Taking Away The Shine

It’s getting more difficult literally by the moment to remain a fan of the NFL.  The league is in a clear free fall and seems almost like it is making things up on the fly. If a league ever needed a war time consigliore it is now.  Tom Hagen, where for art thou?

What’s frustrating about all of this is that for at least fans in Cleveland it’s taken a bit of a shine of its first home opener win since the Truman administration.  Which is too bad because if there is anything much to like about a bad team in a good city it’s the over-the-top euphoria felt when the team wins a game it’s supposed to lose.  The sun shines, the birds sing, and every coach and player is the best we’ve ever had.

That would pretty much sum up fan reaction to the Browns unlikely win against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday if the league wasn’t so dysfunctional at the moment.  Indeed I’m not really sure how appropriate it is to even discuss the Browns’ win except as an afterthought.

The blame for this falls squarely once again on Commission Roger Goodell.  I was pretty certain for a great number of years that Bud Selig was the worse commissioner in the history of organized sports.  But at the moment Goodell is making Selig look like David Stern by comparison.  Goodell is Nero, fiddling as the league burns.  Other than a handpicked interview he conducted with CBS News and then botched anyway, Goodell has been in hiding managing the crises he’s creating by his own dithering.

To get a true measure of Goodell’s incompetence all you need to know is that he so mishandled the Ray Rice situation that most observers now have been grudgingly forced to sympathize with Rice, not for his deeds but for the simple fact that he’s now been punished twice for the same offense.  The legal concept of double jeopardy doesn’t technically apply to a private entity like the NFL but that’s beside the point.  It doesn’t feel right when someone is punished twice for the same offense if no new facts have emerged between punishments.

But it’s not just the Rice situation.  Goodell’s complete inability to manage a crisis has allowed teams to flounder about as they manipulate their own morals to justify why their best players shouldn’t be punished for offenses they’ve clearly committed. 

Adrian Peterson’s name is now as notorious as Rice’s thanks to Peterson’s rather candid admission and attitude toward how one may properly punish a 4 year old child.  The Minnesota Vikings at first deactivated Peterson and there he should have remained.  Yet he didn’t for a number of reasons.  He’s the Vikings best player was one.  The league couldn’t figure out what more to do was another.  After reinstating him and then looking like fools for doing so, the Vikings again essentially deactivated him.

In Carolina, they were essentially shamed into doing something similar with Greg Hardy, who actually has been convicted of domestic violence and yet, strangely, remains unpunished by league.  He may not be active for the games but he is getting paid.  In San Francisco, where the owner and the head coach know no shame, let Ray McDonald play on.

All this is going on while Goodell remains holed up and lawyered up.  A cabal of idiots describes them best.

Every league is going to go through these moments.  Baseball has had at least two of them, both around widespread illegal drug use and survived.  The NFL, too, will survive this mess one way or another.  The game itself is simply too popular.  What is most fascinating though is that the league, a multi billion dollar enterprise with virtually every resource at its disposal, can’t manage a crisis.

I won’t pretend that these issues aren’t complicated.  We do live in a just society and we do want to see people accused of crimes be treated fairly.  But the issues also aren’t nearly as complicated as the NFL is making them out to be, either.

Rice was an easy call at the outset that Goodell proved incapable of handling.  It’s actually hard to fathom how anyone seeing just the first video would still only assess a two game suspension.  The Hardy call is just as easy.  He’s already been convicted and the testimony against him is damning.  The Peterson case is easy mainly because Peterson isn’t denying the conduct, just the label.  And the McDonald case isn’t difficult either given that there were plenty of teammates present who actually witnessed what took place. 

Yet it seems that the NFL wants to deal more in nuance instead of the obvious.  The crime some prosecutor decides to charge the player with isn’t the issue.  Prosecutors are politicians who do things as much for political reasons as practical ones.  The facts are what they are and it’s on those and not the actual charge on which the NFL should be making its decisions.

I’m not surprised that Goodell remains popular with the owners.  But all you need to know on that score is that one of his more vocal supporters is Dan Snyder.  And why Snyder?  Because Goodell decided that the racially offensive name of Snyder’s franchise was not a league matter but one for Snyder to decide.  It’s a mutual backscratching society which is why Goodell’s job is safe when it should be over.

When people think of the NFL these days it’s not about the games, it’s about the league itself and that is the essence of the problem.  In Cleveland, the Browns won last Sunday not because of some fluke or quirk but because they were the better team on a given day.  The fans are talking, yes, but talking much more about Rice and Hardy and Peterson than Brian Hoyer.

That’s too bad.  Right now this Browns team doesn’t stink, at least like virtually every previous iteration.  A team that averages 5.6 wins a season for the last 11 years (a number that’s actually skewed by an improbable 10-win season in 2007) is pretty much exactly what it means for a team to stink.  So right now, at 1-1, the Browns don’t stink.

And while I’m not here to throw cold water on a good win, let’s just say that we’ve seen this before. Last year’s team had a mini win streak of sorts early in the season and then regressed to the true level of its awfulness.  In fairness, in most other years no regression was needed.  The team started out bad and got worse.

Still, there was much to like about Sunday’s win but perhaps the biggest takeaway was its ability to carry over a relatively high level of play from one week to the next.  True the Browns looked like the 2012 Browns in the first half of the Steelers game two weeks ago.  But the second half was more productive and energetic even if it fell short.  To watch that productivity and energy get carried over was indeed rare in these parts.

It’s still too early to offer a fair assessment of head coach Mike Pettine and maybe, as owner Jimmy Haslam said in a flash of exuberance after Sunday’s win that the team got the right coach (a feeling he likely uttered last season about Rob Chudzinski as well as the Browns, under Brian Hoyer, won 3 straight early last season), let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Pettine does seem different.  He isn’t the wet blanket that was Pat Shurmur or the little dictator that was Eric Mangini or even the genial but befuddled grandfather that was Romeo Crennel.  He’s pretty much a square-jawed, look you in the eye kind of guy, akin in temperament to former head coach Marty Schottenheimer but without the soaring clichés and flowing tears.

What is going to take time is to assess whether Pettine truly has the make-up of a successful head coach.  A head coach sets the tone and in that regard Pettine has done a good job thus far.  But two games into the season where expectations were low anyway isn’t exactly trial by fire.  The measure of Pettine and hence this team will come in a million smaller ways but will boil down to his ability to keep this team together and competitive if/when the season, like virtually all others, starts circling the drain.

Soon, hopefully, fans can have exactly these kinds of discussions.  That’s what football is supposed to be about.  As long as Goodell remains in charge, as long as he continues to garner support from the owners with their own foibles to hide, the NFL will be less about the games and more about “the league.”  It’s not the welcome distraction that any one wants.

Moral Relativism and The NFL, Roger Goodell-Style

Do you feel a little dirty today?  I do.  Despite everything I knew and felt about the Ray Rice situation, despite everything I wrote about it previously, I still sat and watched Monday night football.  I watched it because I’m a fan of the New York Giants.  I watched it because I enjoy NFL football. 

That’s the essence of the conflict here.  The NFL has a product that I enjoy as a consumer to the point that I end up looking the other way at its moral relativism no matter how offended I otherwise might be.  That makes me complicit in the dirty business of a league that, first, only suspended Rice for two games and, now, keeps Roger Goodell employed.

