The Price of Admission
It was obvious that Greg Gumbel was not happy. There was a palpable lowering of his voice, a brief decline into the robotic we-are-being-treated-well tones of a hostage video. With everything he had, The Humble Gumbel was signifying that this particular “60 Minutes” promo was being read under protest. “It says here,” he sighed, “that Jerry Jones has got an ego the size of Texas,” before continuing to plug that night’s profile of the Cowboys owner. The CBS cameras cut to Jones, who had left his luxury box and was on the sidelines, his face that familiar taut botox rictus and his arms pumping out oilman handshakes to his players as they left the field.
The timing of it all was, admittedly, fairly awkward, and probably bought some poor switchboard hump at CBS an early evening of speed-dating phone calls with Cowboys fans who had both the cellphone minutes and misplaced priorities necessary to get on the horn and voice their displeasure with that self-evidently correct characterization. While NFL media types are remarkably loath to speak ill of the NFL’s luxury box-bound gentry, it’s not even clear that Gumbel’s coerced promo was anything but an individual example of a broader truth about NFL owners. And anyway, given that Jones’s cultivated grandiosity often seems the result of Gruden-ian marathons of film study in which episodes of “Falcon Crest” and “Dallas” stand in for game tape, the Cowboys owner might even accept it as a compliment. At any rate, the point is this: Jones may indeed be a nightmare of big-talking billionaire entitlement and petro-tackiness, but he makes sense as the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. I’m going to explain how this relates to Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder in a second, I promise.
Okay, so while civic pride no doubt factors into the equation to different degrees for different owners, it seems safe to say that no one buys a NFL team because they intend to make it a living, concussion-generating gift to a particular metropolitan area. Unlike most NBA owners and many Major League Baseball owners, the NFL’s proprietor class actually turns a profit, and will continue to do so in something like perpetuity thanks to the twin assurances of a progressive and generous revenue-sharing system and a regressive, owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement which ensures that most player salaries feature nearly no guaranteed money. While the NFL won’t open its books due to a looming labor confrontation, pigskin oligarchs have barely bothered with the usual we’re-going-broke-for-love-of-the-fans softshoe that usually accompanies this sort of sports-y labor showdown — while some are more so than others, every NFL team is profitable, and pretty much everyone knows it. Some NFL owners are more civic-minded than others — and some, like Pittsburgh’s Rooney family, really are Pillar of the Community types — but it’s mostly true that NFL owners reflect their geographic region’s distinctive plutocratic folkways more than they serve those regions in any particular fashion.
This is how we get the Ford family’s generous and totally inevitable totaling of the Detroit Lions organization, or jumped-up trans-fat millionaire Jerry Richardson overseeing the distinctly Sun Belt-ian collapse of the Carolina Panthers, or the booming, blistering Texas crassness of Jones and his Cowboys. In Snyder, who has owned the Redskins since 1999, Washington has received both an owner whose excesses reflect that of the nation’s capital and something more prosaic — a defective, self-important try-hard with a lobbyist’s sense of moderation, the accountability of a multi-term Congressman representing a comfortably gerrymandered district, and the thermonuclear entitlement of the most feckless legacy Senator. That the Redskins have had just three winning seasons during Snyder’s tenure in the owner’s box matters less than how they’ve lost during that period, and how they continue to lose — that is, in an increasingly expensive, consistently sour fashion characterized by desperate reactivity from above and logy, enervated decay on the ground.
Which is sort of a grandiose way of saying that the Redskins stink, I know. But while Snyder’s predecessor in Washington was no peach, either — that would be Jack Kent Cooke, a Canadian squillionaire who spent his golden years extricating himself from three-month marriages and trying to find ways to avoid paying taxes — there’s something especially, heartrendingly appropriate and familiar about the way in which Snyder has failed Washington’s fans. The Redskins’ front office is bafflingly opaque and unaccountable, prone to throwing large sums of money at faulty weapons systems — disagreeable battleship-sized nose tackle Albert Haynesworth is the most recent and egregious in a long string of Pentagonian personnel missteps — and strangely, sadly willing to get behind any strongman with a solid PowerPoint and a multi-point plan.
And so it was that unblinking orange martinet Mike Shanahan — whose first move as Redskins coach was to install his son Kyle as offensive coordinator, and whose second was to systematically alienate Haynesworth in the most public way possible — came to power. That Shanahan changed the defensive scheme to exclude Haynesworth (the team’s best-paid defensive player) and spent much of the season undermining quarterback Donovan McNabb (the best-paid offensive player) wasn’t so much a surprise, given Shanahan’s track record. That Snyder has signed off on it is even less so. On Sunday, the Redskins will start Rex Grossman — a human punchline of a backup prone to unmotivated demonstrations of arm strength in no particular direction — over McNabb at quarterback, thereby announcing… well, not so much a capitulation to their opponent as the same thing that the team has continued to announce during Snyder’s term in office. In short, that authority will be exercised. Arbitrarily, expensively, and in unaccountable panic and with implacable unreason and a desperate dedication to faulty ritual, but exercised all the same. This particular bit of nonsense makes almost too much sense.
COIN! I know that I do not really care about or understand individual football games that much, but that does not mean that I am happy to have slipped behind an item of foreign tender in the picks. It also does not mean I can really do that much about it — this week’s games make a little more sense than last week’s, and hopefully my habitual overthinkage will be a bit more useful this week than last. Last week, seven of Sunday’s 13 games were decided by three or more scores. Do you know who would predict something like that? Not a human, I’ll tell you that. Currency would predict that, and it did quite well doing so. At the very least, regardless of what happens going forward, I hold an inarguable advantage when it comes to emdash-usage. No coin, from any country, can take that away from me. But jeez, come on. (Once again, Thursday’s result has been incorporated into the overall standings)
Week 14 (and overall): David Roth: 6–9 (103–99–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 11–4 (104–97–9)
Sunday, December 19
• Washington at Dallas (-6), 1:00 pm — DR: Dallas; ATTLCTDC: Dallas
• Buffalo at Miami (-5.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Miami; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• New Orleans at Baltimore (-1), 1:00 pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: Baltimore
• Arizona at Carolina (-2.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Arizona; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Jacksonville at Indianapolis (-5), 1:00 pm — DR: Jacksonville; ATTLCTDC: Indianapolis
• Cleveland at Cincinnati (-1.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Houston at Tennessee (-1.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Houston; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee
• Detroit at Tampa Bay (NO LINE), 1:00 pm — DR: Tampa Bay; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Philadelphia at New York Giants (-3), 1:00 pm — DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: Philadelphia
• Kansas City at St. Louis (NO LINE), 1:00 pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Atlanta (-6.5) at Seattle, 4:05 pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Denver at Oakland (-6.5), 4:15 pm — DR: Oakland; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• New York Jets at Pittsburgh (-6), 4:15 pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J
• Green Bay at New England (NO LINE), 8:20 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: New England
Monday, December 20
• Chicago at Minnesota (NO LINE), 8:30 pm — DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: Chicago
David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!
Photo by Brian J. McDermott, from Flickr.