Summertime In The NFL

“I cried when I wrote this song

Sue me if I play too long…

…They got a name for the winners in the world

I want a name when I lose

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide

Call me Deacon Blues” 

-- Steely Dan, “Deacon Blues”

If you’ve read my recent columns, specifically ones in which I ask you to talk about your best coach or wax poetic about my own pedestrian playing days or just plain philosophize about the game of football, don’t be bored. It’s early June and every team is hopeful, every coach is undefeated and the humidity hasn’t risen nearly high enough to have anyone thinking of two-a-days. No, the promise of the summer stretches out before all of us and, as Andrew Brandt pointed out, the NFL minus a salary cap in 2010 doesn’t even have to go through its annual June 1 ritual of cutting players who had previously been overpaid so their unallocated signing bonus would count against next year’s cap. There isn’t a next year’s cap. It’s too early to sign veterans without guaranteeing their salaries. Unless we want to discuss the practice schedule of OTAs or mandatory busing as imagined by Eric Mangini, there isn’t much news to talk about.

Rams Sale

Oh yeah, the Rams appear to be for sale and have several groups looking at them. The team retained Goldman Sachs earlier this week as broker on the deal.  But the Rams have been for sale, in some manner, since Georgia Frontiere passed away in January 2008. Her children and heirs, Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriquez, have been struggling with a massive inheritance tax bill related to the dramatic appreciation of the Rams during the time Frontiere owned the team following the death of her husband, Carroll Rosenbloom. This underscores how potentially devastating an issue inheritance taxes may be on an aging NFL ownership, something I’ve written about often, especially given how restrictive the league’s ownership rules are in limiting the number of minority shareholders and with an aging population of owners.

The Rams are a veritable bargain in NFL terms because Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke holds a 40-percent interest in the franchise, and while stories broke recently that he might want a bigger interest in the team, he seems to be prohibited under league rules from having multiple sports franchises in different cities and different leagues.  With Kroenke on board but unable take control, a potential buyer would only have to acquire the 60 percent owned by Rosenbloom and Rodriguez rather than the whole 100 percent of the Rams. That means paying about $450 million versus $800 million-plus for a controlling interest in an NFL team. 

The Rams have a very favorable stadium lease that would allow them to leave St. Louis in the next few years if revenue thresholds aren’t met, ironically just after I stopped calling them Los Angeles Rams all the time. And while no group buys any NFL team with the specific intention of moving it, a la Clay Bennett and the Sonics/Thunder of the NBA or what Jim Balsillie is trying to do with Phoenix in the NHL, there are teams considered movable -- and the Rams are one. St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts is reportedly interested, and there’s at least one other group out there. Checketts, for we New Yorkers, is best known as the last person to run the New York Knicks before they became a complete embarrassment. His challenge will be putting together the $450 million necessary to buy out the Frontiere heirs.

Buying an NFL team is a dramatically different acquisition than buying a team in any other sport given the value differences between the franchises and the restrictive rules on minority shareholders or corporate ownership in the NFL. This situation could go on for a while, especially since both buyers and sellers may want to wait for the economy to move definitively in the one direction or another.

The Audacity of Being Average

And we are still six weeks away from camps opening, which brings me back to my original point about it being June and wanting to write to you in a personal way about the game, its people, its heroes and its meaning. I want to do this because I think I speak for a lot of people out there who love football in every way despite not playing it well or not playing at all.  President Obama has talked about the audacity of hope; let’s call ours the audacity of being average. For the next couple of weeks, I hope to talk to you about my love for this thing we call football, and I hope you will share your feelings with us at the Post. 

Somebody will get arrested, Brett Favre will negotiate for extra pickles at Burger King or labor talks will get going again to shatter the calm, but let’s use some down time to celebrate the things that make the game great -- and please indulge me if I take too long or become too sentimental.

Two More Inspirations

There’s one more former coach who inspires me even though I never saw him coach, have met him only twice and have never failed to come away impressed. His name is Bill Campbell. Campbell was captain of Columbia’s only Ivy League-championship team, in 1961. He went on to be an assistant coach at Boston College and then, at a young age, the head coach at Columbia. He left in 1979, wildly popular and universally liked, but probably considering himself a failure as a head coach. In his second act, he went to work for Apple as No. 2 to legendary CEO John Sculley, then to C-level positions with other Silicon Valley companies -- Claris, GO and Intuit, where he is Chairman of the Board. His business success has been well earned. His philanthropy has been extraordinary, and he is now perhaps the only former head football coach to ever serve as chairman of the board of trustees of any university, let alone one in the Ivy League, serving as Chair of the Trustees at Columbia. 

But in meeting him at the recent dinner I detailed at the end of my tribute to Jack Kemp, I learned the secret of Campbell’s success -- and it wasn’t a secret at all. Campbell’s secret was something far more human than some maxim of business. It was that this man genuinely cares about the people who played with him, played for him, coached with him and play the game now at his alma mater or someplace else, as a trustee of the National Football Foundation. And he can put that caring into action and inspire the actions of others. Poet Ruyard Kipling said something about walking with kings and not losing the common touch. 

The measure of that comes from how happy he made my former officemate at NYU and her family just by remembering her brother, who played WR for Campbell more than 25 years ago. When Professor Donna Quadri learned I was invited to meet with Campbell, she asked me to remember her brother Chip to him. Campbell, without missing a beat said, “Chip Quadri, Erie, Pa. Tell me, what he is doing?” The game teaches us to remember those who have struggled with us and against us, and the great ones do remember. 

Please indulge me one other brief inspirational recognition. It’s for a random act of kindness and grace by a US Airways flight attendant who gave the only remaining first-class seat on a cross-country flight to a serviceman on Memorial Day weekend. I noticed. It was a great thing to do.

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