As long as he keeps the owners' dirt swept clean, they will keep him around. They don't give a shit about anyone else in the league but themselves. Coaches, NFL staff and players are tolerated until they are no longer useful, then they are gone. The moment Goodell stops carrying their water, he is gone.
This is sort of my point though. If I was an owner I’d just be waiting for the shoe to drop and hoping it wasn’t me. Assuming, like many owners, I was oblivious enough to just keep doing the same things, acting entitled and wealthy. I can’t imagine Mark Davis would have wanted things to go this way (even if he’s not the direct consequence, this doesn’t reflect well on his brand either), but maybe I’m wrong about that.
Firstly, they never think it's going to be them. They are billionaires, they imagine themselves as predators, not prey.
All fair and I don’t disagree. But some will likely run into trouble because of this mindset. And to come back to the point I was trying to make originally, this dynamic certainly won’t improve league culture.
I mean, it seems obvious that this is exactly what they did.
Because I do actually care about how we engage with each other and I find parroting phrases like "intent doesn't matter" to be counterproductive. Had RW made his point in another way, I would've left it alone, but I see this phrase everywhere online, in mainstream media articles, on television, and it's taken as fact when it doesn't make any sense at all, and I could list you tons of examples and hypotheticals why. Over the past year, we've seen time and again that creating opaque ways of communicating that obscure the meanings of words and phrases does an incredible job of creating well-educated, upper class in-groups, but it does a terrible job of moving along the project of improving relations in America.
Or, as Earl Weaver (or maybe Lasorda) used to say, "there's 24 guys on the team. 8 always hate me, 8 always love me, 8 dont give a shit. The trick is keeping the 8 who hate me away from the 8 who dont give a shit." There's probably fewer than one-third in the "hate" category in the NFL, but I'm sure there's quite a few who dont give a shit about stuff like power and the trappings of it, as long as the checks clear.
Agreed---and that is precisely the PR-focused, short-term obsessed, somewhat shady approach Goodell has always taken to things. I agree that so long as league is as successful as it has been and he doesn't go after too many owners he will stay in place---and I also believe that the NFL could do better and play an even more central role culturally which will have benefits financially. But not with Goodell running things...
It's entirely possible that I'm having trouble keeping up, but I thought the NFL sent the emails about Smith to the Raiders first and then released the others after Davis didn't act.
I think the NFL sent all the emails to the Raiders on Friday expecting Davis to act over the weekend. Then when he didn't they leaked them to the NYT Monday.
I have no words for the stupidity. None.
I asked about this last night. Is there any confirmation about the timeline involving when the NFL received the emails and when they sent what to Davis? If they had the rest of the emails weeks ago but sat on them, and then leaked them to the NYT when it appeared that Gruden may survive, that seems incredibly shitty.
Sounds a lot like Davis was willing to sweep it under the rug or cover for Gruden, and the NFL said, “GTFOH.”
Attribute to Casey Stengel, so probably written by a NY writer who had ol' Case sign off on it.
Yeah that's my take. And someone (maybe another owner, maybe Goodell) was forcefull in telling Davis that he simply has to fire Gruden. The higher minded version of the speech would be along the lines of "the benefits of being an NFL owners are many-- you own a billion dollar franchise and OMG are you going to thrive in Las Vegas where we let you go. The cost is, every now and then, you have to take a hit for the league. And this is your opportunity to do so.
The Raiders shouldn't owe the league shit for Vegas. The league fucked them out of LA, even though they were the best possible solution to go there and Davis went and got the $750M by fleecing Sheldon Adelson himself. If Goodell said that to Davis, I hope Mark told him to fuck all the way off.
Didn't say he should be, just pointing out what could possibly be an awkward situation
That sounds right.
I don't think it's super surprising Gruden used that type of language (esp in 2011). The surprising part is that he did it over official channels to league executives and left a paper trail. That would have been insane even in the 1980s/1990s. How fucking dumb is Gruden? Or maybe he's just a sociopath who thought he was above any consequences.