That has to change and if it doesn’t, if we as users of their product don’t take a stand by not supporting the league, its games, its sponsors until the NFL decides to fundamentally change and stand for something other than its brand, then we too are as big a part of the problem as is Goodell.

Goodell should resign as commissioner and if he doesn’t he should be fired.  Goodell already said he won’t resign and the decrepit ownership of the league, many of whom have their own sordid problems, are so out of touch with what takes place on the streets of day to day life that they probably will award Goodell a bonus.

Goodell’s job is supposed to be about, above all else, the protection of the game.  The NFL is at its cultural nadir at the moment, even if its games remain popular, because Goodell failed at the most important job he had. It’s amazing, really, that he can’t or won’t see it.

As usual, Goodell took to a controlled setting to explain away how incredibly unfeeling he and the league are to victims of domestic abuse who suffer at the hands of the men the league employs.  He looked sincere even as he presented a strong face for the his and hence the league’s indifference to societal norms when he said, echoing the talking points that the Ravens clearly had been given a few days earlier, that seeing the video made all the difference.  I think Goodell is lying about not seeing the video previously mainly because it’s almost impossible to believe otherwise.  And while he gets no benefit of the doubt any more, let’s just assume he didn’t.  So what?  He knew what happened and it matters little that he felt misled by Rice and his attorney who suggested that Rice’s fiancée essentially had it coming to her because she was the aggressor that led Rice to half the further discussion with a well-placed punch.

What Goodell suggests, what John Harbaugh and Ravens owner Steve Biscotti suggest, as they were shamed into facing the almost incomprehensible wrongness of their prior actions is that they never really knew how horrific domestic violence was until they actually witnessed it.  More to the point, they expect the public to buy that explanation.  That’s how far out of touch the league really is and why Goodell has to go, now.

Goodell’s crimes go even deeper.  Foremost, he’s lost any hope of gaining the high ground on this issue.  He can announce a hundred new initiatives and it won’t matter because he’s doing it because it was forced on him and not because he wanted to. 

He could have taken a much more aggressive approach toward ridding the league of abusers in his CBS News interview and did not.  Indeed, right now and despite his letter to league owners about a change to its domestic violence policies, two players, Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald continue to play.  Hardy has actually been convicted by a judge of assault on a female.  He’s appealed so the league dithers as if it has no choice.  McDonald has been arrested and despite his head coach, Jim Harbaugh, proclaiming zero tolerance for domestic violence, McDonald continues to play.

Let’s not lose sight of that fact that no one understands the power of the NFL’s brand better than Goodell as he wields it constantly in order to leverage any and everything he can from anyone.  He doles out limited access to select journalists who will further the league’s narrative in order.  He puts players at risk constantly, first by participating in the cover up of the impact concussions were having on former and current players and still by allowing Thursday night games despite all the medical evidence against such quick turnaround.  Goodell uses his bully pulpit for one thing only, to further maximize the league’s financial windfall while ignoring the cultural slide it contributes to in that pursuit.

Goodell’s abject incompetence at recognizing the broader implications of his decisions isn’t without precedence.  The real reason situations like this continue to come up, particularly in football, has everything to do with the culture of the sport that has been set by the NFL for decades, a culture that values winning and the spoils that come from it far above anything else, a culture that has found its way to the bottom of the feeding pools.

It’s coincidental at least, perhaps ironic, that on the same day that the NFL was finally shaken to its foundations by its own hypocrisy, the NCAA shed the vestiges of its high minded pretension by publicly removing the remaining sanctions from Penn State’s program, sanctions levied because of that school’s institutional coddling of a pedophile because of its desire not to derail its lucrative football program.  I guess because there’s no evidence of new pedophilia among the Penn State coaching staff that it’s time to simply burnish the previous penalties and act as if the entire matter never happened.

There is a common thread. 

Players don’t enter the NFL and then abuse women.  It’s a learned behavior over the many years in which their status is exalted because of their ability to run faster, throw better and tackle harder than someone else.  It starts in high school, continues through college and by the time these players reach the NFL their perceptions of societal norms is so skewed that they end up rallying around a player like Rice as the Ravens players did when all that was known then was that Rice dragged his unconscious girlfriend out of an elevator and left her like a discarded cigarette butt after he had snuffed her out in a fit of pique.

There isn’t a high school or college program in America that hasn’t found a way around punishing its better players in order to avoid potentially disastrous results on the field in the next game.  Florida head coach Will Muschamp suspended 3 players for the team’s opening game against Idaho but that game lasted one play because of the weather and was cancelled.  Florida was scheduled to take on a slightly gamer team in Eastern Michigan the following week so Muschamp lifted the suspensions and lashed out at critics who questioned his hypocrisy.

Muschamp can make all the excuses he wants but he did it because he felt he needed the players on the field for a game against Eastern Michigan.  That says something about how far Florida has fallen, certainly, but it says more about how a situation like Rice’s happened in the first place.

Players are coddled and ultimately made to feel like the rules of proper society are bendable in extenuating circumstances, like a big game on Saturday or Sunday.  Rice had no real fear that losing his temper and knocking out his fiancée and the mother of his child would cause him to lose his job.  He had no such fear because it’s never happened in the NFL.

Last week Sports Illustrated had a profile of Louisville coach Bobby Petrino.  I suspect that it didn’t make Petrino happy nor his fans for it laid out in subtle but definitive ways the institutional hypocrisy that creates the cesspool that ultimately lets scum like Rice float to the top.

Petrino is a complicated figure with an incredibly ethically challenged record both personally and professionally.  One thing he does, though, is win and for that he’s been rewarded again with a top college job.  Indeed Louisville’s athletic director Tom Jurich did a clever slight of hand by turning the question outward as to why he’d bring back Petrino after all the damage he’d done previously to at least 3 different football programs, including Louisville’s.  He couched it in near religious terms by responding, rhetorically with his own question, “who am I to not forgive?”  In other words, we’re all servants of God and if God forgives, how can we not model that behavior?

It’s all bullshit and Jurich must know it and if he doesn’t he shouldn’t be in his position.  It isn’t a question of forgiveness it’s a question of winning and losing.  He calculated that Petrino gave the school the best shot at keeping its program at a high level and he took it figuring he could just shower the grime off later.

That’s why players don’t fear consequences.  There’s always someone else to pick up the pieces for a guy who can help a team win.  Whatever publicly the coaches or owners say, what they do speaks more loudly.  Think about the McDonald and Hardy cases. Both continue to play because their absence would hurt the team.  The tired yarn of letting the legal process play out is ridiculous, particularly in domestic violence cases.  It puts the onus on the victim to recant or refuse to testify in order to save her abuser’s job.  That’s what the Ravens did to Janey Palmer and it’s what the 49ers and the Panthers are doing to the victims in their cases.

But of course there are other options to letting the process play out as they say, they just don’t include letting Hardy and McDonald play in the games.  Their teams could have simply deactivated the players from the active roster on game days.  Sure they’d still get paid but it would leave no doubt about how team management felt about their actions.  But that apparently would clash with the Panthers’ and the 49ers’ nascent playoff hopes and thus clearly wasn’t considered.

