The Seeds of the NFL's Collapse

"Cornelius MacGillicuddy" is a name that may not ring any bells with you, unless you are of a certain age and a baseball historian, or at least someone interested in the game and its history.

For those who do not recognize the name, please don't fret.  It was the formal, birth-certificate name of one of the greatest managers of all time, the great Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League from its inception until he finally retired -- fifty years later.

Connie Mack's Athletics were not the most well-funded teams; Mack himself had owned the team in part or in majority for all that time, and was never in the best position to acquire ballplayers.  However, his astute eye for talent helped the team reach peaks that led to world championships in the early 1910s (three) and then two more in the late 1920s.

Connie Mack's teams that had won championships in 1910, 1911 and 1913 looked inevitable in 1914, but fell to the "Miracle" Boston Braves in the World Series in a phenomenal upset.  So Mack started to dismantle the team, selling off its stars and building younger lineups, trying that formula for fifteen years until his 1929 team -- with Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons and Jimmie Foxx -- brought him another title.

When his Athletics lost in 1914, Mack made the unusual step of dismantling the team, as I said, but he did it fairly publicly.  "Every successful team", Mack is said to have stated then, "contains the seeds of its own demise."

What he saw, of course, was the fact that successful teams are not able to stay together; underlying that success are factors that can't be controlled, from the aging of the participants to personal disputes, to egos and other stresses on teams.  The exceptions -- the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, for example -- are able to get players to buy in to a team philosophy and subjugate their collective egos to a greater aim.  But in 1914, Mack understood how rare something like that, 100 years later, would be.

It took Connie Mack many years to return to prominence with a championship team, particularly as the New York Yankees instituted the money-is-power philosophy in the 1920s and made it more difficult to compete.  But his team's recovery is not as important as his philosophy.

Successful teams do indeed contain the seeds of their own demise, and successful organizations are the same way.  Amazon is roaring right now, as is Apple.  Microsoft is doing quite well, thank you.  But then, so was Kodak.  So was Digital Equipment, and so was Toys R Us.  And Compaq.  And the Democrats.

And so, my friends, was the NFL.

Five years back, there was simply no stopping the National Football League.  The money was enormous, the competition was strong.  The fans in most cities enjoyed the fact that, with a salary-capped league, your team's sustained success would rely on strong management and coaching, not buying players but buying the right players.  The TV payments to the NFL were huge, because the league could almost guarantee high ratings.

Gambling?  Oh, Lord yes.  Every company had pools on games or a week's slate of games, scoring squares, you name it.  The NFL was a prime sport for betting, over-under and whatever.  All of it served to keep the NFL in the public eye.  And the value of franchises was soaring as well, to where an average NFL owner had an asset worth in excess of $2 billion, with a "b."

But every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise.  And this past week -- some are calling September 24, 2017 "The day the NFL died" -- we saw what some of those seeds were, and could project what they could grow into.

You know what happened.  All across the NFL, players and whole teams were spitting on the military, on veterans and on patriotic Americans by failing to stand for the National Anthem.  Some teams stayed in the locker during the anthem (despite being subject to an NFL fine for doing so, that one NFL official is reported to have said will not be levied).  Many individual players got on one knee.  No one got fined.

Exactly what they were "protesting" is murky as heck.  It's supposed to be something about how "people of color" are not getting justice, although we don't know who, where or what the injustices are.  It certainly is not the thousands of "people of color" who have died on the streets of Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, because none of those players appear to be doing anything to stop it.

But even that is not the point.  The point of this piece is that the NFL has exactly one week to get this whole thing resolved before the "seeds of its demise" get fertilized.  You see, the ticket-buying public is not interested in having those multi-million-dollar athletes spit on the caskets of our war heroes and on the shoes of those who have served.

Sports is where we go to get away from the problems of the world, to recharge us and our emotions to be able to get set to attack our and the nation's problems the next day.  NFL players have now polluted our refreshment time with their ill-defined political statements that offend the nation, and that ticket-buying public is not happy.

How do we know?  Well, as of Tuesday, the top-selling NFL jersey was that of ... no, not Tom Brady, not J.J. Watt or Eli Manning or Richard Sherman.  No quarterback, running back, corner or receiver.  Nope.  For what may be the first time ever, the highest-selling jersey is that of Alejandro Villanueva, an offensive lineman.

In case you are wondering who that is, Villanueva is a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  More importantly, to me at least, is that he is a West Pointer, a former Army Ranger awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in three tours of duty in Afghanistan.  And while his teammates waited in the locker room before Sunday's game while the Anthem was being performed, Alejandro Villanueva stood in public at the entrance to the team tunnel, in full Steelers uniform and reverently acknowledging the flag for which he fought.

Villanueva was the same military hero he was two weeks ago, long before his uniform was a best-seller.  But those now buying that uniform are making their own statement, and the NFL ignores that statement at its own peril.  Because they're the same people who buy tickets to the games, they're the ones who make those franchises worth what they are.  If and when they stop attending games, stop buying tickets and overpriced beer and hot dogs, those franchises are worth less.  If we stop watching, the networks know immediately -- and so do the advertisers.

The players are too shortsighted to see any of this.  They get paid what they do because the advertisers pay the networks (for ratings), which pay the NFL (for ratings), whose teams pay the players (for performance).  When those ratings fade because the ticket-buyers prefer the patriotism of Alejandro Villanueva to the political leftism and blatant anti-Americanism of the take-a-knee-for-the-anthem crowd, the money available to pay those gargantuan salaries runs a bit drier.

The players won't be happy, and neither will the owners.  The NFL and its leaders won't be happy either, and if they react by taking the same pandering, pro-player, pro-protest stance they did this past week, the paying audience won't be happy.  And that audience is the source of that money they all obviously want.

Every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise.  Those seeds are greedy players who spit on the fans.  We don't need them.  There are other amusements on Sunday afternoons.  For years, I have managed to forget during the spring and summer the "me, me, me" preening and dancing the players do after simply doing what they're paid to do.  Then comes the first game, the first touchdown dance, the first over-the-top choreographed celebration, and I remember why I often watch football with some reluctance.

There are players on the teams I root for whom I cannot stand.  Their ego transcends their "laundry" to where I simply wish that the team would hand the ball to someone else, or throw to someone else, just to avoid seeming to reward childish behavior by pampered leftist millionaires posing as football players.

The seeds of its own demise.  Will there even be an NFL next year?  Stand by ...

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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