know is where the NFL takes this next.

If the NFL wanted to have a show that went in depth on the finances of each team, that might be something actually worth watching. If the NFL could partner with MSNBC on weekends and follow the legal exploits of dirt bags like Ben Roethlisberger as they try to wriggle out of legal jams by throwing money at desperate college girls, that might be worth watching as well. Heck, it would be great programming if they filmed Goodell’s meetings with troubled players like Roethlisberger or Santonio Holmes.

I suspect, though, that none of that is forthcoming. Instead the logical extension of the NFL’s march toward world domination is a longer season featuring more teams and a Super Bowl that’s played at the end of March. That way the off-season would really be about 6-weeks long.

In a way, that would be a welcome change. Anything to limit further the broadcast time afforded to Mel Kiper, Jr. can only be a positive.

Conspiracy Peas in the Same Pod

I should know better than to allow myself to be sucked into sports talk radio. The hosts usually have, at most, a casual fan’s knowledge of most sports and, besides, most seem to get their information and opinions from the morning newspapers. That’s certainly true here in Cleveland and, I suspect, most other towns.

But the national sports talk shows are supposed to be different. In theory, the hosts have achieved some level of accomplishment and credibility that puts them closer to if not quite equal with the print reporters that cover sports on a daily basis than the average bozo fielding still another call from the suburbs about whether or not he thinks the Indians will be able to re-sign C.C. Sabathia.

Listening to ESPN’s Mike Greenberg on the Mike & Mike show this past Monday rant again and some more about the New England Patriots allegedly spying on the opposition has officially started me thinking otherwise. According to Greenberg, who sounded just a tad unhinged, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell should open up for full public view the league’s continuing investigation into the Patriots and what former Patriots video camera holder and part time golf pro Matt Walsh might or might not know.

Greenberg’s view essentially is that he’s a season ticket holder for the New York Jets, this issue goes to the integrity of the game, and, consequently, he and the rest of the ticket-buying public are entitled to transparency as to the inner workings of the league.

Let’s dispense with the easy stuff first. The NFL, the last time I looked anyway, was still a private enterprise. It certainly isn’t a government agency nor is it even a publicly-held company. It has no obligation whatsoever under the various laws that govern these things to publicly disclose anything, whether it’s Goodell’s salary or who the league hires to clean the rest rooms at its headquarters in New York. That doesn’t mean it can’t publicly disclose such matters and it often does. But undertaking that task on some items doesn’t require it to do so on others.

As for Greenberg’s bizarre sense of entitlement by virtue of his lousy investment in Jets season tickets every year, it’s a great populist justification, but it opens up a slippery slope that I’m not sure even he wants to traverse. Whether he likes it or not, his status, such as it is, doesn’t give him an entrée into the executive offices of the Jets, let alone the league, any more than buying a Prius gives him an entrée into the CEO’s office at Toyota. More to the point, the fact that my monthly cable bill includes a hefty charge for the various ESPN channels doesn’t entitle me to understand, let alone weigh in on, how the various ESPN executives decided to discipline their employee Dana Jacobsen after she acted like a high school sophomore taking her first swig of vodka at the Mike & Mike celebrity roast this past January.

The more difficult issue revolves around the underlying “spygate” allegations. (And, by the way, when exactly does the statute of limitations expire for adding the word “gate” to whatever noun is used to represent an on-going investigation by anyone into anything?) Apparently, there is a fair number of people, including disgruntled Philadelphia Eagles fan and current Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who tend to think that using video equipment to steal another team’s signals threatens the integrity of the game. Baloney.

All using video equipment does is help one team better document the other team’s signals. If stealing signals was the issue, then the NFL would outlaw that practice, which they don’t. All the NFL’s arcane rule does is prevent the kind of activity that the Patriots engaged in: using a videographer to tape a sideline coach’s signals and note the time so that it can later be synced with the play-by-play log. Nothing prevents a team from having an assistant or an intern train a set of binoculars or a high-powered telescope on an opposing coach if it wants to and write down the various gestures and the time.

This isn’t to excuse the Patriots actions. They and the rest of the teams were warned by the league not to tape the sidelines of the opposing team and they did it anyway. They paid a fairly hefty price for their transgressions. But Specter, with absolutely nothing better to do apparently, has been attacking this matter with the kind of fervor one would hope a more conscientious member of Senate would do with the economy, or gas prices, or the war in Iraq, or poverty, or home foreclosures, or global warming, to tick off just a few of the more pressing problems that average constituents are facing.

Specter initially criticized Goodell for supposedly covering up the results of his investigation into the Patriots and destroying the tapes that were gathered, linking it to the CIA’s destruction of the tapes of its rather aggressive interrogation techniques. Apparently someone got to Specter rather quickly on that one and he backed down on the dramatic and wrongheaded comparison. But he otherwise hasn’t backed down on the underlying issue much to his embarrassment.

What Specter still hasn’t explained is why he continues to even care about this issue, except in the way a sore loser whose hometown team lost to the Patriots in the 2005 Super Bowl might. Try as he and others have, this issue isn’t even comparable to the widespread use of illegal steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in baseball or other sports. That clearly is both a legal issue and an integrity issue, not to mention a public health issue. But videotaping another team’s assistant coaches, or even surreptitiously filming the opposing team’s walk through the day before a game, implicates nothing more than a perceived or potential advantage that can never be proven so why try.

You can forcefully argue the point that knowing what defense an opposing team might be running might be helpful to the offense, or vice versa, but that’s always been more theory than reality. By the time an opposing coach’s signals are deciphered and relayed to his team, there is precious little time to change the play anyway. In other words, it’s about as helpful as batter finding out what pitch is coming just before it’s released.

Moreover, the NFL is as open of a book as any sport, maybe more so. Every game is televised, has been for years, and each team has so much film on every other team that by the time the game arrives, little if anything could possibly be a surprise. You could put a member of the Eagles defense into the Patriots offensive huddle and Randy Moss is still going to catch the pass from Tom Brady if he’s open. It comes down, as always, to execution.
I have no doubts that little pockets of interest around the country still exist about this issue, just as they do about whether or not Neil Armstrong’s moon walk was actually filmed on a Hollywood soundstage. But those same pockets, fueled by blowhards like Greenberg and Specter, still haven’t offered a cogent reason for their on-going obsession, likely because there is none. Maybe that’s why Goodell keeps stiff-arming Specter, which is a more polite response than the one he’d probably rather give and should, an extended middle finger.