More to the point, let’s not act like anyone in the NFL actually cares about a due diligence process or is even bound by one.  They just pull it out when it’s convenient to them as cover for far more nefarious motives.  The NFL, despite having the power and money of a medium sized country, isn’t subject to the Constitutional protections of due process.  Goodell has told us many times that he can take action at any time for the good of the game.  Yet he and the Panthers and the 49ers in concert saw no reason to take any action yet on Hardy or McDonald and still don’t even as the league burns around them for the inept handling of the Rice situation.

Look at the shameful way that everyone associated with the Ravens handled the Rice situation.  The owner left it in the hands of the football people who calculated that the team’s playoff chances were less without Rice.  So the team president Dick Cass, the team general manager Ozzie Newsome and the team head coach John Harbaugh wrapped their swaddling arms around Rice, furthered his despicable implication that it was Palmer’s fault all along, and treated him as if he had accidentally run the car into the neighbor’s hedges.  Grounding him for two games stung about as much as a paddling does to a 6 year old with about the same impact long term.

What all of these demonstrate is that apologists exist at the highest levels to excuse player behavior because what they do isn’t about building men or character but about winning games and bringing money into the school, the city, the franchise, the league.

As should Goodell, the Ravens should be made to purge the franchise of its owner, its president and its general manager and its head coach.  The franchise’s culture can’t be fixed as long as any of them remain.  The same goes for the Panthers and the 49ers and any other team coddling the miscreants on their teams.

It seems like the only people that don’t know that the league is at a major crossroads is the league itself and all those apologists.  Just keep on the same road and they won’t need anyone calling for their heads.  They’ll have made themselves so irrelevant that they’ll fade away of their own accord.  If that’s the way this goes, then good riddance.  Finding another diversion from pro football won’t be nearly as hard as they think.

A Missed Opportunity

If you’re looking to professional sports to provide justice for the wrongs you think need to be righted, find a different hobby.  Professional sports doesn’t exist to bring you anything more meaningful than the highs and lows that accompany victory and defeat.  That said, it still provides an enormous capacity to fail you when you need it most.

The latest but certainly not the last case in point was NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s rather lightweight two game suspension handed down to Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for domestic violence against his fiancée, now wife, Janay Palmer.

Rice and Palmer were in an Atlantic City casino for fun and games when a domestic dispute turned horribly violent.  According to reports, both Rice and Palmer struck each other.  But you don’t need to speculate who came out of that fight unscathed, at least physically.  The video tape is crystal clear.  Rice was forcibly dragging a limp Palmer by her hair out of an elevator following whatever took place behind those metal doors. 

Physical violence against women is nothing new among NFL players.  The San Diego Union-Tribune maintains a database of all NFL players arrested since 2000.  You could review it if you have the time but suffice it to say that nearly every team in the league has had a player charged with domestic violence since 2000.  And that’s just the recent history.  Cleveland Browns’ fans with a memory can recall the number of run ins Jim Brown had with domestic violence during and after his career (with all charges either eventually dropped or resulting in his acquittal).  What set the Rice situation apart in the public conscious was the videotape.  It’s one thing to read about a player dragging an obviously injured woman around but a whole other matter to actually see the horror on continuous loop.

The incident gave Goodell and the NFL a chance to do two things.  First, he could take the most public stand possible against the NFL’s unfortunate history with domestic violence.  Second, he could send a message to all of the other players that violence against women in any form is now a zero tolerance offense that will threaten your livelihood.  And in some fashion Goodell did both by even bothering to punish Rice at all.  But what Goodell also did was place the penalty on a spectrum that’s hard to fathom—less than smoking marijuana, slightly more than wearing non-league approved cleats.  When Goodell had the power to do all he could he opted instead to do the least he could and keep a straight face.

There are plenty that would argue that Rice should have been suspended for a year.  There are plenty of others that would argue that a player smoking marijuana merits a 4-game suspension so at the very least, the very least, a player channeling his inner caveman dragging around his property by the arm ought to suffer the same consequence.

I’m not sure exactly what the right penalty should have been.  What I am sure about is that this penalty doesn’t feel right.  A two-game penalty tells you that the NFL sees other offenses as far more serious than those involving its players hitting women.  Just ask the New Orleans Saints players accused of participating in a bounty system against other players in the league.  But more to the point, it also offers absolutely no deterrent to the next offender.  A season long suspension clearly would.  A half year suspension just might.  And in the end, isn’t that at least part of the purpose of issuing a penalty?  Shouldn’t the impact it will have on deterring similar conduct be taken into account?

Let’s go back to the aforementioned New Orleans Saints bountygate as a proxy.  It wasn’t domestic violence but had similar attributes in that involved NFL players and coaches sanctioning or participating in specific conduct meant to injure another.  Goodell leveled significant penalties, suspending head coach Sean Payton for a year, indefinitely suspending another coach and issuing minimum 6 game penalties to others.  Goodell also suspended one player, Jonathan Vilma, for a year.  Three other players were suspended for a range of between 3 and 8 games.  In every case players and coaches suffered more significant penalties than Goodell issued against Rice.  (It’s worth noting that the sanctions against the players were overturned by Paul Tagliabue, who was hired as an arbitrator.  Tagliabue found that they engaged in the conduct but placed the blame on the coaches for incentivizing them to do so.)

My guess is that Goodell sees the distinction between the bountygate situation and Rice’s as a matter of one threatening the integrity of the game and the other a singularly personal matter.  But can that dichotomy alone explain the massive difference in Goodell’s thinking, especially when once a penalty is issued the outcome of a game, in this case a future game, is potentially altered?

If Goodell really is parsing these situations that closely then he is losing sight of the reason he’s taken such a strong stand on personal conduct issues in the past.  Maybe Goodell felt chastened when Tagliabue overturned the penalties on the bountygate players, but that’s hardly a reasonable excuse.

Nothing gets done in a vacuum and I suspect Goodell levied a penalty that he knew Rice would not appeal without looking like an even bigger idiot.  I’m sure, too, that Goodell had to balance the inevitable outcry from the union had he levied a penalty with real sting.  Goodell, as commissioner, is as much a politician as an executive.

But not every incident calls for a political solution.  Sometimes a line has to get drawn and let the consequences flow from that.  The players’ union is like the NRA.  There is no penalties on its members that they’d ever agree to on the record.  Besides, their interests are not at all aligned with Goodell’s.  He has to protect the integrity of the game and all that it stands for.  The union, particularly this union under the misguided leadership of DeMaurice Smith, cares not a whit about the good of the game, only the good of the dues paying members.  Given that, Goodell’s thought process should have been first and only to do the right thing.  Instead he looked to do what was expedient, what would make his life easier.

It would be interesting to understand Goodell’s actual thinking but he’s taken the coward’s approach and gone radio silence, allowing the furor to dissipate.  It hasn’t yet.  At some point, maybe at a press conference during Hall of Fame week or some other low key moment down the road he’ll elaborate, but I doubt it will be much.  He’ll say that the league took a stance by bothering to punish Rice at all and then dangle out there that reasonable people can debate the severity of the punishment.  All true, technically.   Practically, it’s a load of crap.

