Cracks in Revenue Sharing Threatens NFL

Byline: Leonard Shapiro

The NFL winter meetings couldn't have been held in a more posh locale this week, what with team owners, league executives, coaches and media all on hand at a lovely hotel in Kapalua, Hawaii, hard by the Pacific, surrounded by golf courses and natural scenic wonders around every bend in the road.

Maybe that's why not all that much got accomplished over three days that would rattle many coffee cups around the country. Unlike the late Pete Rozelle, who used the meeting to stun the owners with his resignation in 1989, current Commissioner Paul Tagliabue did not announce he would be retiring at this session. He's still got another three years on a contract renewal he signed last year, and few expect him to step down any time soon.

In the early 1990s, after Jimmy Johnson had won two Super Bowls as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, he and team owner Jerry Jones got into a shouting match in the hotel bar one night at a league meeting, and by the time that session ended, Johnson was fired from a franchise he had helped resurrect from a 1-15 season his first year in 1989.

But there were no banner headlines this year, only the good news that the league had passed a few rules to improve player safety and a little bad news -- that they didn't correct a major flaw in the instant replay system.

A proposal to allow reviews of plays where fumbles occur after a whistle indicating the runner was down by contact fell four votes short of passage, meaning the same replay system in effect in 2004 will be in place this coming season. Wait, stop the presses, they did agree to do away with the buzzer system that allowed coaches to alert referees they were challenging plays. Now, only a red flag thrown from the sideline will get that review.

In short, there's not much broken with the NFL these days. Of course, there was plenty of saber-rattling from Tagliabue on the current status of negotiations with the NFL Players Association on an extension of the current collective bargaining agreement. On Monday, Tagliabue described the talks at a dead end; by Wednesday he seemed far more optimistic.

Tagliabue also got a big laugh Monday when someone asked him if he was concerned about having the same sort of problem that forced hockey to lock out its players and cancel the 2005 season. Any attempt to compare football to hockey would be a grave mistake, Tagliabue said smiling, knowing full well the NFL is not about to shoot itself in the head on his watch.

Still, it also must be said that Tagliabue's biggest problem on the labor front may come from several of his own owners, some of whom are insisting they be allowed to keep larger amounts of cash they're able to generate on their own, rather than share with teams located in smaller markets.

Jerry Jones, the Redskins' Dan Snyder and the Patriots' Robert Kraft are all master marketers who know how to make a buck, and they'd all like to keep the swag generated by their efforts. That's always been the American entrepreneurial way, capitalism in its purest form.

Even though most NFL owners are rock-ribbed big-time Republicans, the league's success always has been based on socialistic share-the-wealth concepts. It would have been easy for the ownership of the Giants, the Mara family, to insist on keeping every nickel their franchise earned back in the early days of the league, and the Green Bay Packers be damned.

But the Maras in New York, the Rooneys in Pittsburgh, even Art Modell in Cleveland, all knew that the success for one did not mean success for all. Because of revenue sharing, teams like the small-market Packers, Vikings and others could stay competitive with the mega-market clubs, especially in the days before the salary cap.

It seems short-sighted to change a model that's worked so beautifully over the years, allowed the rich to get richer, among players and owners alike, and turned the league into a true television juggernaut and the real national pastime.

Another issue that was not resolved this past week was the TV contract. While CBS and Fox already are in the fold for six years and $6 billion, Sunday night, Monday night and a new Thursday/Saturday package are still up for grabs.

It seems absurd to think that the Walt Disney Co., the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN, wouldn't want to keep Sunday and Monday night, although it could cost them close to $1 billion a year to stay in the NFL's ball park, according to several industry sources.

If I were a gambling man, I'd say they'll keep both packages, while the late-season Thursday/Saturday night package winds up on the NFL's own NFL Network, now in its second year.

Some of those decisions may well happen before or during the owners next major meeting in May in another lovely locale--the Nation's Capital. Unlike Hawaii, diversions like whale-watching, snorkeling and visits to inactive volcanoes will not be available in Washington. But baseball will, bringing to mind a famous quote once uttered by the late, great Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the Orioles and before that, a small piece of the Redskins.

"The only thing dumber than a football owner," he said, "is a smart baseball owner."

Write to Leonard Shapiro at Badgerlen@hotmail.com

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