GOODELL EMBARKS ON A CHEATING CRUSADE
Posted by Mike Florio on March 7, 2008, 8:36 a.m.
In a move that casts further doubt on former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s chances for ever getting into Canton without paying the admission fee, current Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to implement sweeping reforms regarding the process of detecting and punishing cheating.
According to the Washington Post, Goodell sent a memo on Thursday to the Competition Committee outlining various proposals intended “to preserve the competitive integrity of the game” and “maintain public confidence” in the game.
For starters, Goodell wants to police more effectively the activities of NFL team. Said the memo: “This will include spot checks of club facilities, including team locker rooms; press boxes and coaches booths; coach-to-quarterback and other in-stadium communication systems . . . and enhanced monitoring of team practices. Many of these checks will be virtually unannounced and clubs would be expected fully to cooperate with this effort.”
We like it. Though many teams now fear getting nailed like the Patriots did, the truth is that the Patriots got nailed because they flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami. Without a system in place to catch teams with their hands in the cookie jar, teams know that they will only get caught when they grab the cookie jar from the counter and run around the house with it shouting, “I am stealing the cookies, eating the cookies, and gradually digesting the cookies into stool!”
Goodell also wants to reduce the standard of proof necessary for an internal finding that a team has cheated. “Too often,” he wrote, “competitive violations have gone unpunished because conclusive proof of the violation was lacking. I believe we should reconsider the standard of proof to be applied in such cases, and make it easier for a competitive violation to be established. And where a violation is shown, I intend to impose more stringent penalties on both the club and the responsible individual(s). I will also be prepared to make greater use of draft choice forfeiture in appropriate cases. I believe this will have the effect of deterring violations and making people more willing to report violations on a timely basis.”
This notion of violations not being reported on a timely basis represents, in our view, an implicit acknowledgement that cheating had been more widespread than previously believed, and that there previously had been a conspiracy of silence about it, as evidenced by the recent disclosure that former Jets Herm Edwards once smiled and waved to Bill Belichick’s supposedly secret cameras that were taping defensive coaching signals, and by Jimmy Johnson’s assertion in the wake of the Spygate I scandal that he had learned about the practice of taping signals when he came to the Cowboys in 1989.
We applaud the Commissioner for dealing with a problem that his predecessor(s) ignored, and we think that the move is far more courageous than it appears to be. Though the Commissioner is in charge of the game, he works for the 32 teams. And if the 32 teams prefer to operate with a “Spy vs. Spy” dynamic in the sport, they might not appreciate the Commissioner imposing on them a new approach to cheating that coincidentally was leaked to the media on the same day that the memo was sent.
Our sense is that the league office got the memo to the press so that the pressure would be placed on the teams to agree with Goodell’s suggestions. Let’s put it this way — if Goodell didn’t think he needed to get all of the teams to buy in to the notion that change is needed, the public wouldn’t have become aware of this memo so quickly. And to the extent that Goodell by all appearances has put his own interests at arguable risk for the sake of the broader interests of the sport that he serves and loves, we respect him more than ever.