There’s just no sugarcoating the magnitude of Goodell’s misstep here.  His supplicants in the media, like Peter King, will dribble out tidbits to suggest that Goodell tried to do the right thing by, for example, talking to the victim, getting her input, making sure her voice mattered.  But in even making that gesture, Goodell conducted that meeting with Rice sitting right next to her, the dominator and the dominated.  What exactly did Goodell think Palmer was going to say in that meeting?

The culture of this country in these matters still tilts wildly in favor of the perpetrator.  Rice was applauded when he walked onto the Ravens practice field the other day as if he’s some kind of hero to be honored for what exactly, not killing Palmer?  Notably, in his press conference on Thursday, Rice was appropriately contrite and apologetic.  It would have been more noble to have chastised the idiot Ravens fans that gave him the applause in the first place.

Victims of domestic violence, like victims of sexual assault and victims of sexual harrassment, on the other hand, face questions about their character and motivations, fair questions in the context of due process but certainly not the only or even the main questions to ask.  And they’re also often put in the awkward position of feeling responsible for the ultimate punishment levied.  That’s a lot to bear.

Had Palmer, for example, been allowed to speak freely and confidentially, neither of which occurred here, she might have had a different story to tell.  We’ll never know but it isn’t a stretch to suggest that Goodell, a lawyer by trade, knew exactly what he was doing by interviewing Palmer with Rice present.  As it is, though, because Goodell and King and others dribbled out the information about her role in Goodell’s deliberations, a harsher penalty on Rice would inevitably brought a harsher scrutiny on her from all those Ravens fans who can’t stomach the thought of being without Rice for an extended period of time.

There is a war on women in this country and it shows no signs of abating.  Goodell just contributed to the fray when he had a real chance, using this country’s most popular sport and his position in it as the ultimate bully pulpit, to emphatically declare that there is absolutely no place for domestic violence.  Goodell had an obligation to think globally and instead deliberately thought small and in doing so called into question his ongoing ability to lead the sport.

The fight for women’s rights will go on as it always done, by fits and starts.  The inroads women have made in the last 25 years or so are impressive but for all the gains made it just takes an incident like this and the shocking outcome to remind us all that until we take care of everyone on the same footing we don’t really take care of our own.

The Human Stain

Whenever a societal hot button issue such as racism, sexism, gay rights, pick a similar topic, arises in the world of professional sports, confusion reigns.  Empty grandiose words flow easily from mouths and keyboards for a few days and then the conversation shifts once again.  Meaningful change isn’t discussed much mainly because most of the participants, from the players to the folks who cover them and the fans that watch them can’t reconcile the depth of the issue in the context of the frivolity of sports.

It’s why, really, when the Jonathan Martin story broke that so many knuckleheaded opinions got bandied about.  The incongruity of a physically big Martin playing in the most brutal of sports becoming overwhelmed by verbal taunting was hard to process for many.

Martin, a second year tackle for the Miami Dolphins, walked away from the team and potentially a lucrative career.  That he was willing to do so spoke volumes about the seriousness of the situation and yet many still tended to trivialize the conduct or Martin or Richie Incognito or, worse, compartmentalize the story in the safe, weird corner that is sports as if it had no larger implications.

NFL Commission Roger Goodell hired lawyer Ted Wells and his law firm to conduct an independent investigation and report the results publicly.  Goodell understood at least at a basic level the implications of the situation and its impact on the brand he was hired to protect.  Hiring Wells and commissioning him to publish a public report on his findings turned out to be a brilliant stroke, irrespective of Goodell’s motives. 

Wells’ report came out last week and as I picked through the ugliness of all the investigation revealed, I wondered first about the comments of some of Martin’s teammates like Brian Hartline, the Dolphins’ receiver, who came down hard and against Martin in the immediate aftermath of Martin’s departure.  He was hardly alone. 

I also wondered about the legislators at the local, state and national levels that have repeatedly opposed laws against discrimination as some sort of unnecessary burden on job creators.  And then I wondered about the job creators themselves, the ones who don’t want the administrative burdens of eradicating discrimination in their work place because they don’t see any relationship between human interaction and productivity and thus are all too willing to support politicians who will keep the political correctness police at bay.

The Wells report is much more than a simple report about an unfortunate situation taking place on one NFL team.  It’s a cultural touchstone, a reminder that there are real world consequences to the rhetoric that too many still accept as mainstream, both within and outside the workplace.

For me, I can’t help but see the Wells report and the conduct he uncovered as informed in part by the harsh words from those Republicans who strenuously and vocally oppose immigration reform that’s based on a principle that accepts the basic human dignity of those who entered this country illegally and are just looking for a path forward to rectify that wrong.  I also can’t help but see the Wells report and the conduct uncovered as informed by the ugly words of homophobics who use ginned up religious justifications for denying basic human rights to gays.  And I can’t help but see the Wells report and the conduct uncovered in the context of those who would claim they aren’t racist but are more than willing to have a laugh and pass along emails on a daily basis that make fun of the President of our country because of the color of his skin.

This country has a shameful and embarrassing history of discrimination that still courses through the veins of the mainstream.  Just last week, the legislature in Tennessee undertook consideration of a bill that would allow public servants (including police and fire) to refuse providing service to someone who offends their religious sensibilities.  That means, for example, that if you’re gay and getting beat up on the streets of Knoxville, a police officer can refuse to protect you because he, too, is offended by your gayness.  It won’t likely become law but the fact that it was introduced speaks volumes.

The state of Georgia recently and once again approved the issuance of specialty license plates that feature the Confederate flag, justifying it as a tribute to their southern heritage without even acknowledging the racially-charged and offensive aspects of that southern heritage.

The U.S. Senate, with bi-partisan support, passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would make workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity illegal but the Republican controlled House of Representatives won’t even bring it up for a vote.  They have their reasons but all roads go back to the same place—they value the interests of shop owners over the seemingly trivial concerns of a wide swath of the people these shop owners need to get the work done.

University of Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam declared his sexuality openly in hopes of eliminating the whisper campaign that undoubtedly would have devalued his draft status.  And of course the minute he did there were NFL officials who privately surmised that indeed his draft status would be impacted not because his skills suddenly lessened but because someone providing “those kind” of locker room distractions apparently deserved to be paid less.

I don’t need to get into all the miscreants who play professional sports, from the drug addled to the wife beaters, which are welcomed back into the fold to make my point.  The fact that even one NFL executive would privately assume that a gay athlete would be a distraction explains exactly how the Dolphins’ situation could deteriorate to the point that it did.

The essence of prejudice is misguided assumptions and as a society we allow those assumptions to repeatedly guide us down the wrong historical paths.  This is a country after all that fought a war over the existence of slavery.  This is a country that denied blacks and women the right to vote.  This is a country that prohibited interracial marriage.  This is a country that still won’t recognize the workplace rights of gays and transgenders, let alone their familial rights.

The prejudices in this country, whether or not openly and unabashedly practiced, are insidious.  It’s a narrow-mindedness, sure, but it’s not isolated.  It’s open, it’s common and too often it’s accepted.  We should literally be screaming from the mountains at all the Bible thumpers who oppose gay rights but we don’t because we’re either just secretly like them or don’t want to defend those rights for fear we’ll be ostracized as well.  God forbid.

