The NFL has 99 problems…

– Chris Giannini

This week starts the midway point of the NFL season, and I have to admit this has been the worst start to any season I can ever remember.  The games are boring, the teams aren’t interesting at all, and the league office continues to fumble every situation put in front of them. 
Lets start with how to fix the boring games.  The owners and players need to meet this summer and demand to pay the players a much larger percentage of money, while also demanding they make football a year-round job, allowing the players vacation time during the off-season.  The amount of time off will be based on time with the team and final season record.  Coaches have so little time with the players and these players are beginning the seasons more out of shape every year.  The first 4 weeks of the season since the new collective bargaining agreement are completely unwatchable.  I know player safety is a major issue, so they don’t have to allow hitting, but 1 day a week during these practices.  There is far too much money involved in this league for these players and coaches to be seasonal employees.  Speaking of part-time employees, the league also must do the same with officiating. There is no reason the referees are part-time and have full-time jobs outside of football.  Pay these men and women to study, learn, and train in the off-season to improve the quality of officiating.  In an organization that makes over 100 billion dollars a year, finding full-time salaries and benefits for around 100 people can’t be this difficult. 

As for how to help teams be more interesting, my solution begins, once again, with the league office.  Allow these players to be themselves!  Let them have some fun.  If they do things that are over the top or that go too far, the public criticism will correct it.  Odell Beckham Jr. has been doing dumb things with the kicking net the past few weeks.  Finally he took it too far and his own fans crushed him, begging him to stop acting like a jackass.  After that he seems to have calmed down some.  You don’t have to fine or penalize players for getting excited and celebrating.  It’s not that serious.  Also the longer practices will help the QB play, and that will help the teams become more entertaining.  The quarterback play for so many of these teams is just terrible.  There are 8 legit QBs in the NFL right now out of the 32 teams.  There might be some young guys who develop into a hall of famers, but, as of now, the overwhelming majority of the quarterback play in the league is just worthless.  (Just an FYI Andrew Luck is NOT in that 8.  Two years straight he can’t play!)

Finally, my problem with the league office, and, trust me, this will not end well for Roger Goodell.  First, I will start with my experience being a manager and boss in charge of a branch office for a large global company.  My first major managerial job the one instruction I was given by the lady who hired me was this, “I don’t care if you are the nicest guy in the world, or the biggest jerk these people have ever seen.  Just be consistent.  Your employees have the right to know who they are getting as a manager every time they have to deal with you.”  That is basic information taught to a low level manager who oversees employees making minimum wage. How is it that I was able to get that information and understand it so young, yet these men, who have been overseeing what is possibly the biggest brand on the planet for over 10 years, don’t get that?  The league doesn’t have an image problem because it employs too many felons or womanizers.  It has a bad image because whenever something goes a little wrong in their image, they find a way to make it 1000 times worse!  I once said if you gave Goodell 100 options as to how to handle a situation, and 99 were great choices, and 1 is the worst choice possible, he would not only find the worse choice, but would choose it and then would intimidate anyone who challenged him on his choice.  How this man makes over $40 million a year is beyond me.  He continually uses the phrase “we are learning more and more about how we should be handling these issues.”  I have a problem with that statement alone.  They shouldn’t be paying someone $40 million to be learning on the job.  When he’s been in the position for over 10 years now, at some point, it’s no longer learning on the job and he just isn’t capable of doing the job. 

The league is putting more emphasis on a player jump-shooting the ball over the goal-post after a touchdown, and how high their socks are than they are enforcing policy that the NFL wrote and put into place about player’s personal conduct.   My personal opinion is the league needs to stop trying to be the police of these players, and if guys get into trouble that makes the team look bad enough, their employer will release them of their job or suspend them.  This is not something the league should be getting involved in, and my main reason for thinking that is because the league is so TERRIBLE at it.  They spent millions of dollars investigating the PSI in footballs to see if the Patriots or Tom Brady did something wrong and came up with “we think he did but there is no evidence or proof he did” and that warranted a 4 game suspension (edit by Gary: “I’m still convinced he was suspended because he destroyed evidence/his phone”).  Ray Rice admitted to everything that happened on video with his wife and got 2 games.  Then, this video the league “tried” to get but failed to, comes out when someone from TMZ was able to get it, and Roger looks like an idiot again.  First off, if you couldn’t get the tape and TMZ could you should be fired because the NFL has far more pull and influence than a shitty TV show that no one respects.  Second, if you had the tape and lied about it, then you should be fired because you are a damn liar and unfit to run a company or question anyone else’s integrity.  Now Rice has been blacklisted never to play again.  Nothing on the tape was different than what he admitted when he was only given 2 games. 

Now, with the Josh Brown incident, the league screws this up again.  There is now a policy in place that mandates a 6 game suspension for domestic violence.  The league did their “investigation” and gave him 1 game.  Then evidence comes out that all says the same things Brown admitted to the league, so this is nothing new, and the league panics and places Brown on their “list” and he is immediately cut from the team.  How is this reasonable?   Brown told you everything he did during the investigation.  The league found out no new information.  But since it came up again in the press, now its bad enough to fire him and he is blacklisted. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shedding tears for anyone who puts their hands on a defenseless person of any kind, but this is getting out of control.  If you were to put these situations in front of anyone (no matter an elementary child or the CEO of a Fortune 100 company) none of them could blunder these situations this poorly.  If I didn’t love the teams of my youth so much, and have so much emotionally invested in this product and the players and coaches I respect, I would be cutting the cord on all of it.  I could defend it for years because the product on the field was amazing. 

Before this season if you would have asked me “if you could have any job on earth and be happy doing it the rest of your life what would it be?”  I would have told you anything that has me covering the NFL.  It is the biggest reason I wanted to begin working with Gary on WCE.  I love this game.  I love the history about it.  I love the stories it brings out.  Loving the city of Cleveland, I have watched for years as even the Browns, no matter how terrible they are, they bring that city together.  People from different races and economic classes come together around their team.  Friends use this game to build their own make-believe teams and it gives them a way to stay in contact with one another. 

NFL owners, the power is in your hands.  Free the fans, and your league, of this man’s complete incompetence and dysfunction.  Reunite the bond and trust that was once there with the players because, right now, it’s completely gone. 

Gary Segars

Gary began his first website in 1998 as a sophomore in high school, writing reviews of cds and live shows in the Memphis area. He became editor of his college newspaper, then moved towards a career in music.He started the infamous MemphisTider.com blog during the 2006 football season, and was lucky enough to get into blogging just before the coaching search that landed Nick Saban at Alabama. The month and a half long coaching search netted his site, which was known for tracking airplanes, over 1 million hits in less than 90 days. The website introduced Gary to tons of new friends, including Nico and Todd, who had just started the site RollBamaRoll.com.After diving into more than just Alabama news, Gary started up his first installment of WinningCuresEverything.com in 2012. After keeping the site quiet for a while, it was started back up in April 2016. Gary then joined forces with high school friend Chris Giannini and began a podcast during the 2016 football season that runs at least 2 times a week, focusing on college football, NFL football, and sports wagering, and diving into other sports and pop-culture topics.E-mail: gary@winningcureseverything.com Twitter: @GaryWCE

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