The Sports Xchange

It seemed laughable last winter when Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, forecast a big decline in the NFL’s popularity over the next decade because the league had become so greedy. He said the NFL was “10 years away from an implosion.”

Lately, that doesn’t sound like such an off-the-wall prediction.

It’s not just greed that’s wrong with the NFL these days, although we all could do with a little less of Roger Goodell’s bluster about plans to turn the league into a $25 billion business.

Greed is part of the reason the league has an image problem, certainly. But if we had to sum up in a few words what has gone wrong with the NFL, it is largely a matter of the league not paying attention to what does matter.

What has made the NFL a great league — and a super-rich league — is the competition. Yet these last few months we have heard about everything but the competition. At least not the competition on the field.

At a time when we should be speculating on the upcoming season, wondering if Aaron Rodgers or Peyton Manning can finally win a second Super Bowl, how Adrian Peterson will rebound after nearly a full year off, whether Rex Ryan’s coaching can match his mouth and finally get Buffalo back into the playoffs, or dozens of other on-field questions, an entire offseason has been spent on just two issues: the three teams trying to move into two spots in Los Angeles, and the question of what Tom Brady knew about deflated footballs in the AFC championship game.

Really, can we move past that?

Well, apparently not. And for that, the fault rests strictly with the league’s leadership, headed by Goodell. The late Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue made some missteps, to be sure, but they didn’t let them linger. Now, too many issues are allowed to fester and take focus away from the game on the field. Fester? It’s almost like the higher-ups are encouraging, nee foolishly creating these diversions.

I remember how a long-time, highly successful general manager, the 49ers’ John McVay, used to answer when someone told him it looked like the 49ers never made a mistake. No, he would say, the team made some mistakes, such as bad draft choices or, occasionally, other player moves, but was quick to cut its losses and move on.

Cut its losses? The NFL won’t even admit its missteps anymore, let alone move past them.

Rozelle and Tagliabue never would have let the LA and deflategate issues linger the way they have. Beano Cook, the late college football pundit, used to say that if Germany had the NFL’s public relations department in World War II, we’d all be speaking German now. Rozelle, particularly, and Tags, to a lesser degree, were guided by PR considerations, by doing what looked good and hopefully, was the right thing. That was a smart approach that helped make everyone in the league rich, but it no longer seems to be the NFL’s way.

Now, I know what some people will say and, in fact, some NFL people already have said — that this is a different time, that the issues are more difficult, and that they can’t be resolved as expeditiously.

Beg to differ.

In the case of Los Angeles, it has been two decades since NFL teams called that city home. Two of the teams in the Los Angeles discussion, the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, have been waiting for years to get their stadium situations fixed. The St. Louis Rams, the other team lusting after LA, already have a relatively new stadium, and is a perfect example of the greed to which Cuban referred.

In the case of Deflategate, well, that ground already has been well plowed. It is inexcusable that the issue lingered from the end of January to late in the summer without a final resolution. The fact that to this day, the NFL still cannot definitively establish who did what and when, should have been enough to forge a reasonable compromise settlement and move on. Heck, seven months after that AFC championship game, the league still has not been able to complete simple arrangements to make sure the balls are not tampered with going forward.

Even if Goodell believes Brady had a knife in his uniform pants and cut holes in the balls to let the air out during the game, wouldn’t the league be better off if it were not at war with one of its biggest stars and if it were not litigating last season as this season was about to begin?

We haven’t even touched on an even more significant long-term issue, the matter of concussions and the Hall of Fame’s ham-handed handling of the Junior Seau induction by trying to silence Seau’s daughter.

The NFL may be a money machine today, but Cuban just might be on to something. Nothing is forever. Remember Pan Am and TWA? The New York Herald-Tribune? Packard? Studebaker? Philco? The NFL needs to stop acting as if nothing can slow it down, even if that may be the case right this minute. It needs a better institutional memory of how it got to be the big dog in the sports and entertainment industry. It needs to put the focus back on the game and not the sideshow.

–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.