I see Hartline and the other Dolphins who defended Incognito at the outset (and now suddenly silent) as a marker for what ails this country most.  They’d be the first to claim that they don’t condone racism, just ask them.  But they were completely blind to the simple fact that words matter and actions matter even more.  Consumed by their own worlds, they lacked the empathy necessary to understand the private torment of their own teammate.  They heard the language in the locker room, they may have even repeated it.  They just didn’t think anything of it and they certainly never bothered to look below the surface because it never occurred to them that there was anything below the surface to see.

Eradication of racism, sexism, prejudice requires much more than a drive-by interest.  You can’t declare that you have gay friends as proof that you aren’t homophobic.  There has to be more.  For the Hartlines of the world to become not just team leaders but fully realized members of the larger society they’ll have to stick their necks out once in a while.  You can’t criticize Martin for not standing up to an insecure bully like Incognitio when you weren’t willing to do that either.

It is important to be completely invested in the experiences of others.  This isn’t about lopping guilt on the white bread existence of people like Hartline.  Instead it’s about getting them to recognize that the world of others is often much different

What the Wells report underscores more than anything else is the complexity of these kinds of situations and the extreme difficulties inherent in eliminating them.  The Dolphins fired two assistants and a bunch of players will undergo sensitivity and diversity training.  It won’t be enough.

Martin was tormented by his teammates and no one bothered to rally to him.  It wasn’t just the racist language, although that was part of it.  It was the constant and graphic sexual taunts about Martin’s sister and mother that ate at Martin.  The words were tough enough.  But they also fed into a deteriorating self image that Martin had of himself, an image of someone not strong enough to defend the honor of the two most important women in his life.

Martin’s upbringing, he theorized in particularly heartbreaking texts to his mother, left him soft when it came to street smarts.  In high school he felt bullied despite his size and it never got better for him.   That should sound familiar because it’s literally happening this moment still in every high school in this country.  There’s a black, a gay, a lesbian, a transgender, a nerd, a geek, a kid who’s too short, too tall, a girl who’s not pretty, someone who’s overweight, being picked on for being different and while we profess a willingness to stop it, while we pass anti bullying statutes and write rules, the truth is that we don’t stop it because we don’t really see it as the problem for what it is, a human stain on a society that isn’t so great. 

Heck, the Dolphins had well written anti-discrimination policies that Incognito and the rest of the players signed.  You can surmise that they didn’t take them seriously.  What’s more horrific to contemplate is that it never really occurred to them, to Hartline, to quarterback Ryan Tannehill, to head coach Joe Philbin, to the rest of the coaching staff, to most of the rest of the league and the people that cover it, that Incognito’s behavior on a daily basis for two seasons (and likely far longer) was violating every last principle behind those rules.

Some can handle taunts that way, others can’t.  But to celebrate those who can implies that the weaker among us deserve what they get.  Those who advocated, and there were plenty of them in the media and among current and former players, that Martin should have just punched Incognito in order to end the abuse see naked power as the answer.  It doesn’t occur to them that by standing by silently, they made Incognito who he was in the first place.  And if it occurred to them, then they just didn’t care enough to put an end to it for fear of upsetting some other delicate balance of a mediocre team.

Discrimination isn’t an individual problem.  It’s a shared problem over which all of us bear responsibility.

You can trivialize the Wells report or confine it to the context of professional sports, but that would be a mistake.  Human dignity is at the core of our principles as Americans and to suggest that the loss of it is more or less acceptable in some situations, because for example the participants make a lot of money or are bigger than others or don’t share what others consider to be mainstream beliefs, demeans us all.

Martin is today’s victim.  Tomorrow’s victim might be your brother, your sister, your nephew.  Maybe the best way to make sense of the Wells report is to remember the words of the poem by German pastor Martin Niemoller who was critical of the German intellectuals that didn’t rise up against Hitler.  They’re just as valid today:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me

 

 

 

The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again--Intolerance Edition

When now former NBA player Jason Collins revealed that he was a gay athlete last year, it was hard, actually, to appreciate the courage it took.  To understand it, no better context exists than the circus that is the Miami Dolphins at the moment.

Richie Incognito, the hulking lineman who seems hell bent on trying to outlive the suggestion his last name would seem to mandate, is a crude, boorish, possible racist with deeply rooted insecurities.  He’s bullied his way through the NFL at various stops and while his behavior at times has caused a few teammates to just shake their heads, it’s always been in the “that’s Richie just being Richie” sort of way.  His past has been his prologue with no seemingly ill effects.

Jonathan Martin is a Stanford-educated second year lineman of some talent who put up with an unceasing amount of verbal crap from Incognito and other “teammates” until he could take it no more.  It seemed mostly related to his status as first a rookie and now a second year player.  He left the team last week and on the way out the door after an unspecified run-in during a team lunch he decided not to go quietly.

The stress of the abuse seemed to overwhelm Martin and by all accounts he has nothing particular in his background that elicited the attacks.  But could you imagine if he did?  Could you imagine if he had been Jason Collins?  Every person has a breaking point.  Yet, since then little sympathy has been generated his way, in particular little sympathy from “teammates” and others ensconced in and vested with the perpetuation of the unique culture of a professional sports locker room and its status as the last bastion of the all boys club.

There’s enough disappointment around about those who have stood silent or defended Incognito at the expense of Martin to fill up a book the size of a typical Stephen King novel.  Others better suited to that exposing that sort of outrage have weighed in.  Personally, though, I was disappointed in Brian Hartline’s reaction.  Rather than come to Martin’s defense or at least add a balanced perspective, Hartline evaluated the politics of the situation and his place in the locker room and came out squarely against Martin.  I would like to think an Ohio State athlete schooled under Jim Tressel would have reacted better than that.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming amount of analysis about this situation inevitably lands at the intersection of jock behavior and NFL culture.  But it’s not just NFL culture for the same kind of abuse takes place not just in NFL locker rooms but in the locker rooms housing male athletes in virtually every athletic pursuit from middle school to professionals all across the country if not the world.  The typical male athlete is infused with arrested development anyway so it shouldn’t surprise that the behavior that starts young carries over to well beyond the point it ceases to make any sense whatsoever.

Most “locker room behavior” isn’t clever.  It’s the same sort of derogatory abuse that picks first at the scabs of the most vulnerable.  Nothing Incognito said or did to Martin, for example, is any cleverer than the towel-snapping and wedgie escapes of high schoolers.  The only thing that’s changed really is the economic status and the physical size of the participants.

Until you can stop and consider this culture for a moment you can’t begin to fathom how difficult it would have been for Collins to be an openly gay athlete during the prime of his career.  Collins may have been wrestling with his own sexuality for years, conflicted by it, tortured by it, but all the while the overhang to the self-analysis was the unforgiving, uncompromising attitudes of his “teammates.”  The chances of acceptance were always slim and that is the real tragedy of the kind of culture that Incognito, Harline and all the others coming to his defense are trying to protect.  Collins, Martin and all the others deserve better.

