Frank Murtaugh gives NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a little friendly advice.
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Month: August 2010
Dear Roger,
Greetings from Memphis. It’s been 18 years now, since Charlotte and Jacksonville were given the dance ticket Memphians wanted so desperately … but that wasn’t on your watch. We’ve come to recognize Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium for what it is — not an NFL stadium — and we’ve either adopted the Titans, or stuck to cheering for the Steelers, Packers, or Cowboys. Bottom line: Memphians are NFL fans like the rest of the country.
Our heart rates seem to spike this time of year, as the Hall of Fame welcomes its newest class — it’ll be hard to top the one to be inducted this weekend, including Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith — and the exhibition season gives us our first glimpse of the uniforms (if not the players) we’ll cheer as the mercury drops.
But as great as the game is, as profits continue to add millions through one revenue stream after another, there are fundamental changes the NFL needs to make. You have the chance, Mr. Commissioner, to leave a legacy beyond that of your predecessor, Paul Tagliabue (who continues to have trouble gaining election to the Hall despite serving as the league’s authority for two decades). But you’ll have to be brave, somewhat stubborn, and immune to the criticism you’re bound to receive from pro football’s old guard (pardon the pun)
The necessary changes (listed in order of priority):
• Eliminate the three-point stance.
The late Chris Henry — or Henry’s brain, at least — should have the kind of impact in the NFL that Rosa Parks had on the civil rights movement. Only 26 years old, Henry died last winter when he fell out of a moving truck during a dispute with his fiancee. Then Henry’s autopsy report was released in June, showing significant brain damage suffered before the player’s fatal accident.
Your players, Mr. Goodell, are dying. They’re dying slowly, some of them only between the ears (a harsh use of the word “only”). But they are killing one another through collisions to the head in every game and contact practice. Premature deaths of former NFL players far exceed those of the general population, and this has more to do with trauma to the brain than with the ugliest of blown-out knees.
You can pad helmets, you can penalize spearing, and you can try and enforce proper rest for players who suffer concussions. But the only “cure” for concussions is prevention. Forcing linemen to stand at the line of scrimmage will significantly reduce helmet-to-helmet blows and will put a premium on speed and athleticism, as opposed to sheer girth. Football will gain from the change, however odd it appears at first. Better, though, mankind will gain from the change.
• Eliminate exhibition games.
As things currently stand, season-ticket packages are sold to NFL fans that include two home contests in the preseason. This is the sorriest excuse for selling “big-league” sports in the country. Star players are routinely excused from these affairs and, if they do appear, play a series or two before giving the field to undrafted free agents desperate to make the final 53-man roster.
Get rid of these games, add a pair of regular-season contests (making the season 18 games), and restore credibility to every ticket you sell.
• Reduce the number of divisions.
When 25 percent of the league’s teams can call themselves division champions, the title has no meaning. Eight four-team divisions? The NFL is too splintered, Mr. Commissioner. And as long as Dallas is in the NFC East while St. Louis is in the NFC West, don’t suggest regional ties matter.
Cut the number of divisions in half: two eight-team divisions in each conference. A division championship — and the first-round playoff bye it earns — will again be worthy of a banner. Teams with the four best records after the division champs (regardless of division) will qualify for the playoffs. Annual rivalries (like those between the Cowboys and the rest of the NFC East) can be retained while loosening the rotation of opponents from the division-by-division system currently in place.
• Return the Colts to Baltimore.
If Peyton Manning’s team wants to wear the Ravens’ uniforms, that’s fine. (A domed football stadium would certainly be the subject of a modern Poe tale of horror.) But Johnny Unitas’ colors and that iconic horseshoe helmet are Baltimore’s. Make this right, Mr. Commissioner.
Finally, a suggestion on the Brett Favre matter. Welcome the future Hall of Famer back. But insist he play in all four exhibition games.
Yours in football,
FM
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Rock ‘n Roll, Past and Future
Chris Davis checked out the big Antenna Club reunion last weekend. Then he dropped by the Delta Girls Rock camp. Lots of video here.
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tony horne
My weekend was bookended by blasts (of static) from the past at The Antenna Club Reunion, and glimpses of the future at Saturday night’s showcase for Delta Girls Rock camp.