Yeah. Nobody is surprised that Gruden said/believes that stuff. But it shows a complete lack of restraint to send it over email.
My hunch is part of the delay was Davis coming to terms with how much of the sixty million he has to pay out and the fact that it was an awful lot of it. Impossible to analyze without the contracts (and Otto could help more than anyone) Frankly I think it's almost all of the sixty--Gruden almost certainly has some good arguments (remember his emails were not when he was a Raider, it wouldn't be suprising if he had simialr off color emails with Davis etc before being hired so the issue was known, etc etc) and IF Chucky is smart and well advised (both obviously questionable but he has been in these negotiuations a bunch of times in his life) it's hard to imagine he'd resign and relinquish pay unless an agreement of some kind as to the 60 million was in place.
Or maybe the league power structure is full of racists? It took 10 years for it to come out so obviously nobody on the receiving end was appalled.
That is, literally, not at all what he’s saying. And 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of humanity had no idea where the term grandfathered came from. And like pretty much all words, regardless of origin, was used by people in its present sense.
This.
Not to mention the fact that many of these e-mails actually serve to create the false impression that Goodell is hero or martyr due to Gruden disparaging him for his stances regarding concussions and gay players. I have no clue how supportive he has been with respect to LGBTQ movement but there's plenty of evidence he didn't exactly embrace concussion issues out of pureness of his heart.
I'm very much personally interested in the idea of the sins of the father not being visited upon the son.
I think your percentage of humanity is off by about 12.4%. I'm sure there was no intent there.
Casey Stengel, actually; who predates both those guys (someone beat me to this)
Only the pre-Kraft Patriots would do something as stupid as fire the head coach the night before a game. Not that the Raiders went out Sunday and played well; you have to figure the players knew he was a dead man walking.
There's an old adage like that, something along the lines of "Never write what you can say in a voicemail, never leave in a voicemail what you can say in person." Although that's more concerned with general legal issues rather than Gruden's disgraceful behavior.
Nope. I do appreciate a cracker living in his lily white gated community calling me a racist, though. Really hilarious.
It's actually a rule of mine, never put in writing something that you don't want the last person in the world to see what you wrote at the worst possible time. But that's more or less acts as my filter, not my moral compass. The moral compass filters out ignorant crap like what has come out for Gruden.
Agreed. But to answer the question "how could he be so stupid as to put it in writing", it's clear to me that he rightfully didn't fear being narced by the WFT. And he's probably not alone in his ignorance that discovery, however unrelated to him it may be, could fuck him.
As Freddy Linn said, Tirico has more in his past than some silly interview.
It does for most people, thankfully. I'm sincerely hoping that my earlier joke about him hosting OAN's first football show comes to pass as that sort of disgrace couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.
Off topic alert
Our public schools (in freaking Maine, hardly a hotbed of racial equality) talked about grandfather clauses in the context of Jim Crowe back in the 1980s.
I grew up in Maine - graduated from HS there in 1987 - and we never learned about this at all. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention in US History. (possible, since I spent most of the time in that class playing paper football in the corner with three friends)
You are done in this thread.
No. That’s not how it works. When you decide to post your opinions publicly, and repeatedly, people get to respond to them, and to do so publicly. This is the second time that I have seen you respond to someone writing critically about one of your posts by telling them to send you a PM. Or, as you just said to me, they can simply not respond to your public posts. The message, of course, is that you want to say what you believe publicly—you want people to hear it—but you want any dissent to be made in private or to simply go unexpressed.
There are no “latest” micro aggressions. You chose that terminology because you want people to know that you are dismissive of micro aggressions. You want people to believe they they’re being dreamed up one after another by the snowflakes in Cambridge and JP in order to wrongly paint grandma as a racist. In fact, micro aggressions are real and they have real emotional, psychological, and financial consequences for the many scores of millions of Americans who experience them. Do you disagree?