To an extent, athletes reflect society, but only to an extent.  There is plenty of intolerance these days for anyone the least bit different.  Sarah Palin is on her latest book tour railing against religious intolerance by ginning up for profit a phony War on Christmas supposedly being waged by people who just want the same religious freedom to not have her beliefs mainstreamed on them.  Indeed we’re so accustomed to institutionalized intolerance that middle America is to willing to accept without even a sliver of the outrage we have for Incognito a Congress that wants to deliberately preserve the right of businesses to discriminate against gays and transgenders.

But yet in most workplaces where professional athletes don’t toil, the kind of behavior that Incognito attempted to justify in his shameless Fox Sports interview would never be tolerated. Most workplaces are even well ahead of Congress.  They already outlaw discrimination in any form.  If they didn’t, if they tolerated the abuse of others, productivity would fall at roughly the same rate that liability to a major dollar lawsuit would rise.

For some reason though, Incognito and all those who by word or deed support what he did to Martin are essentially trying to convince the rest of us that professional athletes (any athletes, really) should be held to a much lesser societal norm.  To that a simple question: to what end?

It’s not just the particular abhorrent words that Incognito used to refer to Martin that offend.  It’s the whole approach.  It’s the notion that a co-worker, someone supposedly working just as hard as Incognito to reach the same goal for their employer, should nonetheless be subject to unceasing abuse because of status that offends.  Incognito, quite frankly, is just too stupid to understand that concept.  Listen to his interview again and you’ll see what I mean.  I’d say his agent should be fired for green lighting the interview but an agent with integrity and a sense of decency wouldn’t be associated with Incognito in the first place.

But guys like Jason Collins understand better than anyone what a nitwit like Incognito never will.  It’s the notion that status is irrelevant.  Performance is what matters and those who are offended by status of any kind aren’t just lunkheads but cancers to the goal of the enterprise.  They can’t even see the small irony in calling themselves teammates of a player they can’t tolerate.

I’m not naïve to think that this problem is limited to the Dolphins.  I’ve covered sports and have been in plenty of locker rooms.  The fate suffered by Martin, for example, is commonplace.  Women, who make up an ever increasing segment of the working sports press, still get the occasional eye roll and sexist attitude from their subjects.  It’s improved, but it’s not been eliminated.

This is why above all else that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had no choice but to launch an investigation into the Dolphins’ farce.  It speaks to an entire multi-billion dollar enterprise and its own attitudes toward a diverse workforce.  The NFL’s bread is buttered on the backs of its multitude of corporate sponsors, none of which would want to be directly associated with any organization that openly tolerates the kind of conduct Martin exposed.

But Goodell has to do more than just punish the Dolphins and if past is prologue, he will.  Goodell showed an uncompromising approach to the New Orleans Saints that in large measure eliminated an analogous form of misconduct, bounty hunting of opponents, by subjecting it to significant consequence.  That, too, was a behavior initially justified by the supposedly singular nature of the NFL culture.  It was fraud as defense just as Incognito’s explanations are now.  And if, in his investigation, Goodell finds that Dolphins officials and/or coaches helped facilitate Incognito’s behavior then they should suffer a fate similar to that of Sean Payton, the New Orleans Saints head coach.

There’s no reason, no good reason anyway, that the NFL or any professional sports team should tolerate an atmosphere where racial slurs, derogatory comments about sexuality or family or friends, should be seen as just part of the bouillabaisse that makes our sports unique.  The Incognito situation can and should serve as a flashpoint for a sea change in behavior.  There are plenty of Jason Collinses in the NFL right now and even more that desire to play professional football but don’t dare dream for fear of the abuse they’d be subject to in the name of preserving an antiquated culture.

It’s time for the NFL to be a leader once again not just for itself but this time for a whole swath of our culture.

Lingering Items--Concussions Edition

Just remember, we live in a cynical world.

The NFL is about to do a massively right thing by pulling out of its huge bank account as much as $800 million to help thousands of former players who are or may begin suffering from the effects of concussions suffered during their playing days.

Reaction to the NFL’s unprecedented concussion lawsuit settlement has been both fast and predictable and cynical.  Where some see it as the NFL doing the right thing others see it as not nearly enough.  Maybe they just can’t comprehend the scope of how big of a settlement pot nearly $800 million really is.  Then there is the predictable group that has decided in the players shouldn't get a thing.  They knew the risks.  We’ll get to that group in a minute.

There’s never been an effective way to place a monetary value on a human life and there never will be.  In that sense, the carping about the size of the payout isn’t a surprise.  Is someone suffering from Parkinson’s deserving of $3 or 4 million?  Is that too much or simply not enough?  Who really can say?

Lost though in this aspect of the discussion is the simple fact that the NFL stepped up and got this massive lawsuit settled in very short order.  With nearly 4,500 plaintiffs in the purported class action lawsuit, the litigation could easily have taken years just to get through the preliminary wrangling without any of the lawyers breaking much of a sweat. Indeed the parties were wrangling over whether the case should be heard in court or by an arbitrator.  A ruling was due and whichever way it went the other side would appeal.  It could have been years before the parties ever got to the merits of the case.

But this wasn't a lawsuit about someone having water in the basement.  There was real suffering by thousands of former players whose brains and lives got scrambled doing the only thing they ever really were trained to do.  The more the litigation promised to drag on, the worse they would get. Many would have died in the interim.  Many already have.  For all the criticism the NFL gets about its supposed indifference to the needs of retirees, from questions about pensions, to health care, to compensation for past injuries, it was instrumental in putting together an unprecedented, complicated, expensive settlement that promises to provide real relief and benefit to the victims of its violent sport.

There are always aspects of any settlement that anyone can quibble with.  For example, one of the criticisms is that the NFL has only committed $10 million of the settlement toward additional research, which in a vacuum seems woefully insufficient.  But the broader picture on that subject is the NFL has funded hundreds of millions in research already, continues to do so outside the context of the lawsuit and is committing even more money to that effort.

There’s no question that the NFL has had a mixed history of dealing with the players who made the league the economic juggernaut it is today.  And there’s no question here that the league had an economic motive to get the case settled.  At the very least the more it dragged on the more likely there would be revelations embarrassing to the league as one of the key allegations in the suit is that the league deliberately hid the medical consequences of concussions  for years from its players. 

But wrangling over the motive to settle is to miss the relative speed with which the NFL will be getting financial relief to those in distress.  The league essentially paid a settlement that is in the range of what it stood to lose in the litigation anyway and so it’s pretty safe to assume that it indeed understood and underplayed the medical impact of multiple concussions.  It’s also pretty safe to assume that it wanted to provide real relief to these players and it has.

There’s never an adequate way to compensate a person financially when he’s otherwise lost the essence of himself through an injury.  It’s unlikely that the thousands of players suffering from the effects of multiple concussions will ever have their medical fates reversed.  But at least the men who find themselves unable to care for their families and the families who are struggling to take care of these men in a dignified way can ease those burdens with a substantial pot of money.  It may be crass but that doesn’t mean it won’t make it easier.

The NFL should be applauded for actually doing the right thing, particularly since the public default tends to be that the NFL never does the right thing.  Could it have done more? Probably.  It also could have done less.  There were lives at stake.   There still are.  At least the sides are united in the common goal of providing for those who sacrificed so much to make so many others rich.

