NFL owners are mostly excellent examples of really terrible people.
Robert Kraft has his way of doing business. He is, like most successful businessmen, rigid, egotistical, and cheap*.
*Cheap, in the sense that he (they) strip down to minimal spending on things like paying employees and amenities for players, employees and fans; yet at the same time spending extravagantly on useless and/or unnecessary and irrelevant superfluous expenses and projects which he (they) personally like or think will make them look good. So, authority is the primary driver. "I pay the bills, it's MY team."
So all the rhetoric about the fans is just that and nothing more.
Conclusion? Mr. Kraft has made some brilliant decisions, he's a nice man, and he cares about the Patriots.
- Purchasing the stadium lease at auction, outbidding the smug owners.
- Keeping the stadium lease, refusing to sell at a nice profit.
- In what has been described as a hostile takeover (?), paying Orthwein a record sum to buy the team and keep it here. In Robert's own words, “I probably broke every one of my personal financial rules.”
Robert Kraft worked a methodical plan en route to buying the NFL's New England Patriots but paid far more than he had intended to spend.
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- Made an amazingly lucrative deal with the city of Hartford to move the team, which included an escape clause which he exercised when the league and state government decided they didn't want to lose the profits from the Boston media market.
- Proceeded to get CMGI Field/Gillette Stadium built
- Made up for driving Bill Parcells out of town by eventually getting his protégé Bill Belichick anyway, though it cost a draft pick and some money.
That's it. The rest of it, which includes some pretty bad mishandling/nonhandling of team affairs, doesn't erase the above. And there are six Super Bowl titles to show for it. Nothing can take that away.
I think Robert Kraft is definitely an upgrade over founder Billy Sullivan, though it's a low bar in some respects.
But Billy's good, smart, successful decisions are not appreciated locally, due mainly to the media.
Team on field accomplishments should not be affected by ownership behavior, as the Patriots' first thirty years have.
Business-wise, sports are about putting fannies in the seats and getting them to turn on the TV to watch. Those people care about the team, its players and their performance - not whoever the owner happens to be.
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