Remembering Friday night is like trying to remember a fever dream. The Antenna Club banner was hanging on the eastern wall of Nocturnal like it had never gone away. Dave Shouse of The Grifters was standing in front of it singing “Bronze Cast” like he’d never gone away. Greg Cartwright was outside on the sidewalk where all the smokers had gathered, waiting in nearly unendurable heat for his turn to rip the place apart. It was 1993 all over again only much, much hotter.
Scott Taylor of The Grifters performs “Parting Shot” with The New Mary Jane
- JB
- Herenton gets a hero’s welcome at Joe Brown’s place
It was not exactly a bunker — except perhaps metaphorically — but what may turn out to be Willie Herenton’s climactic appearance before a group of political supporters took place Saturday in a smallish enclosed space in North Memphis — the meeting room of city councilman Joe Brown’s district office at Jackson and Watkins.
More than anything else, it was the intense hundred-degree heat outdoors that forced the 40-odd backers of the former mayor into such a crammed, though blissfully air-conditioned, venue. Nate Jackson and other Teamsters members had set up an area for food and drink and dancing outside in the parking lot and heroically continued to toil at their posts throughout the event inside.
There was another sense besides the weather in which the meeting — billed in advance as a “North Memphis rally” — suggested a refuge for survivors. The meeting was held in the face of polls, pundits’ predictions, and a seemingly nonstop string of endorsements for Herenton’s opponent, incumbent congressman Steve Cohen, by African-American personages and institutions. And consequently the feeling of “us against the world” was palpable.
After Sidney Chism, the former Teamster head and current county commissioner who may be Herenton’s oldest and most loyal supporter, addressed the group with one of his patented over-the edge barn-burners, Herenton arrived and entered to the kind of tumultuous welcome that compensated somewhat for the size of the crowd.
And Herenton’s remarks hit some middle between the tempered and the extreme, between a show of confidence and resignation to the inevitable.
He began moderately but with a promise, appropriately cheered, “that we are going to win this election.” In its dire projections as to his electoral fate, the disbelieving media, he said, is confusing likely countywide totals with those of the9th District, which, “always remember…is a subset of the county.” And thus all those reports of higher-than-usual turnouts from white and Republican voters should be disregarded.
He promised to release the details of a poll on Tuesday, which would show, “data-wise with high predictability value of how large our margin will be.” That putative margin over Cohen could be estimated as between 3 to 1 and 4 to 1, Herenton said, “I’d like to beat him so bad I like the 4 to 1.”
Cohen’s well-documented financial edge? “I’ve never seen a dollar vote.” Nor could President Obama and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who’ve endorsed Cohen vote. “But you can vote. And you’re going to vote.” Another cheer. “The black voters are going to determine who’s going to Congress.”
“To even make this race comfortably close,” Herenton said, Cohen would have to get “six out of ten of us.” And with “our folks …voting like mad,” that was not going to happen. “You got to watch these white folks,” he warned, speaking of alleged “irregularities” that occurred during the 2006 election. “Anything goes down, you got to watch white folks counting.” That was one of the lessons learned on the slave ships, Herenton said, somewhat incongruously.
“It will not be close. Look at the demographics of the 9th Congressional District,” Herenton said. Those Democratic candidates who stayed away from him, “the same way Gore stayed away from Clinton” were going to be in trouble. “The way they win is heavily dependent on the black vote. [But] they treat me like I’ve got a plague. But see, I don’t need them. All I need is you.”
Again, he promised to release a poll with “factual information” on the probable outcome on August 5. He ridiculed pollsters “Yacoubian, Ethridge, and Bakke,” and said, “Put all of them together, and they won’t come up with one good poll.”
Herenton also mocked the figure of 35 percent that I had given WREG’s Mike Matthews in an interview as a possible high-water mark for the ex-mayor. I could not resist interjecting aloud that that number was higher than any given him in a scientific survey so far. In fact, my actual estimate of his final vote — “out of the air,” as he put it — has for some time been 33 percent, and that, I concede, is likely too high.
His “victory party” would be held at the Botanic Gardens, he said. And his final words? “It’s all good.”
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ZZ TOP at Snowden Grove