**

Then there are the “they knew the risks” jerks who feel like the former players really don’t deserve a penny.  Pete Prisco, a columnist of sorts with CBSSports.com, leads this pack.  Prisco, aiming for provocation where understanding would be the better motive decided that this settlement was indeed the right moment to make a name for himself at the expense of others by deliberately taking an intellectually dishonest point of view.  He equated the settlement to a money grab by the ex-players who knew the risks of their sport and now, essentially, are suffering as much from buyer’s remorse as anything else.

It’s a crowded platform on the internet.  Columnists are rewarded on the number of clicks they get and so the hot take like the one from Prisco is designed to garner him traffic.  That’s why I won’t provide a link here.  The less clicks, the better.

The retirees’ lawsuit was actually about the very issue Prisco claims was incontrovertible—the known risks of the sport.  Concussions have always been a part of the mix, certainly.  But the science of concussions has evolved over the years as increased research has more definitively established the long term effects of concussions.  When the NFL knew this was a key to the entire lawsuit.  So despite was Prisco says, it isn’t true that the risks of playing football have been known for years other than in a general sense. 

Jackasses like Prisco come and go.  His work on this issue underscores that he would be best sticking to discussing the societal implications of third and long.  Where Prisco didn’t go but could have and maybe should have is to discuss all the players who still have an almost open hostility toward the league’s efforts to make their workplace safer.

Complain all you want about the NFL’s past conduct but you can’t deny the NFL’s strong push in recent years to improve the safety of the sport through literally dozens of rule changes.  These range from rules designed to limit kick returns to changes in equipment, like the mandating of thigh and knee pads, to the outlawing of helmet to helmet hits.

And yet each time it implements a new rule there is the usual reaction from dozens if not hundreds of players that the league is sissifying the sport.  “Why not make it flag football” or “let’s put a dress on them” are the usual, tired reactions from the players.  When a thug like James Harrison deliberately goes out of his way to injure to members of the Browns in the same game and is suspended for it, he tears into the NFL Commissioner and does so with the backing of his teammates and dozens of other players around the league.  It’s simply scandalous that Harrison and his ilk are allowed to remain in the game and perhaps even more scandalous that he and his type aren’t called out on their behavior by their union leaders.

Frankly the players are their own worst enemies when it comes to player safety.  It’s part of the “warrior” mentality that gets ingrained from Pop Warner on forward that they should play in pain and rub a little dirt on the injury.

In that sense it can be a little frustrating to hear about these kinds of settlements, but only in that sense.  Players do bear some culpability for the lifelong effects many suffer from a result of the sport they played.  Players and their union representatives constantly work at cross purposes from the league in terms of player safety.  And while the specific long term effects of things like concussions are still far from being completely understood, there is no question that players today can and should better understand they are involved in an inherently dangerous activity.

That all said, nothing in that equation relieves the league of its duty as an employer to provide a safe working environment for its workers.  Short of banning the sport there probably is no way of making the sport risk free, but that’s not the goal anyway.  The real goal is transparency.  Players are entitled to the full range of disclosures on all the risks inherent in the activities they undertake on the field.  Only then can they truly make an intelligent decision about whether or not to take those risks.

**

In this context, it’s actually fascinating to read about the travails of Robert Griffin III and the Washington Redskins.  Griffin, after suffering serious leg and knee injuries last season, has been cleared to play in the season opener next week.  Yet according to reports from ESPN, Griffin’s own doctor, the well respected Dr. James Andrew, has strongly suggested that the Redskins are risking further injury to their prized asset by continuing to use him as they did last season.

In other words, Andrews believes that allowing Griffin to be exposed to the constant pounding that a read option quarterback takes will be at the risk of losing Griffin again.  No one much is commenting on whether Andrews indeed made that recommendation though Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan eluded to as much by saying that the team needed to talk to Griffin about the issues related to his medical clearance.

I actually think it’s too cynical to suggest that the Redskins won’t follow Andrews’ recommendations, but those recommendations do put the team and the player in a quandary and it’s just that kind of quandary played out over decade after decade of professional football that eventually leads to the kinds of litigation that the NFL just settled.

Griffiin’s issues aren’t concussion related but they carry significant long term health risks nonetheless. But Griffin wasn’t drafted just to hand off the football or sit back in the pocket.  His strong arm and swift feet are his true stock in trade and when perfectly combined it’s really a thing of beauty to watch.

For Griffin, the long term health risks are well known and established.  He has the transparency to the process that players should have.  But he’ll likely ignore them.  He has a contract to live up to and another to grab down the road.  NFL football represents his best path to lifetime financial freedom.  He’d be better served to reinvent himself as a pocket passer but it carries a tremendous amount of risk as well.  What if it doesn’t work? What if he becomes Derek Anderson? You can see the high level calculus Griffin wrestles with as he confronts these issues and then you start to understand why players put themselves in harm’s way even when they know very specifically that harm awaits them.

**

The Browns’ lack of depth is once again being exposed as injuries mount during training camp.  Until the depth on the team improves significantly, the record won’t tick up appreciably.  Still, this week’s question to ponder isn’t about injuries: When was the last time a team went through its final cuts and ended up with no place kickers on the roster?

Lingering Items--PR Disasters Edition

I wouldn't say that the Cleveland Browns are under siege at the moment, but that’s only because they are perpetually under siege.  Having spent nearly a decade and a half in a bunker will give anyone a bunker mentality.  Still, all the bad press flowing from Berea these days suggests that nothing much has changed and also that the Browns really could use a better media rep.

When the story of owner Jimmy Haslam’s troubles at Pilot Flying J broke, the team seemed particularly ill prepared to understand, let alone respond to, the questions fans might have about it all such as whether this will unravel the underpinnings of Haslam’s financial base and in turn thrown the team into even more turmoil.  That’s probably a question Roger Goodell and the other owners in the NFL might want an answer to as well.  And while Haslam has talked directly to the commissioner, the team’s media reps haven’t done a whole lot to help Haslam regain his footing with the fans. They may not know how.

If Haslam wasn’t talking out of an abundance of caution given the FBI investigation and the pending litigation, fans would probably understand.  But Haslam has been chatty in various other forums though he hasn’t sat down for a lengthy local interview on the subject, not even with a team-friendly media type like Jim Donovan.

What Haslam has said is that he didn’t really want to take attention away from the draft, but that’s just a convenient excuse.  The real problem here is that the Browns media department seems poorly equipped to handle the controversy and thus has just dug themselves deeper into their bunker hoping that sooner or later the shelling has to stop.  It’s a strategy, I suppose, but so was the signing of Brandon Weeden.

Then came the well deserved hit piece on te team on the web site Grantland by Chuck Klosterman, a writer with local ties whose main gig now is as The Ethicist for The New York Times.  Klosterman has a sense of the area having written for the Akron Beacon Journal once upon a time.  In his Grantland piece Klosterman blistered the team’s management for first granting and then essentially yanking supposedly unfettered access during the draft.  It’s not that the Browns looked petty and small during the whole incident, though they did, in spades.  It’s that they looked both paranoid and untethered.

Klosterman’s best line about the absurdity of the Browns’ approach to secrecy was the subtle, stinging “I don’t think they’re building chemical weapons in Berea.  But they might be.”  Of course this could be applied to any NFL team around draft time but it’s particularly telling about the Browns.

No one, I suppose, expects the Browns to lay out a week before the draft who exactly the team plans on taking with the 6th pick, but let’s face it.  I’m not sure anyone much cares outside of a dwindling fan base that’s growing bored with the whole damn thing.  The Browns have been perfectly awful at virtually every aspect of building a team for more than a decade now.  I can’t imagine there’s a team out there that has much concern about the Browns or their strategy come draft time except in a George Kostanza-like do-the-opposite-of-what-the-Browns-do sort of way.  I sense that the Browns could grant unfettered access to its draft room to not just the media but reps from every other NFL team and almost no one would show up except to try and figure out why the Browns are so bad at what they do.  Now that would be an interesting inside story.

The thing about the Klosterman situation is that a team with a savvy media department could have finessed the situation, taken advantage of Klosterman’s national stage and used the opportunity to show exactly why the Jimmy Haslam/Joe Banner/Rob Chudzinksi regime is different than the previous iterations.  Instead they bungle it to the point that if anything they look even dumber than Mike Holmgren or Phil Savage and that’s saying something.

Then comes the column late last week from Pat McManamon writing on Fox Sports Ohio.  McManamon has a bit of a history with the team and an axe to grind so there is that.  McManamon used to be the Browns beat writer for the Beacon Journal and then left that to work directly for the Browns mainly writing the crap that masks for news on their web site.  I’m not quite sure what happened in that relationship but McManamon hasn’t been much of a fan of how the Browns run things since.

Still, McManamon’s column is useful for driving home a slightly different point, that the there’s something indigenous to the Browns that make them media boobs.  McManamon  may not have been able to pinpoint the cause but how hard can that really be?  This is a team that’s been serially unsuccessful in any aspect of its operations.  It should be in the business of embracing the fans and instead acts, at best, as if they’re necessary evils to be managed.

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that the Browns rarely if ever generate any good news and thus those in the media are just being too sensitive to a team that is sick and tired of reading how lousy they are.  But then I remember that great line from Don Draper in Mad Men, repeated by his mentee Peggy Olsen, that “if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.”

The Browns seem utterly incapable of changing the conversation.  If this new regime is really taking a significantly different approach than all of the ones in the past, how would you know?  If Haslam really feels like he’s got the situation at Pilot Flying J under control and that it won’t come back to somehow hurt the fans in Cleveland, how would you know?

The reason the Browns are viewed with scorn and ridicule, locally and nationally, is related not just to their general incompetence but to a media approach to the fans that fosters that perception.  But on the other hand why should we expect any different?  A team so awful in its core business isn't suddenly going to be good in the rest of what it does.

**

Maybe it isn’t the Browns but the entire NFL.  Word has come down from on high, meaning Commissioner Roger Goodell, that the league will be making, ahem, a few adjustments to its off season in its never ending quest to be ubiquitous 24/7/365.  In particular, the draft is being moved to either an early or mid May date for 2014, at the very least.  The league is still contemplating whether to start free agency a few weeks earlier.  Given how much press coverage free agency garners do you really have to guess what the final decision will be?

The league claims that the move to May next year has to do with a scheduling conflict with Radio City Music Hall and its Easter show featuring, I think, the Rockettes’ re-enactment of the crucifixion.  Funny how that kind of scheduling conflict hadn’t emerged in the previous 8 years.  It’s such a ridiculous and incredible excuse that you get the feeling the league reached out to the Browns’ public relations department for advice on crafting the message.

Anyone who follows the NFL with any regularity will know that the league office has been pushing to move the draft into May for years, particularly when they moved the Super Bowl into February.  The league year starts in March (or used to, we’ll see) followed next by the combine followed immediately thereafter by free agency then the draft and then the rookie camp and mini-camps that move seamlessly into training camp and then preseason and then regular season and then playoffs and then the Super Bowl and on and on, year after year.

The slight problem the league claimed to have in its march toward total media domination is that the combine, free agency and draft all occurred in a 4 week or so period between early March and late April.  It left May without any NFL-branded activity except rookie mini-camps.  And if you don't think finding stories in rookie mini-camps is a struggle then you missed all the Geno Smith is a diva articles, luckily.  Pushing the draft into May is the ultimate no-brainer.

Rather than just admit the obvious the NFL strangely hid behind the shadowy scheduling conflict as if the NFL gives a damn about anyone else’s schedule.  Besides, last time I checked Radio City Music Hall was hardly the only venue in New York let alone the only venue nationally that could accommodate the spectacle that the draft has become.

Coaches of course are up in arms about the change because anything that infringes on their time with the players causes them angina.  But the coaches hardly have a voice in anything that actually takes place in the NFL.  Ask Sean Peyton.

The only problem this creates from a fan’s perspective is that anything that lengthens the draft process by definition lengthens the exposure to Mel Kiper.  It will beget even more mock drafts and worthless rumors and front office executives playing games with the fans about the team’s draft plans as if, again, the secrecy is really masking the fact that they’re making chemical weapons.  If you think you hate the run up to the NFL draft, just wait.

Maybe the NFL is right and there is no limit to how much of the NFL fans want.  It doesn't matter anyway because if there’s one thing we do know about the NFL it’s that it never admits a mistake.  The draft will move to May unless the league can figure out how to get the Super Bowl into March.  Then the draft will be in June.  Suck on that, NBA.

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Of course one of the reasons that teams and leagues are so bad at managing their public relations is that they are often working with idiots.  If you worked for the Indians’ p.r. department tell me exactly how you’d handle Chris Perez?

When Perez had his dual meltdowns this past week, a certain segment of fans with good memories blasted him on Twitter.  So Perez did what any right thinking person would do in this case.  He deleted his Twitter account.

Perez has been a fairly active member of the Twitter community, usually offering his followers a song of the day or something relatively innocuous.  He typically doesn’t court controversy in that forum.  Instead he saves it for the blow torch approach,  criticizing the team and its fans directly through the media when it suits his interests.

Apparently the only one that didn’t see all this coming was Perez.  His approach to saving games makes Bob Wickman nervous.  But despite his high wire approach he has been an effective closer except maybe to the small group of fans that accept nothing but perfection.   So it wasn’t a surprise that when Perez finally tripped those fans would pounce.  Call it payback, deserved or otherwise.

What’s funny about the whole thing is the way Perez handled it.  Instead of letting it blow over he deleted his account and then let the Indians’ public relations team issue a press release that reflected the collective sensibilities of the Indians’ public relations team imagining what a guy like Perez might say if they could actually script his words, which they did in this case.

That’s why we get a Perez “quote” of the likes of “we have an extremely positive and supportive group of players, coaches and staff members in our clubhouse and I want to participate in activities and routines that contribute positively to the culture we are building here.”  That sounds exactly what Perez would say, doesn't it?

Anyway, I guess fans won’t have Perez to kick around on Twitter for the time being (who doesn't think he reactivates if/when he gets on a save streak?) but that doesn't mean he’ll be less of a problem for the p.r. department.  Perez will go back off the reservation. He can’t help himself.

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The Cavs just "won" the NBA's draft lottery and thus this week's question to ponder: How nervous are you that Chris Grant is the Cavs' general manager?